Portrait of Mikhail Matyushin

In July 1913 three men met at a summer house in Finland, then part of the Russian Empire, and planned a futurist opera. The poet Aleksei Kruchenykh wrote the words, Malevich designed the sets and costumes, and the music came from the man in this portrait, Mikhail Matyushin, a painter who had also spent years as a violinist in the court orchestra of St Petersburg. The opera, Victory over the Sun, opened that December at the Luna Park theatre in the city, and the audience jeered. Malevich painted his collaborator the same year, and the sitter is hard to find. The long strip of white rectangles across the middle is a piano keyboard, a pointer to the music. Of Matyushin himself there is little more than the top of a head near the upper edge, hair combed flat with a straight parting, which people who knew him said was exactly his.