Red Cavalry Riding

By 1932 Malevich was in trouble. The abstract Suprematism he had invented was now branded useless bourgeois art by the Soviet state, official painting was supposed to show heroic workers and soldiers plainly, and he had already been arrested once. This canvas was how he threaded that needle. A line of tiny red horsemen gallops across a white band of sky above a ground built from bands of pure colour, the old abstract language still fully intact underneath. What let it survive was the title and the words he wrote on the back, saying the Red Cavalry rides out to defend the Soviet frontier. He even dated the front 1918, tying it to the revolution rather than to the year he actually made it. For a long time it was the one work of his the official history of Soviet art was willing to admit.