The Woodcutter

Malevich painted this woodcutter in 1912, part of a run of Russian peasants he was reshaping into something that looks pressed out of sheet metal. The man swings his axe among stacked logs, but every surface, his arms, his coat, the timber, has been rounded into gleaming cylinders and cones that catch the light like polished tin. The logs behind him lock together almost like the cogs of a machine. It's an odd thing to do to a scene of old rural labour, and that tension is what these years are about for Malevich, the village painted with the hard shine of the factory. Three years later he would drop the figure entirely and paint a black square.