Untitled

Late in 1915, in a Russia two years into the World War and two short of revolution, Malevich hung a plain black square in the corner of a Petrograd gallery, the spot an Orthodox icon would normally occupy, and announced a new kind of painting he called Suprematism. This canvas comes straight out of that break, around 1916, coloured bars and quadrilaterals tilted and floating on bare white. There is nothing to recognise in it, and that was exactly the point. Malevich wanted paint cut loose from objects, no faces or fields or bottles, down to pure sensation set adrift with no up and no down. The white ground is doing real work here; he meant it to read as infinity, the endless space his shapes hang in. Peggy Guggenheim bought the picture in 1942, and it has hung in her house on Venice's Grand Canal ever since.