Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement

In 1912 Kazimir Malevich was painting Russian peasants as though they were made of polished metal. A woman carrying water pails becomes a stack of gleaming cones and cylinders, tin-bright, caught mid-stride. He had taken the fractured planes of Paris Cubism and the speed lines of Italian Futurism and bent them to village life, the world he came from. This belongs to what he called his first peasant cycle, and it sits just three years before he covered a canvas with nothing but a black square and declared painting done with recognizable things altogether. The subject here is still a person doing ordinary work. You can read the pails, the bowed figure, the stride, even as everything hardens into machined shapes.