Cuadrado rojo

Malevich showed this small canvas in Petrograd in December 1915, as the country was sliding toward revolution, at an exhibition where he hung his new abstract work like icons, high in the corner of the room. It is close to a plain red square on white, though the shape tilts and the sides do not quite match, so it sits on the white ground with a slight unease rather than dead centre. He called it Suprematism, painting stripped down to pure feeling with no object left in it. The full title he gave it is stranger than the picture: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions. He offered no key to that. The viewer is left to hold the red shape and the words about a peasant woman side by side and make of them what they can.