Au champ II (Marthe et Jeannot)

Kazimir Malevich had spent years painting pure geometric squares, and by the late 1920s he turned back to the thing he had started with, peasants in the fields. But look at their faces, there are none. The two figures walking out to work are built from clean bands of colour, their heads left as blank ovals. He painted this around 1929, just as Stalin's government was forcing millions of peasants off their own land into collective farms, a campaign that would tear apart the countryside Malevich came from. Whether or not he meant it as comment, these blank, interchangeable field workers belong exactly to that moment. Within a few years the Soviet state would decide such art was useless, and Malevich, once celebrated, was arrested and questioned before he died in 1935.