Composição Suprematista

Malevich painted this in 1916, the year before the Russian Revolution, when he was stripping painting down to pure geometry and colour and calling the result Suprematism. A blue rectangle tilts over a red beam on white, floating with no horizon and no ground, meant to be about pure feeling rather than any object. Its later history is almost as turbulent as its moment. Malevich brought a group of these works to Berlin in 1927, left them behind when he was called back to the Soviet Union, and never returned. The paintings passed through other hands during the Nazi years. His heirs spent decades trying to recover them, and after a settlement with a museum in Amsterdam this one came to auction. In 2018 it sold for about 86 million dollars, the most ever paid for a work of Russian art. It is once again in a private collection.