O cavalo branco

Some 15 years after reducing painting to a black square on a white ground, Malevich was painting a horse. By 1930 the Soviet state had no use for abstraction, Socialist Realism was becoming compulsory, and that year Malevich was arrested and questioned for weeks in Leningrad. His late canvases return to figures, but strange ones, peasants and animals set in wide empty bands of colour, often with blank oval faces and no features. The white horse stands against flat zones of earth and sky, more sign than animal. Malevich sometimes dated these late works to years before the revolution, as if to move them safely back into his own past. The paint is thin and plain, with nothing left of the mysticism of the black square.