Cruz Branca

Malevich painted this around 1920, in the middle of a Russia still torn by civil war, when he had left Moscow to teach at an art school in Vitebsk. By then he had spent five years reducing painting to bare geometry, a black square, a white ground, and here he lets a single off-white cross float on a grey field, so close in tone that it almost dissolves into it. He wanted the shape emptied of its old meaning, no church behind it, just form and space. The canvas hangs in Amsterdam now, and it carries a scar from 1997, when a man walked in and sprayed a green dollar sign straight across it. The paint was cleaned away.