磨刀人

Malevich painted this around 1912 and 1913, in the restless years just before war and revolution reached Russia, and a few years before he would strip painting down to a black square on white. Here he is still full of the modern city. A knife grinder pedals his sharpening wheel, and Malevich breaks the man and the machine into glinting facets, repeating the legs, the hands, the foot on the treadle so the whole figure seems to vibrate. He subtitled it the principle of glittering, trying to catch the flicker of metal and motion. He was pulling together Cubism from Paris and Futurism from Italy at the same time. He painted many peasants at their labor over the years, but this is the only picture he left of a person working a machine.