Kazimir Malevich

Malevich showed these without frames and wouldn't say which way up they went — he thought a fixed top and bottom was just another assumption people had gotten used to calling natural.

This is Suprematism — the idea, from what I can find, was to throw out recognizable objects and see if shape and color alone could carry a painting.

By the time this was painted, abstract work had fallen out of official favour in the Soviet Union and painters were expected to produce proper heroic figures. What I've read is that he went back to painting people but left the faces off, which reads as either a compromise or a very dry joke. He's also said to have put earlier dates on some of his late canvases.

It's the third of three squares he painted — black first, then red, then this one. The idea, as far as I understand it, was to strip painting back to nothing but feeling, and it came the year after the revolution, when everything around him was being pulled apart and rebuilt too.

Painted a few years before he gave up on objects altogether and went over to plain shapes on a white ground. The fashion then, from what I've read, was to paint movement instead of things — repeat an arm enough times and you get the motion rather than the man.