#russian

This comes out of the old Russian folk epics, where a rider reaches a stone that spells out which road kills him and which one ruins him. From what I can find the painter chewed on this subject for years, redoing it more than once before settling on this version, and he spent a lot of his career on folk tales and stage designs when most of his colleagues were painting contemporary life.

The tsar's government wanted this out of sight — it was apparently barred from public display for a while not long after it turned up. Part of what's said to be behind it is the political killing going on in Russia at the time, so it isn't really a history lesson so much as a picture about violence the painter was living through. It's also been attacked by visitors with a blade twice, decades apart.

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.

They say he mixed the loose, bright color of the Fauves with the more broken-up shapes of the Cubists, and ran with a Moscow group trying to fuse that French style with older Russian folk prints.

Two summers of travelling up and down the Volga went into this, from what I can find — following the hauling crews around and sketching them. When it turned up in an exhibition some critics called it a slander on the country, and a grand duke bought it anyway and hung it in his billiard room.

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.

I looked him up and it's grim: he ran with the Russian avant-garde crowd, and in 1938 he was arrested and shot in Stalin's purges. His wife, a painter herself, apparently kept his canvases hidden for decades afterwards.