Работа над фальшивками, или Подлинная история дамы с театральной сумочкой

[…] the work from the late 1920s and early 1930s roughly falls into two categories. The first is a series of often featureless figurines, whose stylized bodies, typically depicted against an equally stylized landscape, act as hybrids of the earlier suprematist compositions and themes and subjects from the very beginning of Malevich's career. Peasants has always been a common subject, as were woodcutters, group and close-up portraits, but now they are rendered in strident color schemes that bear no relation to observed reality, instead following a rationale that is determined from within the paintings themselves, very much in accordance with the logic of suprematism.

The secondis an altogether different body of portraits, some of them painted in a more overtly realist style, others with an oddly mannered posture evocative of early Italian Renaissance portraiture. Frequently, the sitters, whether members of the artist's family or more generic male or female workers, are dressed in garments that seem infused with suprematist color schemes or ornaments, such as coats or hats trimmed with contrasting stripes or a bright red bodice transfiguring the torso of its wearer into a solid volume of primary color. Neither of these groupings suggests that Malevich was inclined to abjure his radical pictorial inventions of the second half of the 1910s, nor do they suggest that he understood abstraction and figuration as mutually exclusive in the way in which he have come to view them under the influence of much later art-historical writing. This is made even more explicit by the fact that he frequently signed these canvases not just with his name, but with a small square. It is as if the more political pressures on avant-garde aesthetics grew and the more he ran the risk of his late work being mistaken for a “return to order“, the more Malevich wanted to make sure that his name became inseparable from the icon of suprematism, the Black Square.

AchimBorchardt-Hume, “An Icon for a Modern Age”, in Malevich, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume, London, Tate Publishing, 2014, pp. 28-29

[The late works] are considered to be innovative and a continuation of the Suprematist enterprise, and even to represent a new phase of Suprematism.

PROF. CHRISTINA LODDER, President of the Malevich Society

Portrait of E. Yakovleva, 1932

Portrait of Nikolai Punin, 1933

Suprematist Composition, c. 1919-1920

Mystic Suprematism (red cross on black circle), 1920-1922