Brawler 1913

This sketch, "Brawler," was made by Kazimir Malevich, probably with crayon and pencil on paper. Look at the way Malevich builds the figure from geometric shapes—a solid blue, almost egg-like torso, a triangle for a skirt. It's like he's working out how to construct a body with the simplest forms. The materiality here is so upfront. You see the grain of the paper, the smudging of the crayon. It reminds me that art is always a process, a kind of building and adjusting. Notice how the red of the leg pops against the muted tones, drawing your eye down, grounding the more abstract shapes above. It has this tension between abstraction and figuration that's so cool. You can see echoes of Picasso's Cubism in the way Malevich breaks down the figure, but there's also something uniquely his own. This sketch feels like a prelude to his more radical abstract works, like he's figuring out how to distill the world down to its purest forms. It makes you wonder about the conversations happening between artists at that time.