Austrian went into Radziwill 1914

Kazimir Malevich made this artwork, Austrian went into Radziwill, and you can see how he’s just gone for it with the block colours and bold outlines. There is a kind of directness to his work, a quality of raw immediacy, but I like to think of all the experimentation that must have come first. There’s this figure in a red dress holding a pole, and another character, an Austrian soldier, flying up into the air in a green uniform. He’s clearly been skewered. How could Malevich have imagined such a scene? What inspired him? The flattened perspective makes me think of folk art, but also the work of Léger or early de Chirico, and even later, the work of Philip Guston. All these artists are totally different, but they share this spirit of exploration and a commitment to figurative painting as a site of play and possibility. You get the sense that each mark carries a weight of feeling and intention. And this is what connects artists across time.