Page 29 - Studio International - March April 1975

Cubism as a movement. There he would architecture finds sympathetic reflection Malevich's Head of a Peasant Girl, seen
have seen a masterpiece by Léger, his in Malevich's work. The depiction of a publicly for the first time late in 1913
Femme en Bleu, and the angular, dynamically charged figure in rapid, (although it is possibly a work of late
disjointed, tubular limbs of Malevich's flickering motion, absorbed into an urban 1912), with its complexes of interlocking
Knife Grinder (shown in March 1913 at environment, makes the Knife Grinder planes, held together in a strong linear
The Target), which are played off the most truly futurist (in the original framework, would suggest that Malevich
against the curves and circles below, Italian sense of the term) canvas had been studying works of Picasso's
echo the configurations in Léger's Malevich ever produced. hermetic or classical phase of Cubism
canvas, although these, it is true, had Any young artist interested in Cubism (Picasso's Boxer, for example), a moment
already appeared in a less resolved form would automatically have found his way in art that Malevich was subsequently to
in Essai pour Trois Portraits.8 Also in the to Kahnweiler's gallery, where the work recognize as a turning point in twentieth-
Section d'Or was Duchamp's already of the true creators of Cubism, Picasso, century painting. Head of a Peasant Girl
celebrated Nude Descending a Staircase. Braque and Gris, was to be seen in also bears strong similarities (even
And once again Duchamp's rendition of a abundance (perhaps it should be colouristically) with Gris's Portrait of
figure in successive stages of motion, emphasized once again that photographs His Mother of 1912, although it is worth
surrounded by stylized fragments of were readily available from the gallery). remarking that whereas the analysis of

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