Morning in the Village After Snowstorm

Peasants and the buildings of a snow-covered Russian village are rendered as gleaming, rounded, tubular forms, like polished metal cylinders, in bright clear color. Kazimir Malevich painted Morning in the Village After Snowstorm in a Cubo-Futurist style, fusing French Cubism with Russian Futurism and folk vigor. Now in the Guggenheim, it captures him just before his leap into pure abstraction - the recognizable rural scene already half-transformed into geometry and rhythm, the figures and houses reduced to gleaming volumes, the canvas poised on the threshold of the radical Suprematism he would soon invent.