Malevich. Gerry Souter

relative isolation of Eastern artists was eased quite a bit by these publications and private collections – especially in the case of Shchukin who opened his mansion to the public (and particularly to artists) to see and sketch the works.[7]

      Malevich’s exposure to Gauguin and Cezanne over the first decade of the twentieth century is not difficult to trace in his peasant sketches and paintings. His pencil sketches for Women at Church (1911) have a Gauguinesque quality in their repetitive images and ritual gestures in a single picture plane and the mask-like treatment of the babushka-wrapped faces. In rendering them as masks, he draws on his icon studies wherein the faces that looked down on peasant life from the sacred paintings were not divine faces, but were the transfigured images of ordinary people. By the time the sketches reached their oil painted result, the crowded canvas, subdued colours and heavily outlined colour shapes bring in the influence of Cezanne’s pre-Cubist predictions.

      The Woodcutter II, end of 1912.