Subconsciously the artist used the religious icon as a model to create a planar composition as a source of rich local color which found its place monumentality on frontal figures. The objects on Malevich’s canvases seemed to be carved out from curved metal sheets. They had a steel sheen of this material. The combination of clear boundaries and pictorial content becomes the basis for the construction of recognizable real male and female figures that were presented in profile or full face with a monumental and unemotional severity of features.
The peasant series of works included “Harvesting the Rye”, “The Reaper”, “The Carpenter”, “Peasant Woman with Buckets and a Child” (all 1912, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), “Woman with Buckets” (1912, Museum of Modern Art, New York), “Morning after a Blizzard in the Country” (1912, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). In the painting “The Head of a Peasant Girl” (1913, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) Malevich moved away from human features into images where cylinders, geometric designs, organized according to a kind of logic, dominated. The works reflected both high scientific, technical development and the breakthrough of that time as a projection that builds a futuristic electro-mechanized cult with the Italian roots.
“The iron-steel-concrete landscapes of the moment genre were moved by the arrows of fast time.
War, sports, dreadnoughts, throats of rearing guns, mouths of death, cars, trams, rails, airplanes, wires, running words, sounds, motors, elevators, quick changes of places, intersections of the road of heaven and earth crossed below.
Telephones, meat muscles were replaced by iron-current traction. An iron-concrete skeleton through the sighs of gushin gasoline rushed gravity.
Here was a new shell, in which our body is chained, turning into a brain of steel”6, – wrote Malevich (author’s stanza).
Combining the discoveries of French Cubists and Italian Futurists the left painters gave birth to their own ism – Cubo-futurism which became a domestic trend in the avant-garde art. The movement of Malevich’s Cubo-futurism towards “non-objective” art was made because of the influence of poets (Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Mikhail Matyushin (a man of versatile talents, musician, painter, writer) and his wife Elena Guro, who created Vladimir Mayakovsky innovative association “budetlyane” (from the Russian word form byt’ – ‘to be’)). The synthesis of images, words, music led to the emergence of mutually influencing and complementary artists, poets, actors, musicians who embodied their ideas in the scandalous collection “Slap in the Face of Public Taste”.