Malevitj Running Man 1932-34 Oil on canvas (79 x 65 cm.) Mus Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935)

Description of Kazimir Malevich’s painting The Running Man

RUNNING. MOTION. TRAVELLING.

In the foreground is a running man, no face, no shoes...

In the background, a landscape with a very low horizon with two houses and a sword that rests on a hemisphere and an orthodox cross. The sky is dusky with weightless clouds.

The third plane of the painting is represented by multicolored stripes of red, black, green, white and yellow, this is the basis on which the world presented in the picture is situated.

The predominant combination of red, white and black on a large area of dusky ultramarine creates a dramatic, one might even say tragic, atmosphere. The painting is very complex in its interpretation, but at the same time everything becomes very clear in it, if one is familiar with the historical background of the time.

There is a theory that in this picture the artist showed the reaction of the distressed peasants to the policy of the authorities concerning the locals. There is also a theory that the painting depicts a difficult and tragic period in the artist’s biography, when the Institute of Culture, which the artist led, was closed in Leningrad.

And there is also a kind of historical interpretation of the artist’s painting - as a kind of premonition or planning a visit to Western Europe.

On the picture you can see the main milestones of creativity: Suprematism is shown by horizontal strips of land, non-objectivity is shown by flat houses near the horizon, the cross reminds us of creativity with the poetics of Orthodoxy, and the theme of the man is a peasant series, well, and of course the absence of a face in the character of the picture is a series of "targets".

But the most important thing that draws attention is precisely the "running" man. No one else in Malevich’s work is running. Why did the peasant, whose image was always depicted by Malevich as monumentally standing, run? And here it is worth paying attention to the direction of the character’s movement: he runs from right to left. And European culture prescribes the viewer to view images of paintings from left to right.

Here Malevich breaks the usual vector in painting and with this draws attention to the very process of running. And movement in Suprematism means a connection with the unearthly and cosmic. Consequently, the painting is about the spiritual movements of the time.

Malevich - a native of the Ukrainian-Polish-Belarusian borderland always knew: vertically thrust into the sphere the sword means a military tombstone with the praise of heroic death, as well as the supreme power and triumph of the power of the spirit. And the transformation of the sword with a sphere into an Orthodox cross in Malevich’s painting speaks of the hovering in the air transition of secular life into spiritual life, the mixing of history and mythology. The fact of this change draws attention to the change in size from a small sword to a large cross.

The whole picture is a prophecy of the future of the peasantry, or rather of the absence of that future.

SALVATION BY FLIGHT. WITH THE CROSS INTO ANOTHER WORLD. SALVATION IN SPIRITUALITY.