If any single art event symbolized Russia's thawed relations to its own modernist past, it was the show at the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow last winter by a painter and mystic who died in 1935, well into the Stalin era, and whose work remained buried for decades thereafter: Kasimir Malevich.
Each day a long queue of the curious would form. Inside the packed gallery, people would argue and gesticulate in front of abstract paintings -- a red square on a white ground, a fragmented cubist portrait -- done a generation before their birth.
The Malevich show was a political emblem...
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