The red square was replaced on the screen by a black-and-white photo of a dark man with serious brows, fedora and topcoat standing before an intact Kaiser Wilhelm Church, the one that was now a war memorial on the Ku’damm.

Irina said, “In 1927 Kazimir Malevich visited Berlin for a retrospective exhibit of his paintings. He had already fallen into disfavor in Moscow. Berlin at that time had two hundred thousand Russian émigrés. Munich had Kandinsky. Paris had Chagall, the poet Tsetaeva and the Ballet Russe. Malevich was considering his own escape. The Berlin show contained seventy Malevich paintings. He also brought with him an undetermined number of other works—in other words, half of his entire life’s output. However, when he was summoned back to Moscow in June, he returned. His wife and small daughter were still in Russia. Also, the Communist party’s Central Committee’s agitation and propaganda section was putting artists under more pressure and Malevich’s students appealed to him to protect them. When he boarded the train for Moscow, he left instructions that none of his art be returned to Russia.

“At the end of the 1927 Berlin show, all the works were crated by the art-transport firm of Gustav Knauer and sent for storage at the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover, which waited for further instructions from Malevich. Some works were exhibited there, but when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and denounced ‘degenerate art,’ which included, of course, avant-garde Russian art, the Malevich paintings were returned in their Knauer crates and hidden in the museum cellar.

“We know that they were still there in 1935, when Albert Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, visited Hanover. He purchased two paintings and smuggled them out of Germany rolled in his umbrella. The Hanover museum decided that possession of the rest of the Malevich collection was too dangerous and shipped them back to one of Malevich’s original hosts in Berlin, the architect Hugo Haring, who hid them first in his house and then, during the Berlin air raids, in his hometown of Biberach in the south.