In the early days of colour television you could buy a device which, it was said, would convert your black and white set. It consisted of a transparent plastic sheet, half blue and half green. You stuck it over the screen, in the hope that once in a while the sky and the prairie would divide the picture in the right proportions. Arkhip Kuindzhi's Landscape: The Steppe of 1890 is the only painting I know which would allow that simple scam to work perfectly. It shows featureless grey sky above almost featureless green steppe, which stretches right out to a distant, dead level horizon. 'Look,' it seems to say, 'this is all we have - an endless plain and high grey skies.'

LRB 5 August 2004 | PDF Download