Two other new exhibitions show how true this was even in the careers of the great abstract masters. Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian Art is at Tate Modern until October 26. Malevich is best known as one of the great abstract artists, famous in particular for his Black Square (1915), a black square surrounded by a margin of white. He declared Black Square to be the "zero of form", an end to old conventions and the beginnings of a new pictorial language. However, what is most striking about the exhibition is the later figurative work by Malevich, from the late 1920s through the '30s. In a fascinating review in the New York Review of Books, Robert Chandler writes how Malevich's last portraits "are remarkable for their humanity". He goes on: "They are fully realized embodiments, at a time of state terror, of clear-eyed love." Then there are Malevich's drawings of the "Second Peasant Cycle", which Chandler describes as "a profound response [. . .] to the horrors of Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture . . . with their black or red crosses, their crucified figures, and their dead children". These terrifying blank faces, painted at the height of Stalin's campaign of terror, are breathtaking. Malevich's paintings of peasants, not his abstract works, black and white rectangles and squares, blocks of primary colours, painted during the First World War, are what seem exciting and original. 

At the same time, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, there is a new exhibition which opened in June and runs until next spring, Kandinsky Before Abstraction, 1901-1911. This is a fascinating reminder of Kandinsky's early work, especially in Munich. Curators, it seems, are starting to look more closely at the other aspects of the work of the great abstract artists. In the careers of Malevich and Kandinsky, there is a more complicated story to be told.

Chandler's review of the Malevich exhibition raises an important point about why figurative art might be making a comeback. From the Middle East to the failed states of central Africa, these are dark times. What kind of art speaks to the growing feeling of foreboding today? Is it the bright decorative paintings of Miró and the work of Delaunay? Or is it the outstanding figurative art at these new exhibitions: Malevich's 1930s peasants, the wartime paintings of urban destruction at the Clark exhibition, Chagall's astonishing images of pogroms and the Holocaust shown at New York's Jewish Museum last year or Anselm Kiefer's meditations on Nazism which can be seen at the Royal Academy this autumn? These powerful and original exhibitions don't just show that figurative art is back and the story of modern art is being retold to make room for it. They tell us something about how figurative art speaks to us today in a way which abstract art no longer does. It says something powerful about the dark history of the 20th century, something which strikes a chord today. Figurative art is back because it matters.