He wrote: “Moscow icons turned over all my theories and brought me to my third stage of development. Through icon painting, I began to understand the emotional art of peasants, which I had loved before, but the meaning of which I could not grasp until I studied the icons.” These Moscow years had a double value for Malevich, allowing him to study both the deeper meanings of his beloved icons and learning new painting techniques and principles.

      Rerberg was one of those multi-faceted teachers who, though he preferred to work in the Impressionist manner, did not force that style on his students. His primary claim to fame was preparing students to enter the Moscow College. While Malevich failed to take advantage of this preparation, his studies with Rerberg between 1905 and 1910 grounded him in composition and colour. Rerberg was a master technician and wrote books about the chemical content of various brands of oil paint. Together with a deep appreciation of physiology and psychology, he pressured his students to translate technical facility into the expression of their own feelings.

      In effect Fedor Rerberg was Malevich’s only real intellectually-based teacher other than the osmosis derived from working alongside and being exposed to the works of beginners like himself and academic masters such as Pymonenko. From Rerberg, however, Kasimir received one unique gift, the chance to exhibit his work. In 1907 he exhibited two sketches at the 14th “Exhibition of the Moscow Community of “. He participated in the 15th and 16th Exhibitions, as well, before moving on.

      Personally, this period covering the first ten years of the new century was unsettling for Malevich. With his father’s death he became responsible for his mother and younger siblings. Combining his failure to gain a place in the Moscow College with the insecurity of his teetering self-confidence forced him into direct action to ease the pressure. To maintain connection with the core of the fine art movements, he moved his mother and family to Moscow while he commuted back to Kursk in the summers to work and paint. The strain on his marriage caused him to divorce his first wife and marry Sofia Mikhailovna Rafalovich. She was the daughter of a psychiatrist and wrote children’s stories.

      To keep the wolf from the door, Malevich and his new bride lived with other poor artists in a commune where everyone chipped in and shared chores. He took commercial art jobs and one in particular, sketches for publication of a controversial symbolist play, Anathema by Leonid Andreev, launched him among the “shock troops” of the avant-garde Moscow art movement. The Moscow Art Theatre that mounted the production gathered his lithographs into a rather elegant portfolio featuring scenes from the play and portraits of the actors in costume.

      Malevich did not take this brief immersion in the maudlin excesses of Russian Symbolist poetry and theatre very seriously, but the vitality of the reaction to their productions must have excited him. An even greater influence on his work at this time was colliding with some of the best of French and other European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Because Reberg was one of the founders of the Moscow Artists Society, Malevich was able to exhibit in the twice yearly shows beginning in 1907. Over time he was able to ingratiate himself with a virtual “who’s who” of the emerging Russian avant-garde.

      The new stars included Natalia Goncharova, David Burliuk, Alexander Shevechenko, Mikhail Larionov and Alexei Morgunov. Towering over them was the eminence of Vassily Kandinsky. Malevich found himself swept up into the enthusiasm of Goncharova and Larionov and joined them in exploring a post-Impressionist style in 1909.

      Goncharova was born in Nagaevo village near Tula, Russia, in 1881. She studied sculpture at the Moscow Academy of Art, but turned to painting in 1904. Like Kasimir, she was deeply inspired by the primitive aspects of Russian folk art and attempted to emulate it in her own work while incorporating elements of Fauvism and Cubism.

      Reaper II, 1912.

      Oil on canvas, 71 × 69.4 cm.

      Art Gallery of Astrakhan, Astrakhan.

      Reaper II, motif: c. 1910–1911, version: 1928–1929.

      Oil on plywood, 74.2 × 72 cm.

      The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

      Reapers/Rye Harvest, 1912.

      Oil on canvas, 74.2 × 72 cm.

      Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

      The Mower I, end of 1911-beginning of 1912.

      Oil on canvas, 113.5 × 66.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts of Nijni Novgorod, Nijni Novgorod.

      From 1902 Larionov’s style was Impressionism. After a visit to Paris in 1906 he moved into post-Impressionism and then a neo-Primitive style which derived partly from Russian sign painting. In 1908 he staged the Golden Fleece exhibition in Moscow, which included paintings by international avant-garde artists such as Matisse, Derain, Braque, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Other group shows promoted by him included Tatlin, Marc Chagall and the emerging Kasimir Malevich.

      Larionov helped found two important Russian artistic groups, the Jack of Diamonds (1909–1911) which included Malevich in its exhibitions, and – with Gonchorova – the radical-chic Donkey’s Tail. This latter group was conceived to create a break from European art influence and to establish an independent Russian school of modern art. Though Goncharova had been involved with icon painting and primitive Russian folk-art, Futurism became the focus of her later paintings. She achieved fame in Russia for her work such as the Futurist Cyclist and her later Rayonist works. In 1913 Larionov created Rayonism, which was the first attempt at near-abstract art in Russia. The Donkey’s Tail group led the Moscow Futurists and organized outré lecture evenings in the fashion of their eccentric Italian counterparts.

      Impressionism and Experimentation

      At this point in his career, Kasimir Malevich was an open vessel, seeking a style that he could embrace. He participated in the second exhibition of the group Soyus Molod’ozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg in 1911 with some success.

      Besides his Russian and Ukrainian contemporaries, Malevich had access to one of the great collections of Western contemporary art assembled by Sergei Shchukin. The heir to a very wealthy textile manufacturer and director of two textile plants, Shchukin had the capital to invest in art. Beginning in the 1890s, he carved a swathe through the Paris galleries, crating and shipping works of Renoir, Pissarro, Monet and continued into the new century with purchases of Van Gogh and Gauguin. The early canvasses of Cézanne were plucked off the walls and from gallery racks before most of the art world had recognized the Frenchman’s genius. Alongside 21 Cézanne works that found appreciation in Shchukin’s mansion, between 1909 and 1913, thirty-five Picassos were purchased, beginning with his painting Lady With a Fan.

      If any Western painter besides Cézanne was lionized in the East, it was Paul Gauguin. The June 1909 issue of the art newsletter, Zolotoe

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