Parallel to the historical upheavals in Russia from 1905 to 1920, Russian artists sought new ways of expressing their image of the world. A wide variety of art movements emerged in very rapid succession, taking up the art trends of Western Europe and developing them further. Particularly influential was an art exhibition initiated in 1908 by the Russian magazine Das Goldene Vlies, which featured works by the most important contemporary Western European artists. Among those represented were Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Kees van Dongen, Alfred Sisley and Pierre Bonnard.
This was followed in 1911 by an exhibition of the group "Jack of Diamonds", which involved a large number of artists of the Russian avant-garde and established the development of Russian painting and sculpture towards abstraction. The exhibition "0,10", which followed in 1915 and in which Suprematist paintings were exhibited for the first time, marked the breakthrough to non-objective art. In addition to Malevich, the exhibitors included Vladimir Tatlin, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Lyubov Popova and Ivan Puni.
How inspiring these encounters were for the development of modern Russian art can be seen in the artistic development of Malevich, who found his way to Cubofuturism through the influence of the French Impressionists, the Futurists and Cubists via a post-impressionist and neo-primitivist style and then developed Suprematism.