With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and a period of enforced isolation that lasted through out the war until the break of the blockade in 1921, Moscow and Petrograd became the scenes of a fierce, concentrated activity among the artists. During this time, the pre-Revolutionary movement of Suprematism and the post-Revolutionary school of constructivism emerged and became crystallized so that when movement and exchange of ideas with the outside world again became possible in the early twenties, these two unknown movements made a tremendous impact on post-war Western Europe. The first occasion to celebrate this swelling of the ranks of the Russian Avant-Garde was an exhibition held in Petrograd in February 1915. The show was called the ‘The Futurist Exhibition: Tramway V’. This exhibition brought Malevich and Tatlin together. They had first met through Larionov’s exhibitions, but it was at this exhibition that they emerged as the leaders of two distinct schools: Malevich to suprematism and Tatlin to constructivism. Tatlin’s works were by far the most radical in the exhibition. He showed ‘Painting Reliefs’ of 1914 and one of 1915: six in all ( This was the first group exhibition at which Tatlin showed these works). Malevich showed works of 1911-1914, beginning with Argentinian Polka of 1911, Woman in a Tram of 1912, the radical Portrait of M.V. Matiushin of 1913 and a number of works of 1914 which he called ‘Alogist’ or ‘Non-sense Realist’. None of these paintings by Malevich was a new or unknown work; he sent no Suprematist work. Liubov Popova and Nadezhda Udaltsova sent cubist works of their Paris period to this exhibition. They are interesting in that they give an idea of the Russians attitude to this movement. The Russian artist was not primarily concerned with a strict interpretation of the thing seen, but rather with a new way of constructing a painting. Cubist works by Malevich, Popova, and Udaltsova, who were the chief representatives of this school in Russia, are constructed in an almost entirely abstract fashion. ‘Futurist’ painting in Russia was again fundamentally different from that of the Italian and French Schools. Examples of so-called Russian Futurist painting which come closest to the Italian School in their inspiration are such works as Rosanova’s Geography and Malevich’s The Knife-Grinder. Malevich’s The Knife-Grinder is an excellent example of a few paintings that belong to this ‘Futurist’ movement. In this painting, the machine is not idealized-it is indeed an extremely primitive machine. Malevich is preoccupied with the idea of the new man which emerges from machine-power: a super-man, man-becomes-machine. Man is the master of the machine. To the Russian artists, nature is a force hostile to man. So for the Russian, the machine came as a liberating force, liberating man from the tyranny of nature and giving him the possibility to create an entirely man-made world, of which he will finally be the master. This romanticism of the machine lies at the basis of Constructivism.