Knave of Diamonds (arts association)

[3] The Knave of Diamonds exhibition opened in Moscow in the Salon of the Levisson Building on 10 December 1910, and ran through to January 16, 1911, and included works by thirty eight artists.

Curated by Alexandre Mercereau,[4][5] the exhibition additionally included works by German expressionist Gabrielle Munter, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexey von Jawlensky (Russian painters then living abroad),[6] and Russian artists active in the Moscow scene, including the group of young artists recently expelled from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture due to their "leftist tendencies".

While one contemporary account blandly concluded: "Organizers regard the title Knave of Diamonds as a symbol of young enthusiasm and passion, 'for the knave implies youth and the suit of diamonds represents seething blood,'"[3] the public itself understood the symbolism to trend in a different direction: "unaccustomed to such novel titles," they assumed the show to be "a gambling house or brothel," and "in no way an art exhibition.

The Moscow painters, admirers of modern French artistic styles and frequent visitors to collector Sergei Shchukin's house (from 1909, open every afternoon Sunday for public viewing) and including canvases by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse, included Robert Falk, Natalya Goncharova, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Aleksandr Kuprin, Mikhail Larionov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Ilya Mashkov, Vasily Rozhdestvensky, and Marianna Wladimirowna Werewkina.

[8] "The Russian artists were following the paths that Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso had gone down in discovering the primitives of Africa and Oceania, with the only difference that they did not need to go far away to find inspiration but got it at home - in shop signs, in tin-ware or the works of other non-professional folk artisans.