[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".
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.
[9] The group was founded by Pyotr Konchalovsky, Ilya Mashkov, Mikhail Larionov, Natalya Goncharova and Aristarkh Lentulov, and included Robert Falk, David Burliuk, Wladimir Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Kuprin, Vasily Rozhdestvensky, Alexander Osmerkin, Alexander Shevchenko, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Adolf Milman, Lyubov Popova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Antonina Fedorovna Sofronova, and Moisey Feigin.
[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.