Painting 

   In around 1896, he became inter­ested in the works of the Russian school of Realism - pictures by Ivan Shishkin
and Ilya Repin, who belonged to the Wanderer group of artists. When the Malevich family moved to Kursk in 
1896, Malevich set up a joint studio with other pain­ters and became acquainted with academically trained artists.
The first pictures were completed, painted direct from nature. Dissatisfied with his efforts, Malevich sensed the
neces­sity for academic training as an artist.
   In 1904 he traveled to Moscow, and from 1905 had painting lessons in the private workshop of art painter 
Fyodor Rerberg. The style of his early works remained within the formal canon of the period - they are traditional
Symbolist or Neo-impressionist works. Unlike the Wanderer artists, his works are not indebted to any natural 
realism after 1850. In the first years of the zoth century, gazes were turning west. The first collections of French
art were being established. Young artists were interested in the Impressionists, the modern art of the time.
     In the same way as the Russian Wanderers, the French Impressionists also found their subject matter in their
surroundings. Along with landscape painting, they concen­trated on painting modern life in the streets, parks,
and cafes of Paris. In contrast to the realism depicted by the Wanderers, their aim was the recording of a direct 
impression. A sense of atmosphere had to be brought out. There was no attempt at conveying either heroic or
moral aspects in paint. Favorite subjects of theirs were everyday life and light.
   With glowing colors and rapu brushstrokes, the painters ende;u , ored to capture changes of tin moment.
Visible brushstrokes demon­strated that their pictures are just paintings. This gives them a some­what sketchy 
almost blurred char­acter. For their predecessors, such work would have been considered unfinished. In order
to show nature in its constant variation, the Impressionists set up their easels directly in front of the subject matter, 
thereby founding the open-air school of painting.
   Malevich knew the work of the French Impressionists from seeing reproductions in periodicals. Here he
discovered how to express his love of nature in art. A year before he had even  left for Moscow, he was painting 
in an Impressionist style,thereby already utilizing the main­stream style of his day. It was, however, not the scenes 
of city life that interested him. His pictorial subjects were gardens and parks, as well as the people that chanced
to be in them. The pictures of people remain anonymous and distanced, in a way like snapshots. Unlike the French
Impressionists, however, Malevich entertained no ambitions to capture the effects of light in his pictures. He relied 
solely on the effects of color. Colors themselves become sources of light in his work, which he boldly juxtaposes
in their vividness. Connected colored sur­faces replace the minutely dissected shimmer of Impressionist pictures. 
He also atuck more closely to a composi tional frame, for which trees were often used to provide a horizontal and
vertical axis. That he managed to raise himself from the provincial to the top rank of young Moscow artists, bears
witness to his fierce determination to seek new fields.