In the late 19th century, Vitebsk was a major town in North-Western Russia and the center of a vast economically developed gubernia. It had regular railway communications with Vilno, Riga, Kovno, Mogilev and St Petersburg. Like other provincial centers of Russia at the turn of the century, Vitebsk boasted a vigorous cultural life, hardly inferior to that of the capital. Theater companies regularly came on tours and famous  musicians gave concerts there. 
   After  October’s Revolushion   for a brief period Vitebsk became a major centre of avant-garde art in Russia, a fact which has not lost its appeal to a host of art historians and artists who now attempt to assimilate the lesson of the "Vitebsk Renaissance". The three years which elapsed from the arrival of Chagall to the departure of Malevich and UNOVIS members in the winter of 1921, overshadowed the entire preceding and subsequent history of Vitebsk artistic life. Ignorance of that history, however, may interfere with the full understanding of that short spell and the realization of why such an outburst of artistic activity took place precisely in Vitebsk, and what local forces could support it.
     Vitebsk had a proper "groundwork", which visiting reformers leaned on. Long before the tumultuous events of 1919-1921 an original artistic milieu had formed around a private art school headed by Ye-huda Pen,  Chagall's first teacher. It was no accident that the first teachers of the newly-established School of Art included, alongside Chagall himself, other disciples of Pen, or that nearly all its students had attended his private school.
     The last visit Marc Chagall paid to Vitebsk before leaving Russia forever occurred in the autumn of 1918 when he came as Commissar of Fine Arts for Vitebsk. His arrival added untold vigour and a new dimension to artistic life in that provincial town. A Public Higher School of Art (or the Vitebsk Academy of Arts, as Chagall himself called it) was opened there; it employed as teachers major avant-garde artists, such as El Dssitzky, V. Yermolayeva, I. Puni and K. Boguslavskaya. A big exhibition of the leading masters of modernistic trends was held, and a collection for Russia's pioneering Museum of Modem Arts was started. In late 1919, Kazimir Malevich came to Vitebsk where his radical reforms had an enthusiastic and numerous following in the UNOVIS (Russian abbreviation for the Founders of the New Art)  group.