The motive of European Art Nouveau is presented in the work “Rest. Society in Top Hats” (1908, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg).
In 1909 Malevich married for the second time. His wife was the children’s writer Sofia Rafalovich (?–1925). It was important that the new father-in-law had a country house in Nemchinovka, which became a significant place for the artist until the end of his life. He tried to spend all his free time in Nemchinovka and its surroundings.
Malevich participated in a series of exhibitions which began in December 1910 when the extravagant organizer Mikhail Larionov invited the artist to the first “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition (December 1910 – January 1911). Since then he regularly took part in the shocking exhibitions of left artists who were representatives of Russian pre-revolutionary modernism (Cezanneism, Primitivism, Сubism). “Self-portrait” (1910, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), “Still Life” (1910, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg) are the works of this period. At the same time the artist participated in the exhibition called “Union of Youth” (St. Petersburg, April – May 1911). The next exhibition was in Moscow. Its head was the same (Larionov), and its title is defiant – “Donkey’s Tail” (March – April 1912). Here Malevich exhibited over 20 works – “Argentine Polka” (1911, private collection, New York), “Bather” (1911, Stedelic Museum, Amsterdam), “Gardener” (1911, Stedelic Museum, Amsterdam), etc.
When at the end of his life Malevich was thinking about his art, he wrote: “I stayed on the side of the peasant art and began to draw in a primitive spirit. At first, in the first period, I imitated icon painting. The second period was purely “labor”: I drew the working peasants in harvest, threshing. Third period: I approached the “suburban genre” (carpenters, gardeners, summer cottages, bathers). The fourth period – “city signs” (floor polishers, maids, footmen, employees)”4. Malevich’s view on the origin of the religious icon was peculiarious. He considered it as the highest stage of “peasant art5.”
The main feature of Malevich’s works of this period was his desire to perceive the objective environment as the sum of individual elements where each of them received its own light and shadow modeling with a textured solution. It could be powerful sculpting of space which was made with use of colored brushstroke. There were lined up, unnaturally large, anatomically consciously increased proportions of body parts in the system of technical design of planes with a clear outline.