5 On December 19, 1915, the museum-going public of St. Petersburg was scandalized by the artworks on display at the 0.10 (Zero-Ten): Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting. 1 Out of the 155 exhibited works, Kazimir Malevich’s epoch-making Black Square (1915) was especially singled out for critical censure as an “evil hallucination” that represented “a cult of futility.” 2 It had intrepidly transgressed both the boundaries of acceptable aesthetic experimentation and polite taste, thus earning itself a place of honor within the annals of modernist art. According to conventional accounts, it was here that Malevich (1879–1935) triumphantly inaugurated the vanguard new abstract movement known as suprematism, which forever altered the course of twentieth- century art history both in Russia and abroad. However, as recent scholarship has persuasively demonstrated, Malevich’s earliest suprematist forms did not in fact debut at 0.10. Instead, they initially appeared as “decorations” on applied art objects at The First Verbovka Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art held at the Lemercier Gallery in Moscow in November 1915. In her analysis of these works, Aleksandra Shatskikh contends that “the fact that Malevich for the first time showed his mature, suprema- tist works now seen in any textbook at a ‘needlework exhibition’ attested […] to the audacious freedom of the artist, who did not hold with the traditional hierarchy of the arts […] [but instead] created above and beyond barriers.” 3 Although the author con- cedes that the precedent was first set by nineteenth-century “painters such as Mikhail Vrubel,” she immediately dismisses the latter artist’s achievements by claiming that he “in no way challenged the hierarchical division into ‘high,’ or principal art, and ‘earth- bound,’ or secondary, auxiliary art.” 4 The present chapter aims to offer a corrective to such pervasive views and to challenge entrenched modernist narratives by demon- strating that it was the daring, experimental artworks of the late nineteenth-century artist Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910)—and especially his decorative pieces—that were integral to the formal and conceptual innovations of twentieth-century avant-gardes. The ceramic medium in particular granted Vrubel the freedom to articulate some of his most revolutionary ideas. It allowed him to develop a distinct and original visual syntax that sowed the seeds for subsequent Russian modernist movements, including the neoprimistivist, constructivist, and productivist avant-gardes—a link that has been rarely examined. It is hardly an accident that the next generation of artists repeatedly identified Vrubel as the “founder” of Russian modernism and “an artist [who was] ahead of his time.” 5 Young talents such as Liubov Popova (1889–1924), Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956), Naum Gabo (1890–1977), and Sergei Sudeikin (1882–1946), among others, all Blurring Boundaries Mikhail Vrubel’s Decorative Turn and the Rise of Russian Modernism Maria Taroutina