Vitebsk before the revolution was a small Belarusian city whose Jewish population - including a young Marc Chagall and the painter Yehuda Pen, his teacher - had produced an unlikely concentration of artistic talent. After the October Revolution, Chagall converted his ambition to provincial reform. He founded the People's Art School at 10 Bukharin Street. The Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art occupied the same building. Chagall and Kazimir Malevich - who arrived in 1919 to teach - directed the museum together, joined later by Alexander Romm, who in January 1920 became Chief of the Vitebsk Commission on Preservation of Heritage and Arts. Malevich and Chagall did not get along. Malevich's hard, geometric Suprematism - black squares, white planes, the rejection of representation entirely - had little use for Chagall's floating violinists and rooftop lovers. The students gravitated to Malevich. Chagall left Vitebsk for good in 1920.

After Chagall's departure, Malevich and his circle established UNOVIS - the Affirmers of the New Art - a collective of students and teachers who tried to push Suprematism beyond paintings into furniture, ceramics, architecture, and political poster design. For two or three years Vitebsk was one of the most radical art centers in the world, a provincial Belarusian town producing manifestos that would shape Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and a century of design. The museum's collection grew with their ambition. By spring 1921, Romm catalogued 120 paintings. The artists represented read like a roster of Russian and Eastern European modernism: Nathan Altman, David Burliuk, Marc Chagall himself, Aleksandra Ekster, Robert Falk, Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, Ivan Kliun, Mikhail Larionov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Lyubov Popova, Władysław Strzemiński, Varvara Stepanova, David Shterenberg, Yehuda Pen. Almost all the names you would teach in a graduate seminar on the Russian avant-garde.

The collapse came quickly. The museum opened to the public in July 1920. Between July and October 1922, 23 paintings were transferred to Petrograd. By 1 April 1923 only 35 works remained in Vitebsk. In 1925, contemporary witnesses reported that paintings by avant-garde artists from the museum were being cut up - their canvases reused by students at the Art School who needed material to paint on. It is hard to read this without flinching. A Suprematist composition by an artist now studied across the world, sliced apart for a student's exercise. On 26 September 1925, the surviving 32 paintings were transferred to the Vitebsk Regional Museum. Most went on to the Belarusian National Arts Museum in Minsk in 1939. After World War II, only one work from the original museum remained in Vitebsk: a small still life by David Shterenberg.

Of the 120 paintings catalogued in 1921, the locations of only 26 are now confirmed. Nineteen are in the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, four in the Belarusian National Arts Museum in Minsk, and one in the Kawamura Museum of Modern Art in Japan. Researchers have catalogued about 90 paintings in total that may have belonged either to the modern art museum or to the parallel School Museum (founded 1919) in the same building. The dispersal was the standard Soviet pattern: provincial collections folded into central institutions and quietly redistributed to other republics, with documentation that did not always survive. Some of those missing paintings were almost certainly destroyed, by fire or by indifference or by a student needing canvas. Some are likely sitting in storage in a Russian or Belarusian institution waiting to be rediscovered. The avant-garde dream of art reforming Soviet life was crushed in the 1930s under Stalin's enforced Socialist Realism. Many of the artists died in the Gulag or in disgrace. Chagall, having left in 1920, lived until 1985 in France. Malevich died in Leningrad in 1935.

Modern Vitebsk preserves the memory of those few brilliant years. The Marc Chagall Art Centre and the Marc Chagall Museum operate in the city. Yehuda Pen's school, where Chagall first studied, is commemorated. UNOVIS is now a footnote that fills monographs. The original museum building, the events that took place inside it for three or four years, the conversations between Chagall and Malevich, the Suprematist canvases hanging beside Yehuda Pen's gentle realist portraits - it happened, briefly, in a small Belarusian city during a revolution that was eating its own. The museum did not survive. The art it championed went on to remake the visual world. Both things are true.