Natalia Goncharova studied sculpture in Moscow, but worked as a painter and designer. She was inspired both by an interest in Russian folk art, and by modernism in art. With her lifelong partner Mikhail Larionov she first developed a style called Rayonism. They part of the pre-Revolution Russian avant-garde. They helped to organise the so-called 'Donkey's Tail' exhibition of 1912, and showed their work at the Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich the same year.