Paul Gauguin dies at 54, alone in…

Britain makes an alliance with Japan.

In countering Russia’s presence in Manchuria, Britain encourages Japanese expansion.

The naturalistic novels of Toson and Katai inaugurate modern Japanese fiction.

Bogdanovich, the Russian Governor of Ufa, is assassinated in 1903.

“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a supposed plan for Jewish world takeover allegedly drafted by clandestine Tsarist propagandists, is published in a Russian newspaper in 1903.

Lenin, in the summer of 1903, organizes the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party, emphasizing the need for a vanguard to lead the revolution.

In 1903 in Moscow Kandinsky has his first one-man show.

He paints his earliest mature works in a jewel-like, fairy-tale Cloisonnist style.

(He will later tell how one evening in his studio he came upon "an indescribably beautiful picture, drenched with an inner glowing ... of which I saw nothing but forms and colors..." (from R.L. Herbert [ed.], Modern Artists on Art, 1965). It was one of his own works, standing on its side, so that its content was incomprehensible.)

The Russian central government does not organize pogroms, as is widely believed; but the anti-Semitic policy that it has carried out from 1881 has made them possible.

Official persecution and harassment of Jews has led the numerous anti-Semites to believe that their violence is legitimate, and their belief is strengthened by the active participation of a few high and many minor officials in fomenting attacks and by the reluctance of the government either to stop pogroms or to punish those responsible for them.

The pogrom in Kishinev in Russian-ruled Moldavia in April 1903, although more severe than most, is typical in many respects.

Riots had broken out after a Christian child, Michael Ribalenko, was found murdered on February 16.

Pavolachi Krusheven, the editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper Bessarabetz, and vice governor Ustrugov labeled the incident a ritual murder plot by the Jews, although it was fairly clear that the boy had been killed by a relative.

Beginning on the 19th, mobs, inspired by local leaders acting with official support, kill, loot, and destroy without hindrance from police or soldiers.

Interior Minister Plehve supposedly orders authorities not to stop the rioters.

After three days, when troops are finally called out and the mob dispersed, forty-five Jews have been killed, nearly six hundred have been wounded, and fifteen hundred Jewish homes have been pillaged.

Those responsible for inciting the outrages are not punished.

Despite a worldwide outcry, only two men are sentenced to seven and five years, respectively, and twenty-two are sentenced receive sentences of one or two years.

This pogrom is instrumental in convincing tens of thousands of Russian Jews to leave Russia for the West and for Palestine.

The child's real murderer is later apprehended.

Chaim Nachman Bialik, in his poem "City of Slaughter", chastises the Jews of Kishinev for not defending themselves in the pogrom.

Cézanne exhibits seven paintings in Vienna at the Secession.

Cézanne exhibits three paintings in Berlin.

Gabriele Münter studied the piano throughout her youth but in 1902 entered the Phalanx School of art in Munich, where within a year the twenty-four-year-old Berliner becomes the student and companion of Kandinsky.

Munich native Franz Marc, twenty-three in 1903, had executed his early works in a self-consciously academic style, but his exposure to French Impressionist painting now lightens his stolid naturalism.

Architects Wagner, Hoffman and Loos help to establish a cooperative enterprise for crafts and design called the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop), a center for arts and crafts, which Hoffman directs.

Hoffmann completes the Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1903; Purkersdorf, Austria).