After leaving the Slade School of Art in 1914, where he had been a student on a Jewish Educational Aid Society scholarship for one year, Kramer moved in modernist and bohemian circles in London. He began showing with progressive artistic groups such as the Vorticists, The London Group and the Allied Artists Association (AAA) and exhibited in David Bomberg, and Jacob Epstein's important Jewish Section at the Whitechapel Gallery's groundbreaking 1914 exhibition 'Twentieth Century Art: a Review of Modern Movements'. He produced a number of highly simplified graphic images at this time, in different media, including gouache, pen and ink, and woodcut, several of which were used as illustrations in contemporary literary and artistic 'little magazines' such as Voices, Rhythm and New Paths. These designs can be seen as experiments with form and colour - one of Kramer's guiding principles, along with expressing the essential spirituality in his work - as he worked towards his most radical Cubist-influenced images, such as his most ambitious oil entitled 'The Day of Atonement' (1919, Leeds Art Gallery), which fused the subject of Jewish religious observance with radical simplification and geometric repetition, and 'The Philosopher' (1922).