Marc Chagall, On the Street, 1914–1918.
Oil on canvas, 141 × 197 cm. Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow.
Mikhail Larionov, Rayonism, 1912–1913.
Oil on canvas, 52.5 × 78.5 cm. Baschkirski Museum, Ufa.
Abstractions
The Russian Avant-Garde
The Russian avant-garde is one of the most surprising intellectual and creative movements in the art of the 20th century. Within a very short time, an immensely concentrated burst of the most varied creative innovations emanated from Moscow and Leningrad. In the 18th century, Russia had opened itself up to the West, primarily to France and Germany and the lively exchange in the intellectual and artistic spheres between the East and West during the first two decades of the 20th century unleashed an innovative and mutually enriching art scene of the highest calibre. The new discoveries in the spheres of physics, technology, medicine, and psychology, were the basis of this scientific-artistic questioning. The eastern and western avant-gardes were a closely woven conglomerate of reciprocal inspiration. One cannot imagine the non-representational art of the west without the trail blazing of a Frantisek, Kupka, or Wassily Kandinsky. De Stijl cannot be imagined without Suprematism and eastern Constructivism. Many of the émigrés, who were successful in the west, had their roots in the east like the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, or the Russian Marc Chagall.
The Russians were primarily drawn to France and Germany. Wassily Kandinsky, like Alexej von Jawlensky, and Marianne von Werefkin, had already had travelled to Munich in 1896 and he often returned to Russia. Léon Bakst, Marc Chagall, Antoine Pevsner, and El Lissitzky lived and worked in the years 1910 and 1914 in either France or Germany. Archipenko and Survage went to Paris in 1908, as did Zadkine and Lipchitz a year later. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, they brought their experience back to their Russian homeland. Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Gontcharova went in the opposite direction and immigrated to Paris in 1917.
From around 1905 until the 1920s, Russian art, driven by creative and intellectual energy, developed in an unusually multifaceted manner. This period was opened by Impressionism and Symbolism at the beginning of the century. Neo-Primitivism, Cubo-Futurism and Abstract Expressionism, Rayonism, Suprematism and Constructivism followed this all the way to Analytic Art. With respect to painting, the most outstanding representatives of this multifaceted, yet very intense, period are Natalia Gontcharova, Wassily Kandinsky, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyuchin, and El Lissitzky.
Symbolism is one of the most important aspects of the spiritual longing at the turn of the century. It is a logical development of Russian culture, not of a decadent atmosphere as in some western countries. Russian Symbolism strove to integrate beauty as a life-giving force into daily life. This was accompanied by a feverish search for the purpose of life after ethical ideals in the background of the impending collapse of old Russia. In contrast to the West, the expressiveness of Russian Symbolism extended until around 1910.
The most brilliant of the Symbolists was Mikhail Vrubel. He created highly psychological portraits, linking the finest lyrical moments with expressive emotions and tragic loneliness. His worldview was imbued with a strange duality. He venerated Goethe and natural philosophy, and internalised the theories of Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
The Russian merchants and collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, were the first to promote the new art movements. Shchukin had already opened his collection of contemporary art to the public in Moscow in 1914. What significance this collection of the French avant-garde had for the specific development of Russian art before the revolutions can be judged by what the painter, David Burliuk, one of the future Cubo-Futurists, said, as he wrote to a friend in St Petersburg:
In Moscow, we often looked at the French collections of both S. I. Shchukin and I. A. Morozov. If I had not, I would not have dared to start. We have been at home now for three days. All the old stuff has been thrown into the rubbish heap, and, oh, it is hard and uplifting to start again from the beginning.
A unique ensemble of paintings by Paul Gauguin, placed close together like a frieze in the manner of an Old Russian iconostasis, was on display in the Shchukin’s dining room. Located in the centre was the painting Obsterte (Fruit Harvest) from the last Tahiti period. Natalia Gontcharova, deeply impressed, responded to Paul Gauguin with her four-piece composition Fruit Harvest. She painted an equally exotic depiction of daily life, however, one with Russian folkloric motifs, lifting the simple, daily life of the Russian peasant to her Tahiti, into her paradise-like state.
Never before had the artistic relations between Russia and France been so intense. The legendary The Golden Fleece exhibition of 1908, named after the journal of the same name, reflected this. On display were 282 paintings, two thirds of which were from Paris. For the first time, many Russian artists saw Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro and the Nabis with Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard, Sérusier, and the Pointillists. What impressed the Russians the most were the Fauves like Derain, Marquet, Matisse and van Dongen. The impact of this exhibit on the evolving Russian avant-garde cannot be overestimated.
As a result, two distinct groups arose. In St Petersburg, the Union of Youth, and in Moscow, Jack of Diamonds led by Larionov and Gontcharova. Their place was taken in 1911 by the group Donkey’s Tail, with whom Tatlin and Malevich exhibited, and, in 1913, by the group, Target. For the prerevolutionary Moscow art scene, the activities of Larionov and his wife, Gontcharova, were of crucial importance. Before World War I, both took part in a number of exhibits abroad, for example, in 1912 with the Blaue Reiter in Munich and at the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon in Berlin. Larionov travelled a further time in 1914 to Paris in order to work there with Diaghilev at his ballet. Together with Gontcharova, he exhibited in Paris, and wrote the foreword to the catalogue.
Italian Futurism also contributed important ideas to the Russian intellectual life. The short-lived Cubo-Futurism group, which in addition to Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Gotcharova, Aleksandra Ekster, David Burliuk, Lyubov Popova and Kazimir Malevich belonged, united Futurist ideas on painting with those of the Russian Neo-Primitivists. Out of this developed the almost object-free Rayonism style. In Saint Petersburg, the Futurists met with Matyuchin and Elena Guro. In addition, the brothers Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Olga Rozanova also took part.
Natalia Gontcharova, The Harvest, 1911. Oil on canvas, 92 × 99 cm.
The Omsk M. A. Vrubel Museum of Fine Arts, Omsk.
Mikhail Vrubel, Fallen Demon, 1901.
Watercolour, gouache on paper, sketch for 1902’s painting, 21 × 30 cm.
Drawings department, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
From 1912 to 1913, the Russian avant-garde developed a strong sense of personal identity of its own and looked increasingly to the strengths and values of its own national origins. Larionov together with Gontcharova created Rayonism, an early variant of abstract art. They, thereby, sought primarily to differentiate themselves from Italian Futurism. In the Manifesto of Rayonism, written in 1912 and published in 1913, they expressly praised nationalism.
Rayonism combined contemporary European trends. It fused Cubism and Futurism in so far as it fragmented and energised the painting surface. It fused Orphism in so far as it realised the dynamic quality of the light by means of colour contrasts. For Mikhail Larionov, Rayonism (Rayon = beam) meant the dissolution of the painting subject. He referred to the scientific research regarding the materiality of light. This he visualised in his paintings through a bundle of rays and refractions through a prism. A depiction referring to an object had hardly any meaning for him. His concern