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"I believe that colour possesses a strange magic. Sad colours, joyous or calm colours, a delicate or stronger colour harmony. These are not simply words that characterise an emotion similar to the sensations of taste. Colours have an effect on one's psychological make up" - Natalia Goncharova.
Hay Cutting (1907-8)
Tate Modern's current Natalia Goncharova exhibition is doing a decent job of thrusting a hitherto respected, if not particularly well known, artist into the public eye. I went on a Sunday afternoon and it was doing okay business, if nothing spectacular. Which was something of a pity as she was an interesting, varied, and talented character.
Very vocal about the fact she was Russian and not European, she nevertheless (as becomes abundantly clear) was influenced by the burgeoning modernist movements that were sweeping Germany, Italy, and, most of all, France. There are clear nods to cubism and futurism in many works but there's also, and not just in her subject matter, something very Russian about it too.
Goncharova was born in Nagaevo in the Tula Governate under the reign of Alexander III, Alexander the Peacemaker, the penultimate emperor of the Russian Empire and she grew up on her family's country estate two hundred miles from Moscow. 'Estate' makes them sound rich but we're informed they were 'impoverished aristocrats' who'd made what money they had left through creating textiles for the Russian navy.
Which meant young Natalia was familiar with each stage of textile production from planting, harvesting, and sheep shearing to washing, weaving, and decorating. The curators have included some traditional costumes from the Tula region in the first room to give us a feel for this and Goncharova herself collected icons, prints, and 'tray-paintings'. In a rigid and imperialistic society, Goncharova was, like her art, difficult to pigeonhole as she was a woman while also being a radical artist and the daughter of an aristocrat.
Very vocal about the fact she was Russian and not European, she nevertheless (as becomes abundantly clear) was influenced by the burgeoning modernist movements that were sweeping Germany, Italy, and, most of all, France. There are clear nods to cubism and futurism in many works but there's also, and not just in her subject matter, something very Russian about it too.
Goncharova was born in Nagaevo in the Tula Governate under the reign of Alexander III, Alexander the Peacemaker, the penultimate emperor of the Russian Empire and she grew up on her family's country estate two hundred miles from Moscow. 'Estate' makes them sound rich but we're informed they were 'impoverished aristocrats' who'd made what money they had left through creating textiles for the Russian navy.
Which meant young Natalia was familiar with each stage of textile production from planting, harvesting, and sheep shearing to washing, weaving, and decorating. The curators have included some traditional costumes from the Tula region in the first room to give us a feel for this and Goncharova herself collected icons, prints, and 'tray-paintings'. In a rigid and imperialistic society, Goncharova was, like her art, difficult to pigeonhole as she was a woman while also being a radical artist and the daughter of an aristocrat.
Self-Portrait in a Period Costume (1907-8)
Washing the Canvases (1910)
The family estate was called Polotnianyi Zavod (cloth factory) and in works like 1910's Washing the Canvases you can see how she's combined the realities of her upbringing with the bold, even radical, colours coming out of Europe that she'd been exposed to since moving, aged eleven, to Moscow with her parents.
Aged twenty, Goncharova enrolled at the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture where she met the man who would become her lifelong partner, fellow artist Mikhail Larionov. Early 20c Moscow was a great place to see modern European art. Two industrialists, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, had built up and were displaying extensive collections that featured such hugely important figures as Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Gauguin. All the Pauls.
Goncharova was probably being a bit mischievous, a little disingenuous even, when she claimed "I have passed through all that the West can offer ... and all that my country has assimilated from the West. I now shake the dust from my feet and distance myself from the West". Certainly you can see the appropriation and influence of traditional Russian arts and crafts but I find it hard to believe her paintings would look as they do if she'd not been exposed to Picasso, Cezanne, and other contemporaries.
Aged twenty, Goncharova enrolled at the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture where she met the man who would become her lifelong partner, fellow artist Mikhail Larionov. Early 20c Moscow was a great place to see modern European art. Two industrialists, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, had built up and were displaying extensive collections that featured such hugely important figures as Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Gauguin. All the Pauls.
Goncharova was probably being a bit mischievous, a little disingenuous even, when she claimed "I have passed through all that the West can offer ... and all that my country has assimilated from the West. I now shake the dust from my feet and distance myself from the West". Certainly you can see the appropriation and influence of traditional Russian arts and crafts but I find it hard to believe her paintings would look as they do if she'd not been exposed to Picasso, Cezanne, and other contemporaries.
Andre Derain - Tree Trunks (Pine Grove) (1912-13)
Orchard in Autumn (1909)
Pablo Picasso - Queen Isabeau (1909)
That's not to do her down. More to say that nothing is created in a void. It seems likely that she was sick of the hegemonic nature of western European art and its supposed superiority and it also seems eminently plausible that she was simply offering up a bit of patriotism to Mother Russia.
Not that patriotism and art tend to sit well together. Goncharova's work is good enough for me to cut her some slack on this front, though. The mask like figures, we learn at the Tate, are related to stone figures made by the Scythians, a nomadic people from Siberia - but it was only painted four years after Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and shows a remarkable, and surely not coincidental, resemblance. The angles, the mask like features, the celebration of naivete. This is Picasso's primitivism but with a Russian accent.
Peasants Picking Apples (1911)
Self-Portrait with Yellow Lilies (1907-8)
Quite a jump too from the work Goncharova was making only a few years before. Her Self-Portrait with Yellow Lilies is a charming, almost impressionistic, piece that's certainly modern but you could be mistaken for thinking there was a twenty year long gap between that and the apple pickers.
Her's and Larianov's style would become known as neo-primitivism and, like Picasso and Gauguin, they sought different directions by taking their cues from outside the classical, Western, tradition. Ever watchful of changing opinions, the curators have been careful to note that the term 'primitive' can now be considered offensive which it obviously can. But I don't think the intention was ever to belittle more vernacular styles but instead show that they, too, are worthy of a deeper, and more elevated, appreciation.
Gardening (1908)
Round Dance (1910)
Goncharova, it seemed, revelled and saw beauty in everyday activitives like gardening, washing, and dancing. A circle of babushkas in brightly coloured clothes has formed in 1910's Round Dance. The format is not dissimilar to ones used by Matisse or Munch when depicting terpsichorean activity but the flavour is as Russian as a cucumber flavoured can of Sprite.
It seems likely that these works would have been celebrated at the time as good honest Russian painting, if a tad garish. Goncharova's nudes, less so. She was the first modern artist charged with the production of 'corrupting imagery' for both these nudes and some of her more pagan subject matter. It's suggested, and it's very easy to believe, that her gender (as much as the subject matter and the modern expression of it) was what really rankled with the establishment.
A Model (Against a Blue Background) (1909-10)
Water Nymph (1908)
The nudes seem to carry the weight of her pain. They're hardly erotic or prurient and the model against the blue background looks close to being in agony. There are elements of cubism in the painting but Goncharova is also trying to incorporate ideas put forward by the Italian futurists, a sense of movement - even in things that may normally be still.
Larionov and the nineteen year old writer and publisher Ilia Zdanevich coined the term 'everythingism' to describe this approach. Free borrowing of all forms and genres in a non-hierarchical way so as to create herself. In some ways it's a similar approach to the one David Bowie took towards music. High brow, low brow, middle brow. If it's good, it's in.
A work I particularly like is The City from around 1911. It's how I imagine New York City would look to LS Lowry if he were to visit - although I rather suspect it's a Russian city. It's got that sense of overcrowding you get in so much American art of the early twentieth century, buildings crushing up against each other so hard they almost block out the sky, pipes and chimneys pumping soot black smoke into the air, and the tiny little people dwarved by their surroundings but still proud of their role as players in a much bigger game.
Larionov and the nineteen year old writer and publisher Ilia Zdanevich coined the term 'everythingism' to describe this approach. Free borrowing of all forms and genres in a non-hierarchical way so as to create herself. In some ways it's a similar approach to the one David Bowie took towards music. High brow, low brow, middle brow. If it's good, it's in.
A work I particularly like is The City from around 1911. It's how I imagine New York City would look to LS Lowry if he were to visit - although I rather suspect it's a Russian city. It's got that sense of overcrowding you get in so much American art of the early twentieth century, buildings crushing up against each other so hard they almost block out the sky, pipes and chimneys pumping soot black smoke into the air, and the tiny little people dwarved by their surroundings but still proud of their role as players in a much bigger game.
The City (c.1911)
Winter:Gathering Firewood (1911)
Wrestlers (1908-9)
It's actually something of an outlier but then so much of 'everythingism' is. It'd have to be or the name would be meaingless. Winter:Gathering Firewood, Wrestlers, and Mountain Ash could all be by three different artists or, at the very least, from three very different periods of one artists's life but they're all painted by Goncharova and all between 1907 and 1911.
In September 1913 the Mikhailova Art Museum hosted a vast Goncharova retrospective containing more than 800 works. She was only 32 years old at the time so it must have been quite useful that she'd been both so productive and so multifaceted as an artist. Winter:Gathering Firewood is the most obviously Russian of all the paintings on show in this part of the exhibition (perhaps due to its subject matter), Wrestlers seems to mine a ground that combines east and west, and Mountain Ash could almost be the fruit of a Matisse or a Bonnard.
Mountain Ash:Panino near Vyazma (1907-8)
Peacock (in the Style of Russian Embroidery) (1911)
Natalia Goncharova didn't just paint canvases. She'd stroll around the Russian capital with her face painted too (see end of blog) and don extravagant outfits. According to Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, Moscow's bohemian set were quick to steal her fashion ideas and it was Goncharova who "made the shirt dress fashionable".
The fashion designer Nadezhda Lamanova, impressed by Goncharova's style and her ability, commissioned her to create designs which were included in the 1913 exhibition and about fifteen years later, when living in Paris, she collaborated with the couturier Marie Cuttoli from the fashion house Myrbor to create beautiful dresses like the one below, inspired by the Renaissance tradition of translating paintings into tapestries. Embroidery, needlework, and other examples of what would be considered women's work were all raised to the level of high art under Goncharova. She collaborated with such noteworthies as Sonia Delaunay, Fernand Leger, and even Picasso.
Design for 'Myriame' dress for House of Myrbor (1927-8)
Portrait of Mikhail Larionov and His Platoon Commander (1911)
Mystical Images of War:Angels and Aeroplanes (1914)
Mystical Images of War:The Doomed City (1914)
The curators have done a good job of illustrating just how many different styles Goncharova could turn her hand to by following the room dedicated to 'fashion' with one dedicated to 'war'. When the First World War broke out in August 1914 Larionov was called up for military service and sent to the front line and within weeks he was wounded, hospitalised, and demobilised as unfit for combat.
This must have been to the fore of Goncharova's mind when, later that year, she made her Mystical Images of War series that, despite their use of dynamic angles and images, showed war to be disastrous and catastrophic, a futile and criminal waste of human life. Angels wrestle biplanes, the Virgin Mary mourns fallen soldiers, and Death rides a pale horse into the Apocalypse. More Russians, around about 3,000,000 died in the conflict than did from any other nation.
Mystical Images of War were made as lithographic prints, rather than paintings, so they could be distributed more widely thus spreading Goncharova's rather confused message further. It seems to me she was anti-war but she also appears to be promoting patriotism which does have a nasty habit of leading people into daft ideas of exceptionalism and nationalism and from there you're on the road towards war unless you turn round.
These kind of ideas are built on faith rather than proof or evidence and, in that, I blame religion. Religion has never had to be scientifically or rigorously tested before it can make ludicrous claims so it was probably only a matter of time before politics caught up. With my avowed dislike of religion I felt Goncharova's religious paintings (and I like a lot of religious art, I've written about if often) were less interesting than her peasants, her wrestlers, her wars, or her washer women.
I'm not sure how much of a believer she was and it's possible, highly likely even, that she's more interested in the tradition of the icon, of Russian devotional painting than in Jesus or God or any of that old shit. At least she broke the male grip on icon painting by making these paintings. Icon painting was regarded, in Russia at the time, as an exclusively male practice and when her 1913 exhibition reached St Petersburg these paintings were removed by censors. It is hinted for no other reason than blatant sexism.
Mystical Images of War were made as lithographic prints, rather than paintings, so they could be distributed more widely thus spreading Goncharova's rather confused message further. It seems to me she was anti-war but she also appears to be promoting patriotism which does have a nasty habit of leading people into daft ideas of exceptionalism and nationalism and from there you're on the road towards war unless you turn round.
These kind of ideas are built on faith rather than proof or evidence and, in that, I blame religion. Religion has never had to be scientifically or rigorously tested before it can make ludicrous claims so it was probably only a matter of time before politics caught up. With my avowed dislike of religion I felt Goncharova's religious paintings (and I like a lot of religious art, I've written about if often) were less interesting than her peasants, her wrestlers, her wars, or her washer women.
I'm not sure how much of a believer she was and it's possible, highly likely even, that she's more interested in the tradition of the icon, of Russian devotional painting than in Jesus or God or any of that old shit. At least she broke the male grip on icon painting by making these paintings. Icon painting was regarded, in Russia at the time, as an exclusively male practice and when her 1913 exhibition reached St Petersburg these paintings were removed by censors. It is hinted for no other reason than blatant sexism.
Christ the Saviour:Archangel (in Green) (1910-11)
Christ the Saviour:Christ the Saviour (with Grapevines) (1910-11)
Christ the Saviour:Archangel (in White) (1910-11)
The Evangelists (1911)
Elder with Seven Stars (Apocalypse) (1910)
Despite my reservations about Goncharova's art I was rather taken by 1910's Elder with Seven Stars. It wasn't just her colour palette that was darker with this work but the subject matter too. Rather than Christianity, this looked like something out of Haiti or New Orleans, it's got something of a voodoo vibe about it. Religion will always be bollocks but let's at least make it fun bollocks.
You leave the 'art and religion' room and have to go back through the 'war' room (so war leads to religion and religion leads to war as ever) before you can pass through a narrow corridor given over to 'artist books and prints' before emptying out into a large spacious area devoted to 'modernism'. Which, to be honest, I thought the whole exhibition and, in fact, the whole museum was dedicated to. There's a clue in the name - Tate Modern!
As you walk through the corridor you can just about make out 'transrational' poems or 'zaum' playing in the background. Unless you can understand Russian backwards they won't make much sense to you! There are books of poetry by Alexander Pushkin that have been illustrated by Goncharova (Pushkin was married to her great aunt), and stories of the artist engaging with futurist cinema, creating boutiques for her masks and puppets, and painting her face but it's a mere preamble to the wonderful paintings you find once you come out the other end.
Loom+Woman (The Weaver) (1912-13)
The Forest (c.1913)
This was a style that become known, somewhat clunkily, as cubo-futurism and Goncharova saw it very much in keeping with her earlier work, asserting that "the principle of movement is the same in the machine and in the living being". Larionov published two manifestos to promote another new movement. Rayonism, or rayism, was intended to provide 'skimmed impressions' of landscapes, people, and nature.
Loom+Woman (The Weaver), to these eyes, seems the clearest example of the cubo-futurist style (it's full of energy, angles, and jarring colour schemes) while The Forest looks to be a rayonist work, suggesting as that movement did that nature is more than just nature, that there is a world beyond the visible that may hold secrets and answers. 1913's Void saw Goncharova go full on abstract but with a far more organic feel than other Russian abstract artists of the time.
Void (1913)
Peasants Gathering Grapes (1913-14)
Cyclist (1913)
Other works are less cubo-futurist and pretty much straight outta cubism (Linen could be by Braque) and the influence of Italian futurist artists like Severini and Boccioni is clear to see in 1913's masterful depiction of a cyclist rushing down a cobbled street. Cyclist captures movement in all its urgency while Linen focuses on a still life but supposes us, the viewer, to be the one moving. Viewing the scene, in true cubist style, from as many angles as possible.
Linen (1913)
Orange Seller (1916)
Spanish Woman with a Fan (1925-9)
It's clear that adapting, and sometimes copying, modernist European styles was only part of what Natalia Goncharova could do, or did. 1916's Orange Seller and 1925's Spanish Woman with a Fan come from a period when she'd fallen in love with the culture, and the dress, of Spain.
Goncharova and Larionov left Russia in June 1915 to tour Europe with the Ballets Russes. They visited Switzerland and Italy but it seems to be Spain that left the biggest effect. As Goncharova was becoming more entranced by Spain (which, perhaps oddly, reminded her of Russia) the world was becoming more interested in her and she was being given shows and awarded commissions, many of them in the United States.
Her first free-standing screen was created for her American pupil Sara Murphy's sister and was admired by Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, founder of the Arts Club of Chicago who commissioned Spring, below. It's a beautiful piece, to my amateur eyes there's something of Japan about it, and it led to Goncharova's art expanding. She continued making excellent paintings but now her creations for theatre and even fashion, of a sort, were starting to take equal precedence.
Goncharova and Larionov left Russia in June 1915 to tour Europe with the Ballets Russes. They visited Switzerland and Italy but it seems to be Spain that left the biggest effect. As Goncharova was becoming more entranced by Spain (which, perhaps oddly, reminded her of Russia) the world was becoming more interested in her and she was being given shows and awarded commissions, many of them in the United States.
Her first free-standing screen was created for her American pupil Sara Murphy's sister and was admired by Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, founder of the Arts Club of Chicago who commissioned Spring, below. It's a beautiful piece, to my amateur eyes there's something of Japan about it, and it led to Goncharova's art expanding. She continued making excellent paintings but now her creations for theatre and even fashion, of a sort, were starting to take equal precedence.
Spring (1927-8)
Bathers (1922)
The final room of the exhibition is devoted to 'theatre' and is full of sketches, costumes, and set designs for various ballets and operas that Goncharova worked on. Le Coq d'or and Sadko by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (which features a wedding attended by jellyfish, seaweed, and carol - Goncharova's silky rendering of these deep sea dudes is both charming and childlike) and Stravinsky's Firebird, Les Noces, and (the unrealised) Liturgy.
Costume design for Sadko:Seaweed (1915-16)
Costume design for Sadko:Coral (1915-16)
Ukrainian Village:Set design for The Fair at Sorochinsk (1930s)
Set design for the backcloth in the final scene of The Firebird (1954)
Theatre costume for the Golden Cockerel in Le Coq d'Or (1937)
Costume design for Litugy:Cherub (1915)
It's all great, Goncharova really could turn her hand to anything creative, but, for me, the paintings are what I take away with me and what I shall return to. The set design for The Firebird is as good as anything else she painted and, as so often with Goncharova, finds that sweet spot between the east and the west. It was painted during the Cold War and Goncharova, who died in Paris in 1962, never got to see the thawing of that impasse (which is a shame) or, indeed, the ramping up of tensions we're witnessing now (which isn't).
It seems to me that she was a woman both very much of her time and place yet also one who was able to look out into the future and into other cultures and adapt them both for her own ends and to provide pleasure and food for thought for others. Tate Modern did a pretty good job of getting that across.
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