NATALIA GONCHAROVA AT THE TATE MODERN
NATALIA
GONCHAROVA AT THE TATE MODERN
10th
of June 2019
Natalia Goncharova (1881
– 1962) was born in Tula province, Russia, 200 miles from Moscow in 1881. Her career encompassed the Russian avante
garde, she was involved in painting, lithography, design and later in her
career worked as a set and costume designer for Diaghalev’s Ballet Russe.
Her family were
impoverished aristocrats who made their living from textiles. Goncharova was familiar with the creation of
textiles in all stages of their production.
She was initially motivated by her interest in traditional Russian forms
of art and design, rejecting western models.
She collected traditional Russian icons, paintings and designs avidly
and later in her life campaigned for their preservation, just as Stalin’s
project of collectivisation sought to wipe them out. Her work Peasant Woman from Tula Province
(1910, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) illustrates these interests in
traditional peasant costumes, depicted with expressive lines and flattened
perspective.
At the age of 11
Goncharova’s family moved to Moscow and she enrolled at the School of Painting,
Sculpture and Architecture. She met her
future partner, Mikhail Larionov, while studying at the school.
While in Moscow,
Goncharova would see the works of the European avante garde, works found in the
collections of two industrialists, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin. They had built up an extensive collection of
works by Cezanne, Gaugin, Picasso and Derrain.
Works by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Andre Derrain (1880-1954) are
featured in the exhibition to underline her early influences, particularly
Picasso’s painting Queen Isabeau (1909, oil paint on canvas). The work depicts a Medieval Queen of France
but uses Picasso’s cubist technique to evoke the eponymous queen, the work thus
embraces iconography and modernity.
Collecting western art was regarded as very radical in Russia in the
late nineteenth century.
The Morozov/Shchukin
collections also included Russian icons, traditional wood and stone carvings,
and popular prints which shared features of modern art which particularly
interested her, such as minimal form, bold colour and flattened surfaces. Morozov began acquiring works by Goncharova
and Larionov for his Moscow collection at a very early stage in their
respective careers.
Goncharova’s early work
often depicts traditional scenes of life in the Russian countryside, for
instance, Peasants Picking Apples ((1911). The work is derived from traditional Russian
icon painting, the two figures are typical, unindividuated types but features
of the work are also derived from the cubism of Picasso and Leger. Presumably Goncharova would have seen this
work in the Morozov collection.
Her work simultaneously
bore the imprint of what is called neo-primitivism, recalling Picasso’s
fascination with African art or Gaugin’s infatuation with the south seas and
Tahiti. Today, “primitivism” is a
pejorative term since it encapsulates western perspectives on ‘savage cultures’
but also reflects on the part-time artist sometime found in the west who
created works outside the academic aesthetic.
Goncharova was keen to derive her themes and forms from so-called
“primitive” or traditional sources and wanted to gravitate away from the
realist painting celebrated by the art institutions. Her work resembles other so-called
“primitive” or expressionist art that was suddenly beginning to become popular
in the west, for instance in the work of the German group called The Bridge. Goncharova’s work exists in the tension
between traditional sources and western influences.
Goncharova staged a
retrospective of her paintings in Moscow in September 1912, on the eve of the
First World War. This was the most
ambitious and extensive retrospective by a member of the Russian avante
garde. It incorporated a variety of
approaches such as impressionism and traditional Russian icon painting. As a result of this diversity Larionov and
the writer and artist, Ilia Zdavevich, coined the term ‘everythingism’ to
summarise Goncharova’s range and themes.
The retrospective included her nine-part work Harvest (1911,
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).
Although two of the nine parts are now lost, the stylistic boldness and
thematic unity of Harvest is palpable, combining traditional rural
scenes with apocalyptic biblical themes from the Book of Revelation. In one composition, derived from the Book of
Revelation, angels hurl down stones upon the town. Mystical themes of apocalypse dominate this
work. Goncharova clearly realised that Russia was on the brink of tumultuous
and cataclysmic disorder. These biblical
preoccupations reappear in later works like the series of lithographs Mystical
Images of War (1914) which was Goncharova’s response to the war. In this work apocalyptic and literal images
conflict such as The Lion representing Britain, Russia’s ally. In her work The Evangelists (1911, oil
on canvas), a bold series of icons looking backwards to the tradition of icon
painting and forwards to modernity and the various modern movements in art that
were to grab her attention. These were
the first of Goncharova's works to be exhibited in London, even though they had
been removed from a gallery in Moscow the year before.
Goncharova’s work soon
began to attract the attention of the Tsarist regime with its army of censors,
police and petty functionaries. Female
nudes were removed from Goncharova’s exhibition by the police, because it was
thought that the genre was the preserve of men.
Subsequently works like The Evangelists were also removed by the
censors because the painting of icons was said to be the preserve of Russian
male artists. Goncharova was beginning
to erode the phallocratic monopoly consolidated by the Tsarist regime but she
was also beginning to realise the extent of repression and suppression in Russia.
A painting by Goncharova
from 1913, Cyclist, demonstrates Goncharova's interest in new European
art movements like Cubism, which emphasizes geometric form, and Italian
Futurism, an art movement that emphasized modernity, automisation, the machine
age, speed and dynamics. The painting
also incorporates text, counterpointing the work’s emphasis on speed and
dynamic movement with literal signposts to meaning and interpretation.
Goncharova also worked on
fashion design for the couturier Marie Cuttoli and her House of Myrbor. Cuttoli was inspired by the Renaissance
practice of translating paintings into tapestries. Cuttoli also worked with Russian émigré
artists Leon Bakst, Sonia Delauney and Marie Vasillieff and other international
artists such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger. Notable among these designs is Goncharova’s
1927-8 design for ‘Myriame’ dress completed in a variety of materials including
gouache, aluminium, bronze, graphite, crayon and paper on paper.
In 1914 Goncharova and
Larionov were invited to Paris by Sergei Diaghilev to work on designs for his
new opera ballet Le Coq d’Or (The Golden Cockerel) a work by the
composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) derived from a poem by
Pushkin. However, the outbreak of war
forced them to return to Moscow where Larionov was called up for military
service on the front line. He was
wounded almost immediately, demobilised as unfit for service. By the following year the pair had returned
to the west to tour with Diaghilev. They
were never to return to Russia.
By 1919 Goncharova had
settled in Paris. She was to work on
other opera and ballet projects such as the unrealised ballet Liturgy
with music by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and choreography by Leonode
Massine. Her pochoir and stencil
printing technique were said to resemble Byzantine mosaics, the choreography
mimicked the implicit two-dimensionality, but the project was never realised
and only became famous because of Goncharova’s designs and prints. Yet another work Sadko, (1916, music
by Rimsky-Korsakov, libretto and choreography by Adolf Bolm), was designed for
the Ballets Russe 1916 Spanish tour and inspired by a bylina, an
East Slavic poem passed on by oral tradition. Boris Anisfeld designed the set while
Goncharova worked on the costumes. The
plot features a musician called Sadko who woos a sea princess, their wedding is
attended by many sea creatures such as jellyfish, seaweed and coral.
Goncharova features in
one notable photo alongside fellow Russian émigré, Igor Stravinsky in the heady
years that followed October 1917. A
later photo depicts her in her Parisian maisonette, once a participator in
historical, epoch defining upheavals.
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