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Uploaded 30/05/02
‘Skythian baba’s: A painting counter-revolution
Natalia Goncharova: The Russian Years. Russian Museum,
Benois Wing, St. Petersburg. From 25 April to 15 July, 2002.
Natalia Goncharova, one of the famous originators
of Russian avant-garde, is now the subject of a large, academically
developed personal exhibition. Despite the fact that Goncharova
is an important pioneering figure in the history of Russian avant-garde
as described by Camilla Grey in her book The Great Experiment
in Russian Art, the interest in her creativity has faded away.
The explorative pathos of western researchers was warmed by early
avant-garde ideas of the dematerialisation of art and the ‘death’
of painting, which became quite real in the 1970s. Among other highlighted
features there was Malevich and constructivism, – ‘post-Black
Square art’ – Goncharova, with her brutal painting, was
not included in ‘The Great Utopia’ show (1992–93).
The increased interest about this period began with an exhibition
called ‘Goncharova and Larionov’ in the Pompidou Centre
in 1995. Last year’s exhibition, ‘The Amazons of Russian
Avant-garde’, where Goncharova’s paintings were an important
feature – marked the final triumph of pictorial revisionism
and the return of total visuality.
At the same time, despite Goncharova’s refugee status, her
heritage was carefully studied in Russia by scholars, most of which
never accepted the ideas of high modernism. Maybe that is the reason
why Goncharova and Larionovs’ archives were transferred in
1989 to the Tretyakov gallery by their Parisian inheritors. Besides
that, due to the long-term lack of interest in Goncharova’s
work on the part of foreign museums and collectors, her name was
almost never involved in the scandals over fake copies that are
quite common in the world of Russian avant-garde. In addition, unlike
her male companions in art, who were rather light-headed, Goncharova
cared much about the result of her work.
Goncharova’s exhibition in the Russian Museum was expected
to take place in 1981, as a commemoration of Goncharova’s centenary.
Numerous items indicated in the catalogue were prepared by Evgeniy
Kovtun, a great connoisseur and researcher of Russian avant-garde,
who died in 1995. Moreover, Goncharova’s exhibition is the
first one to be prepared and organised by only Russian scholars
alone. The other good news is that foreign museums and collectors
are no longer scared of Russia’s unsettled state.
As a result, the exhibition turned out to be really enormous –
more than 250 items were presented.
The most important and interesting problem for a researcher is
that it is often almost impossible to tell Goncharova’s technique
from that of Larionov’s. They worked and lived together for
decades, and used the same brushes and paints. This romantic story
began in the Moscow College for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
where they studied together. At first, Goncharova became a follower
of the young and active rebel Mikhail Larionov. As years passed,
they came together and separated again and again – both as
artists and as a married couple. From time to time one of them was
ahead, providing ideas for the one who remained behind.
The futuristic era of ‘storm and charge’ marked the irrepressible
running forward, and even the indomitable Malevich occasionally
found himself among Goncharova’s followers. Larionov, the son
of a military medical attendant from provincial Tiraspol, was descended
from inferior classes along with many other Russian avant-garde
artists. The plebeian pathos of destruction of higher culture coming
from ill-bred and badly educated but very angry young people, was
counterpoised and structured by the women of Russian avant-garde,
who, in their turn, originated from higher, more educated classes.
Natalia Goncharova, a descendant of Alexander Pushkin’s wife,
originated from impoverished aristocratic circles, which thoroughly
preserved and cultivated cultural traditions, meaning that she could
ride a horse while wearing a dress.
Goncharova, who had never accepted ‘the great denial of art’,
was nevertheless a very determined woman. ‘First: the manliness
– of a Mother Superior – a young Mother Superior’,
as Russian poet Marina Tzvetaeva writes of her friend-artist. Without
any feminist hysteria Goncharova made a reality of ‘free family’
ideas; she only registered her marriage with Larionov in the 1950s,
she wore men’s clothes and once during an action which was
filmed she stripped her breast. This was an unprecedented accident
not only in patriarchal Russia. She was brought to trial for pornography
several times, and her interest in icons and religious paintings
resulted in the official banning of her paintings on religious subjects.
Intensive social articulation and anti-bourgeois rhetoric in combination
with skilful mass media manipulation led to a paradoxical result
– the terrorist artist had suddenly become a heroine of yellow
media, which discussed her cries like ‘Stupid bourgeois!’
or ‘A herd of sheep!’. Since that time the manipulation
of public opinion became an important technology of modernism. Although,
the actions of Dadaists and surrealists seemed more easy-tempered
than the rowdy public appearances of Russian futurists. Even Tommaso
Marinneti, who visited Russia in 1914 to promote machine art, was
horrified by them. The ritual catcalling to which the leader of
Italian futurists was subjected was based on a new anti-western
programme formulated by Russian avant-garde artists, who by that
time had already assimilated every existing style and trend such
as cubism, futurism and so on. In 1910 Goncharova said, ‘I
have tried everything the West could give. Now I shake the dust
off my shoes and move away from the West. I make my way towards
the East, the source of all arts’. But these anti-modernist
and anti-western words said by a European intellectual secretly
refer to the critique of European culture practised by Gaugin, Picasso
and German expressionists.
If one tries to interpret neoprimitivism in the manner of Eduard
Said, as a specific form of colonialism, it seems obvious that German
and French artists had to carry out their predatory expeditions
in faraway lands (such as Africa and Tahiti). Russians, according
to local imperial tradition, developed domestic artistic spaces.
As an alternative to the fading West, Goncharova drew her cubism
from Scythian stone female images (‘baba’s’) which
are portraits of mythological amazons of the southern Russian steppes.
Although, these idols painted by Goncharova have, instead of an
expression of motionless eternity on their faces – which is
more proper for them – a kind of weird, bully grin.
The stormy decade of colonisation of time and space ended with
a strange picture ‘The emptiness’ (1910). Goncharova reached
an absolutely new and individual level of non-figurativeness that
already had no psychological motivations à la futurism
or cubism (direction of X-rays or a moving observer’s point
of view). One can only suppose that this provocative and shapeless
piece among coloured blobs turned out to be that final impact which
gave birth to the icon of the twentieth century – the ‘Black
Square’. Malevich had only to cut off the last signs of colour
and light perspective so creating a three-dimensional space, which
Goncharova had never dared to abandon, and to close the door to
the apprehensible Carthesian reality.
For Malevich it was only the beginning, but Goncharova’s tireless
moving forward had abruptly ended. The famous entrepreneur Sergey
Dyagilev found out that the Parisian public was no longer interested
in the sophisticated aestheticism of his early seasons, and began
to export Russian exotics in 1914. The collaboration of passeists
and futurists in the same export team turned out to be quite effective
– the brilliant ballet ‘The Golden Cock’ decorated
by Goncharova became the classic masterpiece of scenography. But
the successful export of spicy and brutal eastern art to the West
turned out to be destructive for the artist. In a short time some
non-artistic circles in Russia succeeded in shocking the western
bourgeois, so mighty that the latter had forever lost any wish to
travel to the East forever. So, in the long run everything ended
quite grievously – the Russian Europeans and the creators of
the future, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, died in absolute
poverty and obscurity in the very Paris they had once tried to subvert.
Andrey Kovalev
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