BITTER HARVEST BITTER RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN AVANT-GARDE 1890-1934 AND UKRAINIAN AVANT-GARDE RUSSIAN BITTER HARVEST: RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN AVANT-GARDE 1900-1934 JAMES BUTTERWICK 2 3 Front cover: Alexander Bogomazov Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter, Yaroslava (detail), 1928 Inside cover: Alexander Archipenko Still Life (detail), c. 1918 RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN AVANT-GARDE 1890-1934 First published in 2017 by James Butterwick WWW.JAMESBUTTERWICK.COM All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and the publishers. All images in this catalogue are protected by copyright and should not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Details of the copyright holder to be obtained from James Butterwick. © 2017 James Butterwick Director: Natasha Butterwick Editorial Consultant: Simon Hewitt Stand: Isidora Kuzmanovic 34 Ravenscourt Road, London W6 OUG Catalogue: Katya Belyaeva Tel +44 (0)20 8748 7320 Email [email protected] Design and production by Footprint Innovations Ltd www.jamesbutterwick.com 4 SOME SAW NEW YORK James Butterwick On 24 February 1917, a little over one hundred years ago, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes completed their second and final tour of the United States. The first, from January to April 1916, took in 17 cities and began at the long-defunct Century Theater and ended at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Two of the leading lights of the Russian Avant-Garde, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, had been working for the Ballets Russes since 1915, when Larionov had made the colorful costume design or a Young Jester in the ballet Soleil du Nuit, featured in this catalogue. The first solo show devoted to Wassily Kandinsky took place in New York, at Société Anonyme (of which he was later Vice-President) on East 47th Street, in 1923 – the year Kiev-born Alexander Archipenko sailed to New York to participate in an exhibition of Russian Paintings & Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum. Archipenko stayed for the rest of his life, becoming an American citizen. Boris Grigoriev, meanwhile, worked in the USA in the late 1920s. In the days of Tsarism, before World War I, France and Germany had been magnets to Russian artists. Under Soviet Rule trips abroad could no longer be freely made, many artists preferred a tough life in the USSR to permanent exile. Although Boris Kustodiev and Alexander Bogomazov died before Socialist Realism became official state dogma, the later careers of Vasily Ermilov and Anatoly Petritsky in Ukraine, and Aristarkh Lentulov and Maria Sinyakova in Moscow, would be stymied by Stalinism. New York has again been in the vanguard of international appreciation for what the Metropolitan Museum – in its Avant-Garde exhibition that closed March 12 – called the Revolutionary Impulse emerging from Russia and Ukraine. For our first exhibition in New York we are delighted to show works representing artists from sweeter times – when their creative powers were at their zenith. Natalia Goncharova L’Arbre Rose – Printemps, 1912 (detail) 2 3 PUSHING BACK THE BOUNDARIES OF THE AVANT-GARDE By Aleksandra Shatskikh Each of the works assembled by James Butterwick is an individual masterpiece in its own right. Together they embody the Modernist breakthrough that brought Russian Art to global attention. One of the precursors of this breakthrough was Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) – an unrivalled draughtsman and colourist, whose images were constructed with geometric colour and tonal planes in a style close to the Cubist understanding of form. Legend has it that Picasso was enthralled by Vrubel’s works when he saw them at the exhibition of Russian Art organized by Sergei Diaghilev in Paris in 1906. Vrubel’s captivating drawing Vova Mamontov Reading (c.1890) helps us understand why. It depicts Vsevolod Mamontov (1870-1951), the son of the pioneering Russian art collector Savva Mamontov, and uses ‘planes’ to build up an image in the style of Cézanne that presaged the Cubist revolution. Savva Mamontov selflessly championed his artistic contemporaries, helping establish and develop an entire movement in Russian Art. His Abramtsevo Mikhail Vrubel estate featured studios, buildings and household items designed by artists in a ‘Neo-Russian’ style, inspired by centuries-old national tradition, that would affect monumental art, paintings, drawings and illustrations. The wish to exploit past glories was shared by the refined artists from the Mir Isskustv (‘World of Art’) movement – and by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), even after he left Russia for Munich in 1896. His Promenade Gracieuse (1904), with its horizontal emphasis and female figures dressed in 19th century fashion, looks like a design for a decorative panel in some sophisticated interior, and synthesizes the influences of the Vienna Secession and Art Nouveau as well as Mir Isskustv. The work’s harmony derives from its blend of poetic emotion and lyrical experience. Concern for the soul and mind underpinned Kandinsky’s paintings, drawings and writings. ‘Conveying the spiritual in art’ was, he explained, the main idea behind his approach. Wassily Kandinsky Aristarkh Lentulov Study for a panel, By the Sea, 1915 (detail) 4 5 The talented Alexander Volkov (1886-1957) inherited Vrubel’s Romantic approach in beautiful Khokhloma patterns. His Costume Design for the Dance of the to Orientalism. Volkov’s small watercolour Eastern Fantasy (1918) also has the Buffoons shows a character holding rounded emblems of the grinning feel of a design for a decorative panel. It features languid, bare-breasted femmes Sun, shaped like the pancakes baked during the Maslenitsa Spring Festival fatales in a magical mosaic garden resembling a psychedelic, geometric-patterned inherited from pagan times. Larionov elevated costume-design to the realm carpet. Volkov had close links with Central Asia and spent nearly all his life in of art. Tashkent, pursuing his own, highly original approach to Russian Orientalism. Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) was the first of the female artists collectively The influence of Vrubel’s cut-out forms shines through in By the Sea (1915) by known as the ‘Amazons of the Avant-Garde’. Larionov was influenced by her Aristarkh Lentulov (1882-1943), a design for a large mural painted at the height powerfully organic pictorial talent. The clever structure of her L’Arbre Rose – of his powers. Lentulov was a pillar of the innovative Jack of Diamonds group Printemps (1912) brings to mind photography and the nascent art of cinema. The that showcased the daring, riotously colourful works of young artists; his two-layered composition combines middle- and long-range perspectives, with wealthy brother-in-law sponsored their first exhibition in 1910, when Lentulov’s the foreground dominated by the sturdy trunk of some fairy-tale tree, confined paintings attracted the most vociferous complaints from traditionalist critics. within its own frame, superimposed on a blossoming spring garden. The subtle Alexander Volkov The reasons for their outrage are not hard to find in By the Sea, whose quilted colour scheme, with its gentle contrasts and combinations, displays the same Natalia Goncharova colours exploit some of Lentulov’s favourite themes. Although an everyday decorative genius as Goncharova’s designs for backcloths and ornament in scene, this is a complex composition that encompasses a variety of subjects and Diaghilev’s ballets, and in her splendid panel Spanish Women from the 1920s. is imbued with erotic overtones: one lady flashes a breast, another raises her skirt to reveal her lacey knickerbockers. Dogs and horses patrol the shore as a red- Boris Grigoriev (1886-1939) became a celebrity in his twenties when, along with brick house, top right, extends the landscape’s foreshortened perspective. his friends, Alexander Yakovlev and Vasily Shukhaev, he was recognized as a saviour of Academic tradition due to his unparallelled skill as a draughtsman. Lentulov channels the viewer’s attention with almost wanton artistry, Grigoriev also knew many of the Futurists, led by Khlebnikov, Kamensky and transforming the riders into carpet ornaments as the foreground dogs become Burliuk, and collaborated with Mayakovsky on the satirical magazine Satirikon. cardboard cut-outs casting no shadow – unlike their mistresses who lounge in But the young Grigoriev differed from his radical friends in that he remained the sunshine with shadows defiantly painted in lurid yellow, in negative contrast a traditionalist and formal esthete, despite paying tribute to their rebellious to the habitual blue found in Realist and Impressionist works. On top of this riot pathos. In 1918, shortly before emigrating from what was then Petrograd, of gaudily painted clothes, figures and landscape, Lentulov introduces gold and Grigoriev published Intimité, illustrated with grotesque scenes of prostitutes, silver patterns to the ladies’ rugs. By the Sea’s eye-battering colours bring to mind circus performers and cabaret artistes. His Woman Peering Behind a Screen (1920), Moscow’s oriental cityscape, with its gaudy churches and exotic ornament. from the cycle Russische Erotik, mercilessly stresses the vulgar sexuality of the Aristarkh Lentulov sturdy, half-naked lady in her extravagant hat. This rigid, sardonic image of a Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) was the leader of artistic innovation in early 20th love goddess is created with