Experiment/3KcrrepHMeHT, 1 (1995), 169-81.

JOHN E. BOWLT

MIKHAIL LARIONOV AND THE PRIMITIVE

At his "Target" exhibition in 1913 Mikhail Larionov (Fig. 55) declared: "We aspire towards the East and direct our attention towards national art. We protest against the servile subordination to the West which has vulgarized our own forms and those of the East, has reduced everything to a uniform level, and has delivered them back to us."' Primitivism or, rather, Neo-Primitivism, was a flexible and polymor• phous concept for the artists of the Russian avant-garde. Artists such as Pavel Filonov, Natalia Goncharova, Larionov, and Kazimir Malevich en• deavored, on the one hand, to synthesize the culture of the Orient and, on the other, to continue the reassessment of Russian folklore undertaken by the art colonies of Abramtsevo and Talashkino in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like the Symbolists and the Romantics be• fore them, these artists sought an innocence and spontaneity in the alter• native tradition, which Alexander Shevchenko, author of the 1913 Neo• Primitivist manifesto, emphasized in his observations on the East and the contemporary Russian search for national roots: "Generally speaking, the word primitive is applied not only to the simplification and unskilfulness of the ancients, but also to peasant art-for which we have a specific name, the lubok. The word primitive points directly to its Eastern deriva• tion, because today we understand by it a whole pleiad of Eastern arts• Japanese art, Chinese, Korean, Indo-Persian, and so on."2 Not surprisingly, the first exhibition dedicated to icons and lubki that Nikolai Vinogradov organized in Moscow also in 1913 (Fig. 56), con• tained numerous pieces from Larionov's collection, including Persian, Chinese, and Japanese 'as well as Russian prints. The lubok was a cheap, handcolored print, often carrying ecclesiastical, mythological, and allegorical subjects (Fig. 57). Many of the Russian artists of the early twentieth century, especially David Burliuk, Vasilii Kandinsky, Larionov, and Shevchenko, were interested in the lubok as an art form, collected

1. M. larionov: from untitled introduction to the catalog of the 'Target'' exhibition, Moscow, 1913. The text is reprinted in G. P~spelov, Bubnovyi valet (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1990), pp. 248-49. 2. A. Shevchenko. Neo-primitivizm. Ego teoriia. Ego vozmozhnosti. Ego dostizheniia (Moscow: n.p., 1913), p. 7. 170 Experimentf3Kcnepm.teHr examples, and often reinterpreted its principles or themes in their own paintings and designs (Figs. 58, 59). The artists of the Russian avant-garde developed several perceptions and interpretations of the primitive, although they were all united in their common interest' in the technical rediscovery of the primitive or, rather, archaic arts that was taking place in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the wake of the general European interest in explo• ration and ethnography. True, these investigation~ emphasized the indige• nous traditions of the numerous et~l"!~~ group~ of the Russian Empire and also the remote past of the EUri}Si~r\ nomad$. {rj:l!Jl the Scythians to the Unni.l This anthropological, .if often amateur, appreciation laid a strong foundation for the investigations. Qf tne avant-gard~ artists, which were in• tended to reveal not o.nly n~w ou~rd forms and· esthetic combinations, but also th~ "primitive' spirit" of the, ·peoples of. the East, of the Russian peasants, even of .chilqrel') and sham~ns.. Inherent in their pursuit of the primitive 'Alas the desire, ~0 find a pure and un.iversallanguage-a zaum or transrational gestu.~e that cqr;t be;associated with the speaking in tongues of the yurodivyi or holy fool or in th~ e~sta.sj~s of the shamans. Filonov, Goncharova, Larionov,. and yelimir Iqll~~nikpv used their painting and poetry to express this vision, ~nd, li.ke the fools and the shamans, .they summoned the truth 'via their ·traQ_sgr~ssive behaviour, their cryptic and in• comprehensible codes, and their own symbols and rituals of initiation. The artists of the Russian avant-garde studied and collected many speci• mens of primitive art, both national and non-Slavic, and, as Larionov indi• cates· at the end of his Preface, they gave particular attention to the Russian icon. Clearly, .this ar;~cient craft assumed a fundamental impor• tance for the new generation, preci~ely beca4~~ the first years of the new century coincided with; an unprec~~~,nted :Wave of collecting, recording, and restoring of Mediaeval Russiari ic;ors. By ca. 191 0 Nikandor Likha• chev," Ilia Ostroukhov, and Stepan ~)flpushinsky possessed remarkable collections of icons which. were re~(l~!Y accessible to aspiring artists and scholars; young critics and historians such as Igor Grabar and Nikolai Punin 'began to publish new and positive appraisals, prompting the gen• eral public to take note of their own domestic traditions; finally, the pub• lic was able to examine icons in a museological context, thanks to a se• ries of important exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Moscow such as the "Exhibition of Antiquities" in 1901 and the "Exhibition of Ancient Russian

3. For further discussion of Scythian and Siberian cultures, see V. Basilov, ed., Nomads of Eurasia. Catalog of exhibition at the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles, 1989; S. Ivanov. Materia/y po izobrazitelnomy iskusstvu narodov Sibiri XIX-nachalo XX veka (Moscow• leningrad: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1954).