Lord of Light: Mikhail Larionov’s work comes home.

A leading figure in Russia’s avant-garde in collection.

Way back when I lived with my parents, the headboard of my bed had a special postcard blu-tacked on it. This came from Paris, a memento of a visit to the National Museum of Modern Art in the Pompidou Centre in the Beauborg area.

I had chosen it as much for its decorative effect as for its – even then – challenging modernism. A a man faces us, head neck and chest in view but all of this is overlaid with a rich network of red, purple and green criss-crosses. The Portrait of Vladimir Tatlin immortalises a man whose contributions to art came to be a signature of the early Soviet years. Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov (1881 – 1941) completed this Rayonist portrait in 1913.

Moscow’s own avant-garde scene.

The early Twentieth Century became a time when the visual arts exploded like a sky-rocket. European painters and sculptors found themselves exhilarated by the new world being opened up by scientific advances and sought to answer to this. In France, Picasso and Braque developed Cubism, a fresh way to perceive objects, in Italy Futurism celebrated the machine age and German  Expressionism was concerned with the inner life. All of these trends engaged artists in Russia. Until Larionov’s Rayonism, however, they did not have their own form of non-representational art.

For 23 years the New Tretyakov Gallery, opposite Gorky Park on Krymsky Val, has been the Go To place for Moscow’s modern art. From September of last year and for a five month span, they mounted an exhibition of 500 of Larionov’s works, taking up three halls, including material from the 1920s and 1930s not yet put on view.

As I took the metro to Park Kultury and crossed the bridge over the River Moskva the one question in my mind was would I get to see the Portrait of Vladimir Tatlin once again?

Seeker.

Larionov hailed from Tiraspol (now the capital of Transnistria).Speaking of this Southern area his partner and fellow painter Natalia Goncharova said `You can find Tahiti in Russia too`. Indeed, the vivid colours of his early environment imbued his art. He studied in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He would remain in the capital until being conscripted in to the war.

The military discharged hin though and with Goncharova he fled to France. There he assumed a new role as a stage designer and choreographer for the Ballet Russ maestro Serge Diaghilev.. He would stay in France for the next fifty years, becoming a French citizen.

A Farewell to Concrete forms.

Lariomov published the Rayonist Manifesto when he was 32.

This acknowledged Futurism but was also indebted to the polychromatic style of Apollinaire’s Orphism current at that time. He, however adopted an anti-Western pose (`Long live the beautiful East!`)

At that time Curie’s discovery of radiation lead to a new way of viewing the world and there was talk of a `fourth dimension`. In accordance with this Rayonism called for `spatial forms arising from the intersection of the reflected rays of various objects`.

Rayonism was never as influential as it might have been owing to the isolation of Moscow and then the Great War. Nevertheless Rayonism’s overriding of pictorial space and stress on coloured lighting much influenced later artists such as abstracts of Kasmir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin a decade later.

Wide range.

Not that it was all Rayonism.The first hall of the exhibition featured Larionov’s `neo-primitivist` pieces (inspired by a trip to Paris he made in 1906) these constituted depictions of provincial life and of soldiers (from his spell in the army) done in a `naive` style. In 1912 he evoked the four seasons by referencing pagan practices and deities. `The Blue Pig` (1909/10) shows him already chaffing aginst objective reality, however.

Then we see some `objectless compositions` – whitewash on cardboard, which `our-four-year-old-could-do-better-than` and, of course, there was plenty of sumptuous ballet memorabilia too.

Colour shot.

The notice board opening the exhibition described Larionov as `a brilliant and always surprising painter`. Indeed he was `experimental` in the best sense. Russian art was interacting with, and sometimes pushing against, the stylistic revolutions occurring in Europe and Larionov characterised all of that.

I would have liked more of the crystalline elegance of the Rayonist period, as well as more English language notice boards to explain them to me. I did get to see Portrait of Vladimir Tatlin again but the bookshop was not selling any postcards of this masterpiece. I left, though, with a shot of colour which just might take me through another month of the winter.

 

WikiArt page on Larionov.

Good write up on the New Tretyakov Gallery in `Kidding Herself` blog.