Natalia Goncharova was a Russian painter. She was one of the most important Russian artists of the early avant-garde.
Background
Natalia Goncharova was born on July 3, 1881 in Nagaevo, Tula District, Russian Federation to an elite Russian family. Her father, Sergei Goncharov, worked as an architect and was a descendent of Aleksandr Pushkin, the legendary poet and novelist credited as the patriarch of Russian literature and a revered symbol of national identity. Natalia was named after Pushkin's wife, in honor of her family's history. Goncharova's mother, Ekaterina Beliaeva came from a family that had been musically influential, and included a number of significant religious figures who were renowned musical patrons.
Education
From 1891 to 1896 Goncharova attended the gymnasium in Moscow. In 1898, having formed her decision to be an artist, Goncharova entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1901, where she studied sculpture under Pavel Troubetskoi, who worked in the style of Auguste Rodin. Three years later she left the school despite having won a silver medal and not having completed the ten-year period of study of that curriculum. This coincided with her adoption of painting as her preferred medium of expression.
Like many Russian artists of her time, the first few years of the 20th century was a period of exposure to and adoption of the styles that evolved in the capitals of Western Europe. At the time Natalia Goncharova was drawn to Impressionism and Divisionism, styles associated respectively with Monet and Seurat. Both styles emphasized not the recording of solid objects but the capturing of light (color) that was reflected back from the object to the eye. As a result, drawing tended to be loose and there was an emphasis on color, the strokes of paint. This led to a consciousness of the paint, the strokes, and the texture and pattern on the canvas. These two styles were important for freeing art from being purely representational. Artists were acquiring an awareness of art being an esthetic expression inspired by, but not dependent on, the appearances of the physical world.
In 1906 the great Russian ballet impressario Diaghilev arranged for a selection of paintings by Goncharova and Larionov to be included in the Russian section of the Salon d'Automne in Paris. Their inclusion in this recently established yearly showing of new radical art (the Fauves had their first group showing there that year) indicates that both artists were considered exemplars of trends in the avant-garde of their country. Over the next nine years, prior to her emigration from Russia, Goncharova participated in a number of important exhibitions, many of which she and Larionov organized. During this period she was also represented in the 1912 Post-Impressionist exhibition organized by Roger Fry at London's Grafton Gallery, in a one-person show (1913) of 761 works in Moscow (reduced to 249 pieces the following year when shown in St. Petersburg), and in a show at the Paul Guillaume Gallery of Paris with a catalogue by the noted critic Apollinaire.
The half decade which preceded the outbreak of the war was a period of rapid development in the visual arts in Russia. Goncharova was at the forefront of this. Amazingly, three distinct trends simultaneously appeared in her work: Rayonism, Neo-Primitivism, and Cubo-Futurism. The first of these is an original style conceived by Larionov and was extensively explored by Goncharova as well. Rayonism was among a number of completely abstract styles at the time in Western art. Like Impressionism, Rayonism concentrates on the light rays reflecting off objects. The space in a Rayonist painting is not measurable but is an atmosphere charged with the energy of an infinite number of light rays either directly from the sun or, more likely, rays bouncing back and forth from the physical objects around one. From this infinity of rays were selected particular ones—the title often revealing the objects from which they had been reflected. The guiding principle is purely esthetic in that the colors are chosen for their harmony or visual effect.
For over three decades artists had been fascinated by the idea of creating a non-objective art based on the orchestration of color. If music was completely abstract and yet infinitely expressive, could not there be an art using color (instead of sound) which was equally abstract and expressive. Goncharova was among the 11 artists who signed Larionov's Rayonist Manifesto when it was published in 1913, at which time she showed Rayonist works at the Donkey's Tail and Target exhibitions Cats: Rayonist Apprehension in Pink, Black and Yellow of 1913 (New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) approaches Braque and Picasso's Analytical Cubism in its overall animated and crystalline effect, though with rich color. Instead of the fragmented interlocked shapes found in Cubism, Cats is based on long, slashing colored strokes. Rayonism was a short-lived style, having reached its end by 1914. Franz Marc, associated with the Blaue Reiter of Munich (with whom Goncharova exhibited in 1912), admired her work and painted in a manner inspired by Rayonism in 1913, perhaps due to her influence.
Concurrent with Rayonism, Goncharova painted in a style now referred to as Neo-Primitivism. This was a phenomenon that had occurred earlier in France and elsewhere and seems related to changing political, social, and cultural aspirations. In conjunction with a democratization of political and social thought, there was often a tendency to try to discover the underlying character of national cultures by looking to traditional folk or peasant art for inspiration. Because of her family's clerical background and her having spent her youth living at a country estate, Goncharova would have been drawn to traditional religious and folk art as part of her formative experience and as the fine arts of the masses of her countrymen. This was a period when the intelligentsia came to look upon icons (Russian devotional images) as an important national cultural heritage. The great Romanov exhibition of icons (1913), many of which had been cleaned for the first time, excited many esthetically sensitive people.
Goncharova had painted religious themes for a number of years, having felt that the intensely religious sense and meaning of icons was one of the most important goals for an artist to capture in his or her work. The rich colors, dazzling decorative effects, and highly formalized and stylized character of icons had already inspired her work. Archangel (Paris, private collection) of about 1909 to 1911, the left panel of a triptych titled The Savior, in facial type and drapery pattern bears resemblance to typical aspects of icons. The emphasis on broad flat patterning, as in the angel's wings or the large rhythms of the fabric, suggests the influence of folk arts. This led Goncharova to employ a manner that was unrelated to academic practice. Besides emphasizing flat, decorative qualities, at times the paint was seemingly splashed on the surface or was applied rapidly for spontaneity of effect. The charm and naiveté that had earlier been acclaimed in the painting of Henri Rousseau appeared in Goncharova's work and were, very importantly to her, derived from native sources.
Between 1913 and 1914 Cubo-Futurism, aspects of the then-contemporary styles of Cubism and Futurism, appeared in Goncharova's painting. Cubism would have been known to Russian artists through publications, exhibitions, and collections such as those of Morozov and Shchukin. Cubism was ambivalent to color to the benefit of a new sense of structure—the fragmentation and interlocking of form and shape resulting in a uniformly animated composition in which the figure/ground relation is eliminated.
Italian Futurism also had a following in Russia in the years immediately preceding World War I. Futurism's glorification of dynamism as a constant in modern experience often led to the use of images such as large scale industry, trains, and race cars as emblems of the world rapidly transforming culturally and technologically. This is reflected in Goncharova's work Airplane over Train (Kazan Art Museum) of 1913, for example. Her Futurism, like that of the Italians, was alive with color. The sensations of motion were suggested by rhythmic repetitions of shapes or lines. The inclusion of painted words or word fragments, as if they were from signs and part of an environment through which one was passing, further aided this perception. Sound waves were similarly implied by rhythmic effects and occasionally by the use of musical notations.
In 1915 Goncharova and Larionov, who had been released from service in the Russian Army for medical reasons, moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, to continue their collaboration with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. This lasted until 1929 when Diaghilev died, after which Goncharova worked for other ballet companies. Her travels of 1916 and 1917 to San Sebastian (Spain), Paris, and Rome formatively brought her into contact with traditional Spanish culture and with a wide range of important contemporary styles. In 1919 Goncharova permanently settled in Paris. The year before the Galerie Sauvage (Paris) had held an exhibit of the theatrical work of Goncharova and Larionov. To Goncharova, painting and theatrical work were closely related, both being forms of esthetic expression. Her theatrical sketches and flats have frequently been exhibited and collected. The vision or interpretation of the ballets on which Goncharova and Larionov worked resulted in a close involvement of the visual with the performing arts. Their costumes and settings often determined the tone of the performance.
By the 1950s growing interest in the flowering of radical Russian art prior to the revolution established Goncharova as one of the pioneers of modern art. Her paintings were acquired by important museums, such as the Tate Gallery, London, and there were a number of exhibitions, that of the Galerie de l'Institut (Paris, 1956) having included new Rayonist paintings and drawings. Despite almost crippling arthritis, Goncharova continued to be productive during the last decade of her life. Her final works moved away from the interpretive and the decorative and sought to explore the infinite, as if at the end of her career Goncharova was returning to her earlier interest in expression through abstraction.
Cats (Rayonist perception in rose, black and yellow)
1913
Spanish Dancers
1918
Elder with seven stars
1910
Icon painting motifs
1912
Round dance
1910
Airplane over train
1913
Landscape at Ladyzhino
1908
Mask
1915
Pillars of salt
1908
Sabbath
1912
Peasants dancing
1911
Dogwood Blossoms
Forest (Red-green)
1914
Composition
1914
Still life with shoe and mirror
1906
Still Life
Project poster for the ballet by Manuel de Falla, El amor brujo
1935
Dynamo machine
1913
Peasant Women
1910
Harvest
1911
Virgin and child
1911
Still Life with a Tige
1915
Linen
1908
Espagnole
1914
The little station
1911
Sheep shearing
1907
Planting potatoes
1909
Washerwomen
1911
Liturgy, The Seraph's costume
1914
Russian woman's costume from Le coq d'or
1914
Pink Light
The ice cutters
1911
Green forest
1911
The rowers
1911
Boy with rooster
1910
Portrait of a woman (Tatiana Ryabushinskaya)
Views
Quotations:
"To apprehend the world about us in all its brilliance and diversity, and to bear in mind both its inner and outer content."
Membership
Natalia Goncharova was a founding member of The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), one of two groups fundamental to the influential art movement Expressionism.
Personality
Natalia Goncharova had a secretive and restrained character.
Connections
In 1955 Natalia Goncharova married Mikhail Larionov. They had no children.