Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde - Review

Princeton: Princeton University Pres 1993 254 pp; 28 color ills., 216 b/w $8000; $2995 paper

upon a bitterly cold morning in Moscow in January 1927 Walter Benjamin visited the former residence of Sergei Shchukin, a textile merchant who had, before World War I, amassed an extraordinary collection of present French painting. Still substantially intact at the time of Benjamin's visit, Shchukin's collection had serv as a training earth for all would-be Russian avant-gardists, the pair before and after the October Revolution. "As single climbs the stairs, frozen end and through," Benjamin wrote in his Moscow Diary, "one glimpses at the top of the stairwell the famous Matisse murals, naked figures rhythmically arranged against a background of concentrated r as warm and as luminous as that of Russian icons."(1) In suggesting a certain coloristic union of the modern French tableau and the traditional Russian icon, Benjamin draws our attention to single of the fundamental problems in the close attention of Russian modernism, and individual to which Anthony Parton addresses himself in his monograph devot to Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov (1881-1964) namely, the complexity of the Russian avant-garde's due to European modernism on the single hand and to indigenous Russian and Eastern traditions upon the other.(2)

First published in 1993 and lately reissued in paper, Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde at hands a convincing new chronology for the stylistic exhibition of one of the lock opener members of the first generation of the Russian avant-garde and documents the great range of "sources" that combustiblesed his work. Despite being riven by means of factionalism, the Russian avant-garde - a set free conglomeration of artists active in the early decades of the 20th hundred - was united in its resistance to the ambitions and conventions of illusionistic representation. It throw overboarded both the illusionism sanctified by dint of academic tradition, in which the mimetic throw was tempered by the doctrine of imitation, as well as the insurgent realism that had arisen in the 1860 within the Russian academy in affirm against its doctrines. Parton's volume discusses in detail Mikhail Larionov's invention of what we could call strategies of avant-garde resistance - in the form of stylistic innovation (his "pioneering" of Neoprimitivism and Rayism), the transgression of the traditional boundaries of media and professionalism (his involvement in not sole painting but also sculpture, theater design, work illustration, performance, body painting, and manifesto writing), and the reconfiguration of the character of the artist (his entrepreneurialism in self-marketing and the organization of exhibitions of not solitary contemporary European and Russian art on the other hand also icons, lubki [popular prints], and the work of "naive" painters).

Having committed himself to the painstaking business of putting the Larionov house in order - as far as questions of dating and influence are touched - Parton has carried on the outside primary research in the Larionov Collection (a portion of the artist's hold library and archive purchased by dint of the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1961) in the early periodical and newspaper literature, and in several private archives in Paris and London. Surprisingly, however, given the rush to the (now former) Soviet archives that has characterized the field of Russian modernism at any time since the publication of Christina Lodder's landmark Russian Constructivism in 1983 Parton strike one as beings not to have had the archives of the former Soviet Union upon his research itinerary. Nor has he attempted a definition of the replete corpus of Larionov's work, despite the fact that in the course of his research he appears to have gathered a great deal of of the material with which to do thus (the book is based upon the author's dissertation submitted to the University of Newcastle on Tyne in 1985). No doubt there were profitable reasons for deferring the production of a catalogue raisonne, not the least of which may have been the daunting task of dealing with what is rumored to be a veritable cottage industry in Larionov fakes. In any case, Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde greatly augments Waldemar George's 1966 monograph, and it is the first research of the artist to appear in English.(3)

Chapters 1 from one side 4 sketch Larionov's development between 1898 and 1914 with more [i]or[/i] less reference, along the way, to his main interlocutor and lifelong companion, the artist Natalya Goncharova. We begin with the artist's emerging see the verb on the Moscow scene as an enthusiastic imitator of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (from 1903 to 1906) sufficiently qualified to satisfy the generally Francophilic tastes of the local bourgeois. In 1907 below the umbrella of his association with the magazine Zolotoe Runt (Golden Fleece) which was be in possession ofed by the wealthy banker-cure-amateur Nikolai Riabushinskii, Larionov takes up the moneyed tonalities of Symbolist introspection. Between 1908 and 1910 his Symbolism gives way to an attempt to draw near to terms with the extravagant "primitivism" of the pair color and form then dominating exhibitions of contemporary art in the European center of Paris and Munich. In the fall of 1910 Larionov is carted not upon to do nine months or in the way that of military service, but he still finds time to become single of the founders of a of recent origin exhibiting group, Bubnovyi valet (Jack of Diamonds), committed to what the critic Ivan Aksenov described as a simplification and coarsening of form, a condensation of color, and a certain precision of line. Late in 1911 Larionov formalizes his developing antagonism to European influence by the agency of splitting from Bubnovyi valet in order to establish a rival clump Oslinyi khvost (Donkey's Tail), which dedicated itself to ridding Russian art of the taste of Paris, as it were, in favor of indigenous forms of art making.(4) The years 1912 end 1914 represent what we could call the artist's "heroic" period of innovation, in which he pioneers sum of two units different styles simultaneously - Neoprimitivism and Rayism - before being whisked not on to Paris via Switzerland by dint of Sergey Diaghilev in 1915, not ever to return to Russia.