Natalia Goncharova initially wished to be a sculptor
Natalia Goncharova (also Natalja Sergejewna Gontscharowa) was born on 16 June 1881 in the Tula Governorate of Imperial Russia, sharing a birth year with artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and hew fellow countryman and later lover Michail Larionov (1881-1964). She was the daughter of an architect and the great-granddaughter of the Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) and grew up in a cultured environment which encouraged a politically liberal attitude. Natalia Goncharova followed her father and attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where she met Michail Larionov, her life-long partner. On his advice, she gave up sculpture and turned to painting. She exhibited her pictures in the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1906, joined Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, and took part in the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, initiated by Herwarth Walden, in Berlin in 1913.
Experiments lead to Cubo-Futurism and Rayonism
Natalia Goncharova and Michail Larionov founded the avant-garde artist’s group ‘Jack of Diamonds’ which exerted a decisive influence over the Russian art scene for two decades. Goncharova herself, however, belonged only briefly to the group, and instead, again with Larionov, initiated the equally avant-garde group ‘Donkey’s Tail’, which soon included Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Kasimir Malevitsch (1879-1935) and Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953). But even here, Goncharova’s ambitions soon seemed out of place. She was closely associated with Russia’s avant-garde: she illustrated several books for the Futurists, and the Futurist artist Ilya Zhadanevich wrote the first monograph on Natalia herself. The combination of Futurist and Cubist elements laid the foundation for Cubo-Futurism. Together with her partner Larionov, she developed Rayonism from these roots, which followed Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) special theory of relativity in its concern with making the dimension of light, the fourth dimension, visible through visual art.
Success with stage sets and ballet costumes
In 1913, Natalia Goncharova became the first woman to have a solo exhibition in Russia, but repeatedly had to contend with harassment from the authorities because of her artistic views, which were perceived as provocative. Goncharova and Larionov left Moscow in 1914 and moved to Paris, where the artist created stage sets for Sergei Dyagilev’s (1872-1929) Ballet Russes. Marked by folkloristic influences, her designs were well received, and she went on to design further stage sets and costumes in Geneva in 1915. One ballet in which Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and Léonide Massine (1895–1979) were supposed to participate was ultimately not realised. During a trip to Spain, Goncharova developed her love for the magnificent traditional costumes of the local people, which she made the focus of her own artistic work for a time. Although the Belgian-French writer Michel Seuphor (1901-1999) instigated a renaissance of Rayonism in 1948, Goncharova and Larionov spent the last years of their life in financial poverty and marked by illness.
Natalia Goncharova died in Paris on 17 October 1962.
Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
