Lot 79 D

The year 1913 marked the peak of the still young career of Russian painter Natalia Goncharova. She stood at the pinnacle of Moscow’s avant-garde art scene and had been exhibiting in Paris, Munich and Berlin since 1906; she was also a member of various Russian artists’ groups and, from 1911, the Blauer Reiter in Munich.
The extensive body of work she had created up to that point was characterised by a great deal of stylistic pluralism. In addition to a neo-primitivist style based on Russian folk art, she experimented with cubo-futurism and, based on light experiments, developed rayonism together with her partner Mikhail Larionov: “Based on the idea that the human eye primarily perceives not objects but the rays reflected by them, she – together with Larionov – developed the theory of rayonist painting, according to which this immaterial radiation is to be depicted, as a fourth dimension so to speak” (Antje Birthälmer, in: Der Sturm. Zentrum der Avantgarde, exh. cat. Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal 2012, p. 155).
In 1913 the couple published their rayonist manifesto and, that same year, Goncharova became the first female Russian artist to have a gigantic solo exhibition organised for her in Moscow.
Bazetoux has also dated the large-format “Composition rayonniste” here to this important year. The work’s crystalline explosion of forms is fascinating and opens up diverse associations with its suggestively architectonic as well as vegetable elements.