GONCHAROVA, Natalia (1881, Nagayevo – Paris, 1962)
Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova was born on 16 June 1881, in a relatively cultivated household in the small village of Nagayevo, situated in the Russian province of Tula. In 1891 her family moved to Moscow where she received her primary education. At the age of nineteen, Natalia Goncharova met the artist Mikhail Larionov with whom she shared both personal life and career. In 1901 Goncharova embarked on her artistic training by attending sculpture classes at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under the mentorial guidance of both Sergei Volnukhin and the Prince Paolo Trubetskoi. Her apprenticeship lasted until 1903 when she left the school and began to practise painting as an autodidact, occasionally advised by the painter Konstantin Korovin and her own companion Larionov. Her talent was soon revealed by Sergei Diaghilev’s decision to include a number of her pastels within the 1906 Russian art section at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Goncharova’s early works were permeated with Russian popular spirit although crafted in the modern language she had learned from the French artistic avant-garde, with particular attention to Matisse and Cézanne. Neo-Primitivist paintings such as the 1911 polyptych The Evangelists (St. Petersburg, Russian Museum) are characterised by sober and iconic atmospheres rendered with geometrical forms. During the first decade of the 20th-century the artist worked in the context of the Russian young artistic stage, also producing book illustrations and designs for costumes and theatre sets. After a series of controversial exhibitions including the solo show at the Moscow Society of Free Aesthetics (1910) which turned into a scandal, the artist devoted herself as both an artist and a theorist leader to the group The Donkey’s tail. The group had arisen in 1911 from a Larionov initiative and its members included pre-eminent figures such as Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich. Around that time Goncharova’s talent began to resound abroad as documented by a series of exhibitions both in Munich (within Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1911) and in London. Her interests encompassed many kinds and genres of visual art, including painting, graphic works and decorative designs whose morphology comprehended various stylistic contaminations such as Byzantine and Russian folk art, Cubism and Futurism. Goncharova took a major leap when she founded jointly with Larionov the movement called Rayism (in Russian Luchizm) whose manifesto was published in 1913 with the title: Rayists and Futurists. Noteworthy among her early rayist works are the 1913 Cats (New York, Guggenheim Museum) which greatly epitomised her new mode of constructing space through the observation of rays of light reflected on objects’ surfaces. In 1914 Goncharova and Larionov travelled to Paris where they designed the sets and costumes for the Russian ballet-opera Le Coq d’Or and simultaneously exhibited at the Galerie Paul Guillaume. After a brief soujourn back in Russia (the last one) the couple at first travelled throughout Europe and eventually settled in Paris in 1917 where they spent the rest of their lives, becoming French citizens in 1938. Besides numerous exhibitions abroad Goncharova regularly contributed to the Parisian Salons and together with Larionov, whom she married in 1955, she extensively worked as a decorative designer for theatre, ballets and opera plays, among which stand out Stravinsky’s Firebird, Prokofiev’s ballet Sur le Borysthene and Massine’s Ballet Russe Bogatyrs. Natalia Goncharova died in Paris on 17 October 1962 and was buried in the cemetery of Ivry.
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