Natalja Gontcharova Lot n° 79

Natalya Gontcharova Composition rayonniste 1913 Oil on canvas. 130,5 x 100,5 cm. Framed. Lower right monogrammed in brown 'N.G.'. - With weak craquelé. Bazetoux 585 Provenance Private collection; private property Belgium Literature Anthony Parton, Goncharova. The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova, Woodbridge 2010, p. 440, color illus. 578 (here dated 1920s/1930s). The year 1913 marked the high point in the fledgling career of Russian painter Natalia Gontcharova. She was at the forefront of the avant-garde Moscow art scene, exhibited in Paris, Munich and Berlin from 1906, was a member of various Russian artist groups and from 1911 also of the Blaue Reiter in Munich. Her extensive oeuvre created until then was characterized by a great stylistic pluralism. In addition to a neo-primitivist style based on Russian folk art, she experimented with Cubo-Futurism and, on the basis of experiments with light, developed Rayonism together with her partner Mikhail Larionov: "Starting from the idea that the human eye perceives not primarily objects but the rays reflected from them, she and Larionov developed the theory of rayonist painting, according to which, as a fourth dimension, so to speak, the immaterial radiance was to be represented." (Antje Birthälmer, in: Der Sturm. Center of the Avant-Garde, exh. Cat. Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal 2012, p. 155). In 1913, the pair published their rayonist manifesto, and Gontcharova became the first Russian artist to have a huge solo exhibition in Moscow that year. Bazetoux also dates the present large-scale "Composition rayonniste" to this important year. The work fascinates with its crystalline explosion of forms, which opens itself up to diverse associations with both architectural and vegetal elements.