Word: avant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Malevich, Popova, Kandinsky, Chagall-these are the names that typically come to mind when someone mentions the Russian avant-garde in its early twentieth century heyday. In her book Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1918, art historian Nina Gurianova adds a new name to the old list by paying tribute to Olga Rozanova, a lesser known artist, and showing how she helped pioneer developments in futurism, suprematism and the role of color in painting...
Olga Rozanova (1886-1918) left behind a legacy of art, poetry and theoretical articles that provides a key to understanding the cultural ferment of the early avant-garde movement in Russia. Her collaboration with the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh sought to overcome the boundaries that separate poetry from art. The two worked together on various projects, mostly editions of lithographic futurist books, enthused by the idea that words should serve as visual symbols that lack any specific meaning...
...Gurianova's book is the first full-length study of Rozanova. Her accumulation of a vast number of primary sources-letters, articles, manifestos-is, along with a detailed chronology of Rozanova's life, the crowning achievement of the work. Gurianova's remarks about the evolution of avant-garde styles from long-standing traditions in art and literature are insightful. In her chapter on "The Futurist Shift," Gurianova draws a connection between Rozanova's lithographs made to embellish Kruchenykh's narrative poem Game in Hell and the "denizens of the underworld" of Gogol and Pushkin. Noting how Rozanova...
...Despite these flaws, Gurianova succeeds in providing a glimpse into the life of an artist who continually sought new forms and new means of expression in her work. She makes the important point that Rozanova's career "reflects in miniature the fate of the early Russian avant-garde, which was driven by an inexorable and constant striving for renewal and a denial of previous achievements...
...Olga Rozanova's work will be included in Amazons of the Avant-Garde, a retrospective of six women artists of the Russian constructivist movement, opening at the Guggenheim in New York this September...