Word: goncharova
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Revolution of 1917 was the last great efflorescence of the modernist spirit that is still not fully known about. This was partly due to the cold war. The main reason, however, was repression inside the Soviet Union. The work of artists like Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Natalya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vladimir Tallin, Kasimir Malevich, Natan Altman, Naum Gabo and scores of others was a collectively ecstatic response to the possibilities of a new world, the Utopia that Lenin called "Marx plus electricity." It was international in range, drawing on the resources of the new movements in Italy...
...repression had begun. In Stalin's slow and terrible eye, such art was decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible...
...cannot have a historical show of women's art without the boring and insipid fribbles of Marie Laurencin, but why include a third-rate vendeuse of exotic surrealist tack like Leonor Fini? In such company, artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Nataliia Goncharova and Sonia Delaunay look extraordinary; one's eye goes with relief to Goncharova's crude, provincial but raucously vital cubist portrait of her husband Mikhail Larionov (1913), the face kippered flat and streaked with voracious slashes of color; it luxuriates in the shimmer of rosy light, circle on circle...