Word: gurianova
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...Some of Gurianova's observations are difficult to understand. In her last chapter, "Exploring Color," Gurianova writes that Rozanova's "transrational poetry is always based on two or three phonemes that she varies and arranges, playing on 'vocalic' and 'consonantal' rhymes, much as in a musical tude." Gurianova's attempt to compare the elements of art to the phonemes of language and the notes of music is confusing and does little to explain Rozanova's work...
...Gurianova's free-flowing style-the loose structure of her ideas and her frequent digressions-makes her writing difficult to follow. She frequently pastes together quotes from poets, authors and painters connected to Rozanova without relating them to her arguments and the explanations she provides are often as vague as the quotes themselves. Fortunately, Gurianova provides a thorough chronology of Rozanova's life and includes several of Rozanova's articles, which help to clarify some of the theoretical underpinnings of the succession of -isms with which Rozanova was associated. However, Gurianova's analyses are convoluted and somewhat garbled (part...
...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...
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