I regard it as an important part of my ‘job’ as a second generation Goncharova ‘scholar’ to go through the first generation information, parse the good from the bad, and present it to you in a clear and concise fashion.
As with any emerging artist, and Goncharova certainly still is a that, scholarship is incomplete, sometimes inaccurate and in need of further development. It’s nobody’s fault. There is only so much known about an artist at a given time and a certain amount of guess work and supposition can be assumed. Ideally scholars take ownership of what they do and do not know.
Today I am posting a brief excerpted piece from Anthony Parton’s 2010 book ‘The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova’ because it is well written and relates to her conception of time and space and thus to the conversation around the dating of her work. Parton’s book has its share of issues mostly relating to the inclusion of many questionable works but the level of scholarship is quite high and therefore can be read with confidence. Just perhaps don’t use it as a definitive visual reference.
By 1914 Goncharova’s work presented a complex and divergent profile to both public and critics alike. The sheer variety of her work suggested that she lacked the intellectual rigor to pursue one particular style to its ultimate conclusion. Stark, for example, wrote that ‘she tosses art works at the market like a pancake vendor with a frying pan’1. In an attempt to counter the claim that the diversity of her work was logically inconsistent, Goncharova employed the rhetoric of Everythingism. She explained that: ‘there can be an infinite number of forms to express and object and they can all be equally beautiful’2 for all styles were now declared to be qualitatively equal. Everythingism viewed the practice of art as a vibrant continuum and explained stylistic diversity as its constant and varied materialization. Just as the
droplets of water thrown up by a wave possess no qualitative difference, all being of the same essence, so the practice of art continually threw up new styles, which could not be qualitatively judged since they proceeded from a common source. As she put it: ‘A spark of the spirit lives in us, it is connected with all spirit. It is divine. It is drawn to other, similar sparks. This is the urge to creation’3. This holistic view of art practice challenged the popular, evolutionary view, which judged the quality of an art work by reference to its location in the scale of historical development and which regarded ancient and outmoded styles as somehow inferior, because they had outlasted their usefulness and had been surpassed by more fitting forms of expression. Everythingism, on the other hand, proclaimed that all styles in all periods were equal in expressiveness and significance because they all possessed that ‘spark of spirit’. It argued that a linear, sequential understanding of time, which relegated apparently defunct art to the museums, was misconceived.
Larionov wrote: ‘It is possible to link the most surprising, the most up-to-date doctrine, futurism, with the Assyrian or Babylonian epoch, and Assyria with its cult of the goddess Astarte and the teaching of Zarathustra, exists in what we call ‘our times’...in essence development and movement, epochs are equal; to consider them from the point of view of time is to be narrow minded in the extreme...He who claims to look to the future, believing in a linear development of time is consigning himself to insignificance and is completely blind’4.
1 E. Stark, ‘Natalia Goncharova’, Petersburgskii Kurer, 1 April 1914, No. 71,4
2 N. Goncharova, 1912, in T. Durfee, ‘Natalia Goncharova: Two Letters’, Experiment A Journal of Russian Culture, Los Angeles: Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Vol. 1, 1995, 163
3 Letter from Goncharova to Mary Chamot 8 Dec 1954
4 M. Larionov, ‘Predisolvie’, Vystavka kartin gruppy khudozhnikov ‘Mishen’, Moscow: Khudozhestvvennyi Salon, 1913:6
Views such as these are grounded in fourth dimension theory. Ouspensky had already demonstrated that our conventional understanding of time is flawed since it arises from the incorrect sensation of the affects of four-dimensional motion upon three-dimensional space and contemporaries confirm Goncharova’s and Larionov’s debt to such philosophical sources. Livshits, for example, wrote that ‘Everythingness was extremely simple: all ages and movements in art were declared equal. Each of them served as sources of inspiration for the Everythingists who had conquered time and space’5. The newspaper Birzheviia vedomosti noted that Everythingism sponsored ‘a form of craftsmanship free from time and space’6 while Utro Rossii wrote of a Zdanevich lecture: ‘the public learned that not only had Futurism died but with it even time and space, so that everyone sitting in the room ran the serious risk of finding themselves imminently suspended outside of time and space’7.
It was this mystical understanding of time that provided Goncharova and Larionov with the means to finally divorce themselves from Futurist ideology and aesthetics, since Marinetti’s temporal view of Futurism had little in common with the views of Goncharova and Larionov who ‘proposed to suspend any differentiation between past, present and future’8. The popular press, however, was skeptical of Everythingism and blamed society for the sorry state into which contemporary art had fallen. Nakatov noted: ‘The motto of Mishen (Target) is ‘art beyond time’. Yet the representatives of Mishen are undoubtedly a product of our banal times- times in which great meanings and great artistic ideals have been lost’9, while Stark wrote that, if Goncharova’s art appeared ambivalent and uncertain, then she could not be blamed since this was the spirit of the age.10
5 B. Livshits, The One and a Half Eyed Archer (1933), translated by John E Bowlt, Newtonville, Massachusetts: Oriental Research Partners, 1977:165
6 Anon, ‘Zametka’, Birzheviia Vedomosti, 29 November 1913, No. 13881, 4.
7 S., ‘Vsechestvo’, Utro Rossii, 6 November 1913, No. 256, 4.
8 M. Tupitsyn, ‘Collaborating on the Paradigm of the Future’, Art Journal, Winter 1993, 21. 9 I. Nakatov, ‘Osei iskusstva’, Moskovskaia gazeta, 26 March 1913, 244
10 E. Stark, ‘Natalia Goncharova’, Petersburgskii Kurer, 1 April 1914, No. 71,4.
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