Natalia Goncharova: a Russian aristocrat turned radical artist

By Chloë Ashby

Of all the Russian avant-garde artists of the 20th century, Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) was the most experimental. She absorbed the artistic styles around her, from traditional Russian folk art and religious icons to the latest trends in modernism. She dabbled in different art forms, like book illustration and fashion design, and painted a wide range of subjects, from the female nude to peasant scenes and urban landscapes. Her lifelong partner and fellow painter Mikhail Larionov described her ever-changing style and subject matter as “everythingism”. On paper, this approach might seem unfocused and unwieldy, but a new exhibition of Goncharova’s work at Tate Modern in London proves otherwise. The first Goncharova retrospective in the UK, it brings together 500 of the raw, vibrant works she produced in the first decades of the last century. Together they paint a portrait of a truly original artist.

Born into a family of impoverished aristocrats in 1881, Goncharova spent her early years on country estates in rural Russia, where she was influenced by the life and culture of the local peasantry. When she was 11, she and her family moved to Moscow, and nine years later she enrolled at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where she met Larionov. By 1913, when she was 32, Goncharova had established herself at the artistic vanguard with a retrospective at an enormously prestigious gallery in Moscow: the Mikhailova Art Salon. Her rise to prominence hadn’t been without its stumbling blocks. In 1910 critics had panned an exhibition of hers which included abstract depictions of the female form – a far cry from the idealised nudes commonly found on gallery walls at the time. This didn’t deter the 12,000 people who pitched up to the salon to see more than 800 of her works three years later. The exhibition, which showed off her experiments with paint, textiles, print-making and set design, was the most ambitious of any Russian avant-garde artist to date. The catalogue was so popular it ran to three editions.