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Review
Natalia Goncharova review, Tate Modern: an unstoppable enthusiasm for form, shape and colour
Natalia Goncharova may not be a household name in Britain, but judging from this epic survey at Tate Modern, she certainly should be. Born in 1881 (the same year as Picasso) in an obscure corner of the Russian empire, the feisty Goncharova was one of a generation of young artists – including Kazimir Malevich of The Black Square notoriety – who shook up Russian art in the early years of the 20th century. Her 1912 painting Les Fleurs was until recently the most expensive ever work of art by a woman, and she’s been trumpeted ahead of this exhibition as the spiritual precursor to punk-feminist collective Pussy Riot.
Yet the abiding impression of this exhibition, comprising 160 works, is of an artist who may have spent her life in the middle of tumultuous events in huge cities – from Moscow to Paris – but whose heart and soul remained deeply rooted in the Russian countryside.
It opens with an early painting of rustic washerwomen, Washing the Canvases (1910), displayed beside a traditional woman’s costume from Goncharova’s Tula region and some wonderfully vital embroideries and folk prints. The latter’s rich and instinctive use of colour and pattern feeds into Goncharova’s work again and again, as she pushes Russian art into the 20th century, while trying to avoid merely imitating the west.
In a large room filled with works drawn from the 1913 Moscow retrospective which brought her national notoriety, examples of highly competent but slightly stilted post-impressionism hang beside pastiche Matisse, a clunky attempt at cubism and many of her magic-realist village scenes. It’s the latter, naturally, that compel our attention, most strikingly Harvest (1911), a seven-canvas polyptych inspired by the Book of Revelation, which fills an entire wall with vibrant clashes of blue and orange, yellow and purple.
While the show makes much of Goncharova as an artist working in many disciplines, her fashion and textiles are oddly staid. There’s also a room on her work for the ballet, including some extraordinary 1938 colour film featuring her vibrant costumes for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or.
She and her fellow-artist and life-long partner Mikhail Larionov developed their own avant garde style, rayonism – a fusion of French cubism and Italian futurism – with masses of fragmented planes and angles that evoke vibrating motion. But these feel like intriguing provincial responses to wider developments rather than genuinely ground-breaking works.
Having moved to Paris to work for Diaghilev in 1915, the couple found themselves stranded by the 1917 Russian Revolution, and remained in the French capital until Goncharova’s death in 1962. Of her Paris works shown here, the large Russian Woman, c 1920, lacks compositional tension, while two paintings of Spanish women bring to mind Picasso’s synthetic-cubism at its most decorative.
But just when you feel Goncharova’s talent has foundered in the transplanting from her native earth, the show pulls the 16ft wide Bathers (1922), out of the bag: an eye-popping arrangement of industrial-anthropomorphic forms in throbbing orange, venetian red and greys – sleek Parisian modernism that’s a world away from the Russian steppes.
In common with many exhibitions these days, the show skates over biographical facts it finds inconvenient. Goncharova’s relation to the Russian Revolution is left irritatingly vague and her later attempts to return to Russia not mentioned. But the real elephant in the room is the fact that the vast majority of works here were produced in a mere four years, from 1909 to 1913. A few later ballet designs and illustrations aside, you’re left wondering what this dynamic woman was doing for the last 40 years of her life.
Yet if Goncharova’s heyday was painfully brief, the sheer volume of work produced amply fills this large and exhibition, while her verve and energy uplift. The abiding impression is of an unstoppable enthusiasm for form, shape and colour, set against some of the most challenging times in history.
June 6 until Sept 8; 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk