Malevich found himself swept up into the enthusiasm of Goncharova and Larionov and joined them in exploring a post-Impressionist style in 1909.
Goncharova was born in Nagaevo village near Tula, Russia, in 1881. She studied sculpture at the Moscow Academy of Art, but turned to painting in 1904. Like Kasimir, she was deeply inspired by the primitive aspects of Russian folk art and attempted to emulate it in her own work while incorporating elements of Fauvism and Cubism.
Reaper II, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 71 × 69.4 cm.
Art Gallery of Astrakhan, Astrakhan.
Reaper II, motif: c. 1910–1911, version: 1928–1929.
Oil on plywood, 74.2 × 72 cm.
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Reapers/Rye Harvest, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 74.2 × 72 cm.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
The Mower I, end of 1911-beginning of 1912.
Oil on canvas, 113.5 × 66.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts of Nijni Novgorod, Nijni Novgorod.
From 1902 Larionov’s style was Impressionism. After a visit to Paris in 1906 he moved into post-Impressionism and then a neo-Primitive style which derived partly from Russian sign painting. In 1908 he staged the Golden Fleece exhibition in Moscow, which included paintings by international avant-garde artists such as Matisse, Derain, Braque, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Other group shows promoted by him included Tatlin, Marc Chagall and the emerging Kasimir Malevich.
Larionov helped found two important Russian artistic groups, the Jack of Diamonds (1909–1911) which included Malevich in its exhibitions, and – with Gonchorova – the radical-chic Donkey’s Tail. This latter group was conceived to create a break from European art influence and to establish an independent Russian school of modern art. Though Goncharova had been involved with icon painting and primitive Russian folk-art, Futurism became the focus of her later paintings. She achieved fame in Russia for her work such as the Futurist Cyclist and her later Rayonist works. In 1913 Larionov created Rayonism, which was the first attempt at near-abstract art in Russia. The Donkey’s Tail group led the Moscow Futurists and organized outré lecture evenings in the fashion of their eccentric Italian counterparts.
Impressionism and Experimentation
At this point in his career, Kasimir Malevich was an open vessel, seeking a style that he could embrace. He participated in the second exhibition of the group Soyus Molod’ozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg in 1911 with some success.
Besides his Russian and Ukrainian contemporaries, Malevich had access to one of the great collections of Western contemporary art assembled by Sergei Shchukin. The heir to a very wealthy textile manufacturer and director of two textile plants, Shchukin had the capital to invest in art. Beginning in the 1890s, he carved a swathe through the Paris galleries, crating and shipping works of Renoir, Pissarro, Monet and continued into the new century with purchases of Van Gogh and Gauguin. The early canvasses of Cézanne were plucked off the walls and from gallery racks before most of the art world had recognized the Frenchman’s genius. Alongside 21 Cézanne works that found appreciation in Shchukin’s mansion, between 1909 and 1913, thirty-five Picassos were purchased, beginning with his painting Lady With a Fan.
If any Western painter besides Cézanne was lionized in the East, it was Paul Gauguin. The June 1909 issue of the art newsletter, Zolotoe Runo (The Golden Fleece) displayed ten pages of Gauguin’s wood reliefs and sculpture taken mostly from the Paris collection of Gustav Feyet. This publication, a fine arts journal, was begun in 1906 and documented both the traditional and avant garde inside and outside Russia.
The relative isolation of Eastern artists was eased quite a bit by these publications and private collections – especially in the case of Shchukin who opened his mansion to the public (and particularly to artists) to see and sketch the works.[7]
Malevich’s exposure to Gauguin and Cezanne over the first decade of the twentieth century is not difficult to trace in his peasant sketches and paintings. His pencil sketches for Women at Church (1911) have a Gauguinesque quality in their repetitive images and ritual gestures in a single picture plane and the mask-like treatment of the babushka-wrapped faces. In rendering them as masks, he draws on his icon studies wherein the faces that looked down on peasant life from the sacred paintings were not divine faces, but were the transfigured images of ordinary people. By the time the sketches reached their oil painted result, the crowded canvas, subdued colours and heavily outlined colour shapes bring in the influence of Cezanne’s pre-Cubist predictions.
The Woodcutter II, end of 1912.
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