The Legacy of Natalia Goncharova
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by Maria Fee
Maria Fee is a doctoral student in Theology and Culture at Fuller Seminary and a Scholar of the Brehm Center’s Visual Faith Institute of Art and Architecture. She is a visual artist and curates exhibitions for the Brehm Center. She previously worked with artists as an arts ministry coordinator for the Center for Faith and Work, Redeemer Presbyterian Church. She continues to nurture artists with their creative projects as an instructor for Fuller’s Capstone Theology and Art course. Living through a rapidly changing era, the Russian artist Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) experienced both the pressures and the possibilities of a new age. Indeed, Goncharova viewed the heady time of the Russian avant-garde of the early nineteen hundreds as “a flowering of art in a new form—a painterly form” |
in which the East was to lead the international art scene. Yet beyond developing new art genres, Goncharova’s work prior to the Russian Revolution also addressed the spiritual and ethical needs of her time. Foremost, Goncharova endeavored to display humanity’s soul through her paintings in order to counter modernity’s propensity towards detachment and indifference.
To this end, Goncharova chose to lead Russia into the future by tethering it to its past. Her work was simultaneously modern and anti-modern, stimulated by the West yet opposed to it as it sought Eastern roots to honor and revitalize her homeland faithfully. Though inspired by Western avant-garde movements, she both reinvigorated traditional Russian art forms and utilized them to counter the mechanization, urbanization, and individualism of the West that was intruding upon her beloved Russia. For this reason, I believe Goncharova provides a model for Christian artists as they endeavor to engage a secular world that perpetuates the dehumanization of materialism, endless war, and poverty. Like Goncharova, artists need not forfeit their souls or their traditions to offer a critique the age and thereby stake their claim in the world of art.
Goncharova, in fact, demonstrates a way to move forward that is continuous with the past. She does not discount the narratives, mythologies, images, and symbols of her social context. In this article, I will explore some of the notions that drive Goncharova’s religious-themed work completed between 1910 and 1914. I do so with the intent of encouraging Christian artists to investigate their own traditions and social contexts as generative sources toward art making. To this end, I will point out some of the influences on her Neo-Primitive work that includes peasant and religious-themed imagery. I will further highlight Goncharova as a model regarding the prophetic nature of the artist, alongside other insights that may aid and support the Christian artist working in a secular age.
NEO-PRIMITIVISM
Amid a handful of artists such as Aristarkh Lentulov, Alexander Kuprin, Ilya Mashkov, and her life-long partner Mikhail Larionov, Goncharova experimented with the visual vocabulary of early modernism that included Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism and Futurism. Thus, for the Russian avant-garde, Western modernism extended a creative vocabulary beyond the limited world of the Russian Academy. Especially relevant for Goncharova were the works of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse. These artists became instrumental towards the Neo-Primitive style that Goncharova and Larionov would develop in the years between 1910 and 1912.
It was in 1912 that the couple officially broke from the Knave of Diamonds artist group upon the request that its members pay further allegiance to the art of the West. Alternatively, Larionov and Goncharova instituted their own school called the Donkey’s Tail that included such artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Alexander Shevchenko. This group preferred to explore their heritage as a source for their work. Indeed, for Goncharova, the future of Russian art was not in the West, but had to progress from its own soil. In the preface of her exhibition catalog of 1913, Goncharova acknowledged her debt to the West in the formation of her work, but exclaimed how the art of Russia was “incomparably more profound and important than anything” she had known in the West. She also declared that her attention to nationality was not a narrowing factor, but through its particularity the resulting combination of modern-traditional art would be “all embracing and universal.”1 Indeed, Goncharova’s biographer Eli Eganbiuri has dubbed the artist as a “liberator of the Russian Spirit.”2
Goncharova’s Neo-Primitive style is indicated by the application of bold colors and painterly strokes to depict figures seemingly created out of solid mass. This is fitting given that the artist began her studio career as a sculptor. Goncharova referred to this as faktura (texture); it emphasized the movement of the artist’s hand as opposed to the Academy’s obscuring of the brushstroke.3 Her various paintings of peacocks such as Peacock Under the Bright Sun (Egyptian Style) of 1911 depict the bird as if it were colorfully carved instead of painted. Anthony Parton relates how Goncharova’s interest in the simplicity of folk art also offered an immediacy that further enabled the artist quickly to incarnate the theoretical notions of the avant-garde.4
More than the crude manner in which the art was executed, it was really by means of subject matter that Goncharova addressed modernity’s issue regarding the primitive. Should modernity not affirm cultural roots instead of considering all things past as vulgar? What was seemingly simple and crass to the Russian bourgeoisie became the means of Goncharova’s painterly delight. Consequently, through the use of such art forms, Goncharova simultaneously rejuvenated Slavic heritage and admonished the Russian bourgeoisie for its tendency to accept unthinkingly all the values of the West.5
Thus, Goncharova borrowed folk art imagery that included design elements from the lubki, familiar and cheaply mass-produced books. One example is her St. Michael of 1911-1912, whose simple frontal and criss-cross composition recalls a popular image of the archangel from a 1668 religious lubok. Goncharova’s work also displayed elements of Russia’s embroidery, painted wooden trays, ubiquitous signboards, and the playful ingenuity of scale and form found in children’s art. The common feature of all these items is the flattened plain, which for Goncharova emphasized the narrative or symbolic quality of the work.6 Then, of course, there were the influences of Orthodox icons, most notable in such paintings as Virgin and Child of 1910 and the multi-panel work entitled The Four Evangelists of 1911. These works are among dozens of religiously themed paintings she created in the years preceding the Russian Revolution.
According to Irina Vakar, Goncharova understood that the fundamentals of folk life were essentially work and religion.7Rural life communicated relationship and responsibility, thus social and religious coherence alongside nature. This belief aligned with her rural upbringing, exemplified by her memory of the aesthetic pleasure of Trinity Sunday when peasants filled the church with flowering branches and flower petals.8 Goncharova depicted regeneration with its duel notions of piety and nature’s fertility in her 1910-1911 painting Women Going to Church. Goncharova felt that daily rural life was much more religiously oriented than urban life. So, in 1910, alongside her religious art, Goncharova painted a series of canvases depicting peasant women at work that include Spring Gardening, Women with Rakes, and Sheep-Shearing.
Goncharova’s engagement with this type of imagery not only pointed to her own Russian spiritual heritage, but through faktura, the artist endowed her subject matter with a physicality and weight, much like the presence found in icon paintings. Goncharova understood that the iconoclasm of the West had divested such presence from its art, and this inclination was being adopted in the East. To counter this movement, Goncharova reveled in pictorial symbolism, the figurative, and the physicality of painting, thereby hoping to create the presence usually imparted by icon paintings. In a growing age of disbelief, Goncharova’s works of 1910 to 1914 continually relied on the Russian icon, biblical imagery, and spirited Russian country life.
In this vein, Goncharova not only dealt with peasant displacement in Russian modern society, but also looked to defend Russian belief in the mysterious, both in the myths of the land, and the religious expression found in Orthodox Christianity.9 Through folk and religious art, Goncharova sought cohesion between national identity and the spiritual impulse. Art was not solely the domain of self-expression, as modernity professed, but also belonged to whichever people and culture bore the creative impulse. It was Goncharova’s claim that a “religious art which can glorify the State is a perfect and majestic manifestation of art itself.”10 Thus, her religious work, although controversial, sought to encourage societal change in order to manifest the real spirit of Russia. Goncharova discovered that a value for tradition enriches the relational and inclusive aspect of the work.
By utilizing Russian mythology, national figures, and religious imagery such as the previously mentioned icon portrait of St. Michael, Goncharova expanded both the meanings of her work and its reach. First, because she utilized a shared visual language, her imagery offered multivalent meanings that prophetically spoke of the times. Secondly, such forms also served as a foothold for the public to the unfamiliar vocabulary of modern art. For Goncharova, the spirit of Russian art is its accessibility and depth. In a letter to a friend, Goncharova wrote, “You can understand the most abstract of things only in the forms you see most often, and also through whatever works of art you’ve seen.”11 In this way her paintings would serve as a medium towards social unity.
Goncharova was unapologetic in locating herself within Russian culture and aligning herself with an Orthodox worldview. Explaining why her art relied on the visual language of icons, Goncharova noted that she held a “kinship with other souls.”12 In this regard, her paintings became windows to these souls. Contrary to her lifestyle that exemplified the rebellious, modern, and bohemian artist, Goncharova held a religious worldview that connected her with God, others, and the land. As the Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann noted, Christianity’s primary action is not intellectual assent, but entrance: one enters into the church, the Eucharist, and the kingdom.13 Thus, just as the art of Orthodox Christianity is an entrance into a spiritual world, Goncharova’s art became the means for her to know the other.
Goncharova’s icon paintings also expressed her family’s religious inclinations. The artist’s maternal grandfather taught at the Moscow Theological Academy. Parton notes how there were several priests in Goncharova’s family. He also recounts how Goncharova’s nurse, Maria, took her to church when the young artist was growing up on her grandmother’s estate.14 Thus, in painting icons, Goncharova followed the vocation of many in her family. However, as a woman, her religious paintings were severely criticized; the subject matter was unfit for a female to execute. In an open letter, she wrote, “I believe that everybody, including women, has an intellect in the form of the image of God, that there are no bounds to the human will and mind.”15 While she described one of her religious paintings to a friend in another letter, Goncharova broke into lament, asking, “Will the Lord not let me paint this? Lord forgive me. . . . I believe in the Lord firmly enough. Who knows who believes and how?”16 This same letter disclosed how Goncharova took on the formal rules of Orthodox icon painting including the spiritual practice of prayer and fasting.
Theologian Cecilia González-Andrieu asks viewers to respect the integrity of religious works by recommending that they restrain their perception to the work’s primary mode—that of a particular worshipping community. Thus, González-Andrieu calls for an “honest autonomy” that defines the work primarily by its first operation.17 Thereby, an icon is only truly autonomous in the context of what it was created for. González-Andrieu’s honest autonomy carries deep theological implications, verifying in a like manner how persons are only truly autonomous when they grasp God’s original intent for their lives. Yet, if we solely judge religious art or humanity on this premise, we negate the reality of both sin’s alienation and Christ’s redemption. Both religious art and people have survived as aliens in a strange land. It is even safe to say that some have thrived. Furthermore, through Christ, the Spirit fulfills God’s intentions. So while honest autonomy is an ideal goal, there is grace.
This grace allows for Goncharova to utilize the religious function of the icon in order to upset the prevailing rationalism, individualism, and depersonalization she sensed in modernity. Furthermore, her work carried ethical momentum that questioned the gender hierarchies of the church, thereby loosing the restraints that prohibited women from creating icons.
Nicoletta Misler reports that the results of Goncharova’s recovery of icon painting taught the artist how the power of that art form can incite social action, while simultaneously preserving its own value and expression regardless of Goncharova’s secular application.18 In this manner, Goncharova models for the twenty-first century Christian artist how religious impulses can help shape secular society’s public realm. Art, through its prophetic nature, has the capability to question prevailing attitudes and norms.
THE PROPHETIC NATURE OF ART
Goncharova’s icon paintings are more than a painterly formal exercise wherein an artist is looking for new paradigms through primitive forms of expression. She seriously understood herself as a prophet standing at the forefront of change, and art was to lead the way into a new modern era. In addition, she understood primitivism to be subversive because it called attention to a national culture that was snubbed by elite society, including the Academy. As Parton puts it, “Neo-Primitive represented the ‘other’ Russia.”19
It was Goncharova’s belief that Neo-Primitivism could stimulate the creative impulse that belonged to all. Such creative power had the ability to mediate both individual change and societal change. As a prophet, Goncharova relied on the art form of the icon and biblical imagery to address the social dissatisfaction of the times. In fact, prior to the October Revolution, apocalyptic imagery emerged in many artistic works of literature and painting, especially those relating to St. John’s Book of Revelation. This theme, according to Misler, depicted the anxiety of the age; but it also affirmed “the prophetic nature of what [artists] were writing or painting.”20 Artists were the first to detect the signs of radical change.
Wassily Kandinsky is one example. For the abstract artist, the biblical theme of the apocalypse also signaled a break with the old to make room for the new. The Book of Revelation depicts how destruction is necessary for salvation. Kandinsky chose this path of discontinuity by slowly leaving behind the figure to enter into a world of abstraction. Such work as his 1911 The Angel of the Last Judgment drew on this disjuncture. By formal means, Kandinsky exemplified Russian iconoclasm and entered the de-materialistic mode of the West. Kandinsky joined the Symbolist movement that sought an interior spirituality rather than the Orthodox embodied reality.21
Conversely, Goncharova utilized biblical imagery from the Book of Revelation to make a reference the coming judgment regarding Russia’s neglect of their contextual embodied reality. Unlike Kandinsky, she reveled in the pictorial, the figurative, and the physicality of paint in order to highlight humanity, not to obscure it through abstraction. She created two different multi-panel installations combining images of grape harvest with figures from the book of Revelation. The Vintage: Composition in Nine Parts and The Harvest: Composition in Nine Parts were each created as three sets of triptychs. When assembled, the nine panels from each series were to resemble an iconostasis, the essential backdrop to the altar in every Orthodox church. Thus, these two works took on the added dimension of religious witness, a spiritual presence calling judgment against the evils of secularization, industrialization, and urbanization that sought to minimize the richness of Russian culture and its people.22
GONCHAROVA’S MODEL
Not long after this period of religious work, Goncharova left Russia to pursue stage design work. Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballet Russes, persistently requested Goncharova’s help in incarnating Russian culture for the stage. Goncharova resided and traveled throughout Europe between the years 1914-1916. Once the Russian Revolution occurred, Goncharova settled in Paris. Here, she continued to paint, but mainly depicted the visual richness of her heritage through stage design work. Most notable are the superb costume and set design images for Liturgie (1915). Based on the four gospels, her designed items looked as if they stepped out of an icon painting.
“I want to go east . . . but I ended up in the West,” Goncharova is alleged to have said.23 In her diary, she prayerfully petitioned St. George, “Will you not allow us to return?”24
It was Goncharova’s wish that her work would one day reside in Russia. After the deaths of Goncharova and Larionov in 1962 and 1964, respectively, Alexandra Tomilina became responsible for their estate. Larionov had married Tomilina in the interest of the collection. It was not until Tomilina’s death and Russian political changes in the mid-80s that Goncharova’s art could make it home, finally ensuring that a piece of Russian heritage was preserved for its people. The past had made its way into the future.
As I have mentioned, Christian artists living and working in a postmodern era should take note how Goncharova makes relevant artwork that offers a prophetic model of caring for human particularities that include time, space, and location. A Christian’s social standpoint, cultural heritage, and religious beliefs should unapologetically shape a Christian artist’s work. Moreover, like Goncharova, religion need not be considered a casualty of Western secularization. In fact, religion and art are to push prophetically the boundaries secularization has drawn between the public and private. Thereby, art and religion can provide a social foothold in a world that struggles to find meaning and purpose.
Moreover, Christian artists might take note of how Goncharova exemplifies a mode of creativity that recognized development beyond the self. In her 1913 Manifesto, Natalia Goncharova advocated for an art form that must “fight against the debased and decomposing doctrine of individualism.” She further wrote, “I find those people ridiculous who advocate individuality and who assume there is some value in the ‘I’ even when it is extremely limited.”25 T. S. Eliot echoed the same notion in his 1921 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Here, Eliot understood that art was gained through a progress of “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Like Goncharova, artists are to be receptacles for, in Eliot’s words, “seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images.”26
Parton too related how Goncharova’s storing up of Russian religious and folk imagery “formed the creative syntax of her painterly practice.” He referred to her words, saying “one cannot forget something which is no longer outside of you but within, no longer in the past but in the present.”27 Humanity is formed by, and informs, community and its cultural artifacts. Hence, Goncharova’s avant-guard role moved beyond capturing ground for modern art. Instead, her Manifesto lists the aim “To apprehend the world about us in all its brilliance and diversity, and to bear in mind both its inner and outer content.”28
This inner and outer content is yet one more element of Goncharova’s work that is valuable to the contemporary Christian artist. To reason that the world consists only of its material reality limits humanity. This is why the religious impulse in art is important and must be tended. For this reason, Goncharova incarnates Cecilia González-Andrieu’s idea of “interlacing engagement” of art and religion.29 Indeed, Goncharova provides a paradigm of such interlacing for contemporary Christian artists as she weaves together elements of religion, heritage, and politics while keeping a vital place in the international arts community.
Perhaps instead of summing up Goncharova’s life as a series of dichotomies between old world and new, religion versus modernity, prophetic against tradition, maybe these elements could be seen as interlacing and interactive to form a more holistic view of being human. As her Manifesto makes evident, she did not “fear in painting [either] literature, nor illustration, nor any other bug-bears of contemporaneity.”30 The notion of art for its own sake should be able to intertwine with the idea of art for community’s sake. The two need not be mutually exclusive. Perhaps, then, a faithful Orthodox Christian perspective further enables entrance into such matters of interlacing. Faithful works of art created for community align with the original use of the word leitourgia. Liturgy was the good work offered up for the betterment of a community by a person or group. Goncharova’s leitourgia was to create, store, and return a piece of her country’s heritage.
What are the good works Christian artists should endeavor to make? As Schmemann noted, “As long as Christians will love the Kingdom of God, and not only discuss it, they will ‘represent’ it and signify it, in art and beauty.”31 This art may also serve as commentary on the consensus of the age. Or, perhaps, it may spiritually encourage community. Who knows, it may even influence the art world.
Christian artists need to see the world as something more. This is what is needed in our secular age. Just as one must hold a deep faith in religion, I believe we must do the same with art.
CAPTIONS
Natalya Goncharova
Two of four panels depicting the Four Evangelists, c. 1910-1911
Oil on canvas
Private Collection/Calmann & King Ltd
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Natalya Goncharova
The Archangel Mikhail, 1914
Lithograph on paper
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA
Gift of Thomas P. Whitney (Class of 1937)
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Natalya Goncharova
Self-Portrait, c. 1907
Oil on canvas mounted on board
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA
Gift of Thomas P. Whitney (Class of 1937)
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
NOTES
To this end, Goncharova chose to lead Russia into the future by tethering it to its past. Her work was simultaneously modern and anti-modern, stimulated by the West yet opposed to it as it sought Eastern roots to honor and revitalize her homeland faithfully. Though inspired by Western avant-garde movements, she both reinvigorated traditional Russian art forms and utilized them to counter the mechanization, urbanization, and individualism of the West that was intruding upon her beloved Russia. For this reason, I believe Goncharova provides a model for Christian artists as they endeavor to engage a secular world that perpetuates the dehumanization of materialism, endless war, and poverty. Like Goncharova, artists need not forfeit their souls or their traditions to offer a critique the age and thereby stake their claim in the world of art.
Goncharova, in fact, demonstrates a way to move forward that is continuous with the past. She does not discount the narratives, mythologies, images, and symbols of her social context. In this article, I will explore some of the notions that drive Goncharova’s religious-themed work completed between 1910 and 1914. I do so with the intent of encouraging Christian artists to investigate their own traditions and social contexts as generative sources toward art making. To this end, I will point out some of the influences on her Neo-Primitive work that includes peasant and religious-themed imagery. I will further highlight Goncharova as a model regarding the prophetic nature of the artist, alongside other insights that may aid and support the Christian artist working in a secular age.
NEO-PRIMITIVISM
Amid a handful of artists such as Aristarkh Lentulov, Alexander Kuprin, Ilya Mashkov, and her life-long partner Mikhail Larionov, Goncharova experimented with the visual vocabulary of early modernism that included Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism and Futurism. Thus, for the Russian avant-garde, Western modernism extended a creative vocabulary beyond the limited world of the Russian Academy. Especially relevant for Goncharova were the works of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse. These artists became instrumental towards the Neo-Primitive style that Goncharova and Larionov would develop in the years between 1910 and 1912.
It was in 1912 that the couple officially broke from the Knave of Diamonds artist group upon the request that its members pay further allegiance to the art of the West. Alternatively, Larionov and Goncharova instituted their own school called the Donkey’s Tail that included such artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Alexander Shevchenko. This group preferred to explore their heritage as a source for their work. Indeed, for Goncharova, the future of Russian art was not in the West, but had to progress from its own soil. In the preface of her exhibition catalog of 1913, Goncharova acknowledged her debt to the West in the formation of her work, but exclaimed how the art of Russia was “incomparably more profound and important than anything” she had known in the West. She also declared that her attention to nationality was not a narrowing factor, but through its particularity the resulting combination of modern-traditional art would be “all embracing and universal.”1 Indeed, Goncharova’s biographer Eli Eganbiuri has dubbed the artist as a “liberator of the Russian Spirit.”2
Goncharova’s Neo-Primitive style is indicated by the application of bold colors and painterly strokes to depict figures seemingly created out of solid mass. This is fitting given that the artist began her studio career as a sculptor. Goncharova referred to this as faktura (texture); it emphasized the movement of the artist’s hand as opposed to the Academy’s obscuring of the brushstroke.3 Her various paintings of peacocks such as Peacock Under the Bright Sun (Egyptian Style) of 1911 depict the bird as if it were colorfully carved instead of painted. Anthony Parton relates how Goncharova’s interest in the simplicity of folk art also offered an immediacy that further enabled the artist quickly to incarnate the theoretical notions of the avant-garde.4
More than the crude manner in which the art was executed, it was really by means of subject matter that Goncharova addressed modernity’s issue regarding the primitive. Should modernity not affirm cultural roots instead of considering all things past as vulgar? What was seemingly simple and crass to the Russian bourgeoisie became the means of Goncharova’s painterly delight. Consequently, through the use of such art forms, Goncharova simultaneously rejuvenated Slavic heritage and admonished the Russian bourgeoisie for its tendency to accept unthinkingly all the values of the West.5
Thus, Goncharova borrowed folk art imagery that included design elements from the lubki, familiar and cheaply mass-produced books. One example is her St. Michael of 1911-1912, whose simple frontal and criss-cross composition recalls a popular image of the archangel from a 1668 religious lubok. Goncharova’s work also displayed elements of Russia’s embroidery, painted wooden trays, ubiquitous signboards, and the playful ingenuity of scale and form found in children’s art. The common feature of all these items is the flattened plain, which for Goncharova emphasized the narrative or symbolic quality of the work.6 Then, of course, there were the influences of Orthodox icons, most notable in such paintings as Virgin and Child of 1910 and the multi-panel work entitled The Four Evangelists of 1911. These works are among dozens of religiously themed paintings she created in the years preceding the Russian Revolution.
According to Irina Vakar, Goncharova understood that the fundamentals of folk life were essentially work and religion.7Rural life communicated relationship and responsibility, thus social and religious coherence alongside nature. This belief aligned with her rural upbringing, exemplified by her memory of the aesthetic pleasure of Trinity Sunday when peasants filled the church with flowering branches and flower petals.8 Goncharova depicted regeneration with its duel notions of piety and nature’s fertility in her 1910-1911 painting Women Going to Church. Goncharova felt that daily rural life was much more religiously oriented than urban life. So, in 1910, alongside her religious art, Goncharova painted a series of canvases depicting peasant women at work that include Spring Gardening, Women with Rakes, and Sheep-Shearing.
Goncharova’s engagement with this type of imagery not only pointed to her own Russian spiritual heritage, but through faktura, the artist endowed her subject matter with a physicality and weight, much like the presence found in icon paintings. Goncharova understood that the iconoclasm of the West had divested such presence from its art, and this inclination was being adopted in the East. To counter this movement, Goncharova reveled in pictorial symbolism, the figurative, and the physicality of painting, thereby hoping to create the presence usually imparted by icon paintings. In a growing age of disbelief, Goncharova’s works of 1910 to 1914 continually relied on the Russian icon, biblical imagery, and spirited Russian country life.
In this vein, Goncharova not only dealt with peasant displacement in Russian modern society, but also looked to defend Russian belief in the mysterious, both in the myths of the land, and the religious expression found in Orthodox Christianity.9 Through folk and religious art, Goncharova sought cohesion between national identity and the spiritual impulse. Art was not solely the domain of self-expression, as modernity professed, but also belonged to whichever people and culture bore the creative impulse. It was Goncharova’s claim that a “religious art which can glorify the State is a perfect and majestic manifestation of art itself.”10 Thus, her religious work, although controversial, sought to encourage societal change in order to manifest the real spirit of Russia. Goncharova discovered that a value for tradition enriches the relational and inclusive aspect of the work.
By utilizing Russian mythology, national figures, and religious imagery such as the previously mentioned icon portrait of St. Michael, Goncharova expanded both the meanings of her work and its reach. First, because she utilized a shared visual language, her imagery offered multivalent meanings that prophetically spoke of the times. Secondly, such forms also served as a foothold for the public to the unfamiliar vocabulary of modern art. For Goncharova, the spirit of Russian art is its accessibility and depth. In a letter to a friend, Goncharova wrote, “You can understand the most abstract of things only in the forms you see most often, and also through whatever works of art you’ve seen.”11 In this way her paintings would serve as a medium towards social unity.
Goncharova was unapologetic in locating herself within Russian culture and aligning herself with an Orthodox worldview. Explaining why her art relied on the visual language of icons, Goncharova noted that she held a “kinship with other souls.”12 In this regard, her paintings became windows to these souls. Contrary to her lifestyle that exemplified the rebellious, modern, and bohemian artist, Goncharova held a religious worldview that connected her with God, others, and the land. As the Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann noted, Christianity’s primary action is not intellectual assent, but entrance: one enters into the church, the Eucharist, and the kingdom.13 Thus, just as the art of Orthodox Christianity is an entrance into a spiritual world, Goncharova’s art became the means for her to know the other.
Goncharova’s icon paintings also expressed her family’s religious inclinations. The artist’s maternal grandfather taught at the Moscow Theological Academy. Parton notes how there were several priests in Goncharova’s family. He also recounts how Goncharova’s nurse, Maria, took her to church when the young artist was growing up on her grandmother’s estate.14 Thus, in painting icons, Goncharova followed the vocation of many in her family. However, as a woman, her religious paintings were severely criticized; the subject matter was unfit for a female to execute. In an open letter, she wrote, “I believe that everybody, including women, has an intellect in the form of the image of God, that there are no bounds to the human will and mind.”15 While she described one of her religious paintings to a friend in another letter, Goncharova broke into lament, asking, “Will the Lord not let me paint this? Lord forgive me. . . . I believe in the Lord firmly enough. Who knows who believes and how?”16 This same letter disclosed how Goncharova took on the formal rules of Orthodox icon painting including the spiritual practice of prayer and fasting.
Theologian Cecilia González-Andrieu asks viewers to respect the integrity of religious works by recommending that they restrain their perception to the work’s primary mode—that of a particular worshipping community. Thus, González-Andrieu calls for an “honest autonomy” that defines the work primarily by its first operation.17 Thereby, an icon is only truly autonomous in the context of what it was created for. González-Andrieu’s honest autonomy carries deep theological implications, verifying in a like manner how persons are only truly autonomous when they grasp God’s original intent for their lives. Yet, if we solely judge religious art or humanity on this premise, we negate the reality of both sin’s alienation and Christ’s redemption. Both religious art and people have survived as aliens in a strange land. It is even safe to say that some have thrived. Furthermore, through Christ, the Spirit fulfills God’s intentions. So while honest autonomy is an ideal goal, there is grace.
This grace allows for Goncharova to utilize the religious function of the icon in order to upset the prevailing rationalism, individualism, and depersonalization she sensed in modernity. Furthermore, her work carried ethical momentum that questioned the gender hierarchies of the church, thereby loosing the restraints that prohibited women from creating icons.
Nicoletta Misler reports that the results of Goncharova’s recovery of icon painting taught the artist how the power of that art form can incite social action, while simultaneously preserving its own value and expression regardless of Goncharova’s secular application.18 In this manner, Goncharova models for the twenty-first century Christian artist how religious impulses can help shape secular society’s public realm. Art, through its prophetic nature, has the capability to question prevailing attitudes and norms.
THE PROPHETIC NATURE OF ART
Goncharova’s icon paintings are more than a painterly formal exercise wherein an artist is looking for new paradigms through primitive forms of expression. She seriously understood herself as a prophet standing at the forefront of change, and art was to lead the way into a new modern era. In addition, she understood primitivism to be subversive because it called attention to a national culture that was snubbed by elite society, including the Academy. As Parton puts it, “Neo-Primitive represented the ‘other’ Russia.”19
It was Goncharova’s belief that Neo-Primitivism could stimulate the creative impulse that belonged to all. Such creative power had the ability to mediate both individual change and societal change. As a prophet, Goncharova relied on the art form of the icon and biblical imagery to address the social dissatisfaction of the times. In fact, prior to the October Revolution, apocalyptic imagery emerged in many artistic works of literature and painting, especially those relating to St. John’s Book of Revelation. This theme, according to Misler, depicted the anxiety of the age; but it also affirmed “the prophetic nature of what [artists] were writing or painting.”20 Artists were the first to detect the signs of radical change.
Wassily Kandinsky is one example. For the abstract artist, the biblical theme of the apocalypse also signaled a break with the old to make room for the new. The Book of Revelation depicts how destruction is necessary for salvation. Kandinsky chose this path of discontinuity by slowly leaving behind the figure to enter into a world of abstraction. Such work as his 1911 The Angel of the Last Judgment drew on this disjuncture. By formal means, Kandinsky exemplified Russian iconoclasm and entered the de-materialistic mode of the West. Kandinsky joined the Symbolist movement that sought an interior spirituality rather than the Orthodox embodied reality.21
Conversely, Goncharova utilized biblical imagery from the Book of Revelation to make a reference the coming judgment regarding Russia’s neglect of their contextual embodied reality. Unlike Kandinsky, she reveled in the pictorial, the figurative, and the physicality of paint in order to highlight humanity, not to obscure it through abstraction. She created two different multi-panel installations combining images of grape harvest with figures from the book of Revelation. The Vintage: Composition in Nine Parts and The Harvest: Composition in Nine Parts were each created as three sets of triptychs. When assembled, the nine panels from each series were to resemble an iconostasis, the essential backdrop to the altar in every Orthodox church. Thus, these two works took on the added dimension of religious witness, a spiritual presence calling judgment against the evils of secularization, industrialization, and urbanization that sought to minimize the richness of Russian culture and its people.22
GONCHAROVA’S MODEL
Not long after this period of religious work, Goncharova left Russia to pursue stage design work. Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballet Russes, persistently requested Goncharova’s help in incarnating Russian culture for the stage. Goncharova resided and traveled throughout Europe between the years 1914-1916. Once the Russian Revolution occurred, Goncharova settled in Paris. Here, she continued to paint, but mainly depicted the visual richness of her heritage through stage design work. Most notable are the superb costume and set design images for Liturgie (1915). Based on the four gospels, her designed items looked as if they stepped out of an icon painting.
“I want to go east . . . but I ended up in the West,” Goncharova is alleged to have said.23 In her diary, she prayerfully petitioned St. George, “Will you not allow us to return?”24
It was Goncharova’s wish that her work would one day reside in Russia. After the deaths of Goncharova and Larionov in 1962 and 1964, respectively, Alexandra Tomilina became responsible for their estate. Larionov had married Tomilina in the interest of the collection. It was not until Tomilina’s death and Russian political changes in the mid-80s that Goncharova’s art could make it home, finally ensuring that a piece of Russian heritage was preserved for its people. The past had made its way into the future.
As I have mentioned, Christian artists living and working in a postmodern era should take note how Goncharova makes relevant artwork that offers a prophetic model of caring for human particularities that include time, space, and location. A Christian’s social standpoint, cultural heritage, and religious beliefs should unapologetically shape a Christian artist’s work. Moreover, like Goncharova, religion need not be considered a casualty of Western secularization. In fact, religion and art are to push prophetically the boundaries secularization has drawn between the public and private. Thereby, art and religion can provide a social foothold in a world that struggles to find meaning and purpose.
Moreover, Christian artists might take note of how Goncharova exemplifies a mode of creativity that recognized development beyond the self. In her 1913 Manifesto, Natalia Goncharova advocated for an art form that must “fight against the debased and decomposing doctrine of individualism.” She further wrote, “I find those people ridiculous who advocate individuality and who assume there is some value in the ‘I’ even when it is extremely limited.”25 T. S. Eliot echoed the same notion in his 1921 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Here, Eliot understood that art was gained through a progress of “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Like Goncharova, artists are to be receptacles for, in Eliot’s words, “seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images.”26
Parton too related how Goncharova’s storing up of Russian religious and folk imagery “formed the creative syntax of her painterly practice.” He referred to her words, saying “one cannot forget something which is no longer outside of you but within, no longer in the past but in the present.”27 Humanity is formed by, and informs, community and its cultural artifacts. Hence, Goncharova’s avant-guard role moved beyond capturing ground for modern art. Instead, her Manifesto lists the aim “To apprehend the world about us in all its brilliance and diversity, and to bear in mind both its inner and outer content.”28
This inner and outer content is yet one more element of Goncharova’s work that is valuable to the contemporary Christian artist. To reason that the world consists only of its material reality limits humanity. This is why the religious impulse in art is important and must be tended. For this reason, Goncharova incarnates Cecilia González-Andrieu’s idea of “interlacing engagement” of art and religion.29 Indeed, Goncharova provides a paradigm of such interlacing for contemporary Christian artists as she weaves together elements of religion, heritage, and politics while keeping a vital place in the international arts community.
Perhaps instead of summing up Goncharova’s life as a series of dichotomies between old world and new, religion versus modernity, prophetic against tradition, maybe these elements could be seen as interlacing and interactive to form a more holistic view of being human. As her Manifesto makes evident, she did not “fear in painting [either] literature, nor illustration, nor any other bug-bears of contemporaneity.”30 The notion of art for its own sake should be able to intertwine with the idea of art for community’s sake. The two need not be mutually exclusive. Perhaps, then, a faithful Orthodox Christian perspective further enables entrance into such matters of interlacing. Faithful works of art created for community align with the original use of the word leitourgia. Liturgy was the good work offered up for the betterment of a community by a person or group. Goncharova’s leitourgia was to create, store, and return a piece of her country’s heritage.
What are the good works Christian artists should endeavor to make? As Schmemann noted, “As long as Christians will love the Kingdom of God, and not only discuss it, they will ‘represent’ it and signify it, in art and beauty.”31 This art may also serve as commentary on the consensus of the age. Or, perhaps, it may spiritually encourage community. Who knows, it may even influence the art world.
Christian artists need to see the world as something more. This is what is needed in our secular age. Just as one must hold a deep faith in religion, I believe we must do the same with art.
CAPTIONS
Natalya Goncharova
Two of four panels depicting the Four Evangelists, c. 1910-1911
Oil on canvas
Private Collection/Calmann & King Ltd
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Natalya Goncharova
The Archangel Mikhail, 1914
Lithograph on paper
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA
Gift of Thomas P. Whitney (Class of 1937)
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Natalya Goncharova
Self-Portrait, c. 1907
Oil on canvas mounted on board
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA
Gift of Thomas P. Whitney (Class of 1937)
Courtesy of Bridgeman Images
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
NOTES
- Natalia Goncharova, “Artistic Manifest,” in Natalia Goncharova, Beate Kemfert and Alla Chilova, eds. (Hatje Cantz, 2010), 68. Translation credited to John Bowlt, ed. and trans., in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 55-60.
- Anthony Parton, Goncharova: The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova (Suffolk, UK: Antique Collectors Club Limited, 2010), 143.
- Ibid., 174.
- Ibid., 161.
- Ibid., 143.
- Ibid., 174.
- Irina Vakar, in Natalia Goncharova, 29.
- Parton, Goncharova, 16.
- Nicoletta Misler, “Apocalypse and the Russian Peasantry: The Great War in Natalia Goncharova’s Primitivist Paintings,” in Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 4 (1998): 74.
- Ibid., 76.
- Natalia Goncharova, “Natalia Goncharova,” in Amazons of the Avant-Garde, John Bowlt and Matthew Drutt, eds. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 309.
- Goncharova, Natalia Goncharova, 309-310.
- Alexander Schmemann, For The Light Of The World (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963), 26-27.
- Anthony Parton, Goncharova, 15.
- Anthony Parton, Goncharova, 121.
- Goncharova, Natalia Goncharova, 309-310.
- Cecilia Gonzáles-Andrieu, Bridge to Wonder (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), 79.
- Misler, “Apocalypse and the Russian Peasantry,” 76.
- Parton, Goncharova, 144.
- Misler, “Apocalypse and the Russian Peasantry,” 62.
- Ibid., p. 64.
- Parton, Goncharova, 175.
- Natalia Goncharova, “The Life of Natalia Goncharova,” in Natalia Goncharova, 9.
- Gleb, Pospelov, “The Artistic Legacy of Natalia Goncharova,” in Natalia Goncharova, 62-63.
- Goncharova, “Artistic Manifest,” 68.
- T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1921).
- Parton, Goncharova, 180.
- Goncharova, “Artistic Manifest,” 68.
- Gonzáles-Andrieu, Bridge to Wonder, 88.
- Goncharova, “Artistic Manifest,” 68.
- Schmemann, For The Light Of The World, 30.
