Donkey's Tail

Donkey's Tail (in Russian: Oslinyi Khvost). Title of an exhibition organized in Moscow in 1912 by Goncharova and Larionov after they had dissociated themselves from the Knave of Diamonds group in 1911. They accused the Knave of Diamonds of being too much under foreign influence, and advocated a nationalist Russian art; at this time Goncharova and Larionov themselves were painting in a Neo-primitivist manner based partly on icon painting and peasant art. Malevich and Tatlin were the only other major artists who were well represented at the exhibition; Chagall sent one picture, but otherwise the artists involved were minor figures. The title of the exhibition was an aspect of Larionov's primitivism, referring to an incident in 1910 when three pictures painted with a brush tied to a donkey's tail were shown at the jury-free Salon des Indépendents in Paris (this stunt was devised by a journalist called Roland Dorgelès, who wanted to poke fun at modern art; the pictures were hung as works of the fictitious ‘Boronali', an anagram of aliboron, ‘jackass'). At the Moscow exhibition there was an outcry because some of the paintings on view had religious subjects—for example Goncharova's The Four Evangelists (Russian Museum, St Petersburg, 1910–11)—and it was thought to be irreverent to show religious works under such a title (the police ordered several to be removed). Goncharova and Larionov followed it up with the Target Exhibition in 1913.