Goncharova, Natalia

Goncharova, Natalia (1881–1962). Russian-French painter, graphic artist, and designer, born in Tula province, near Moscow, into a distinguished family (she was related to Alexander Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet). From 1898 to 1902 she studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Initially she trained as a sculptor (she was taught by Trubetskoy), but in 1900 she met her fellow student Mikhail Larionov, who encouraged her to turn to painting. They became lifelong companions and in the years leading up to the First World War were among the most prominent figures in Russian avant-garde art, taking part in and often helping to organize a series of major exhibitions in Moscow. Her early paintings were Impressionist, but after the first Golden Fleece exhibition in 1908 she was strongly influenced by modern French painting (including the work of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Matisse), combining this with her interest in peasant art and icon painting to create a Neo-primitive style. To the influences of Fauvism, she later added Cubism and Futurism, and by the time of the Target exhibition of 1913 she was painting in a near-abstract Rayonist style (Cats, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1913). This was Goncharova's most prolific period as a painter; in 1913 she held a one-woman exhibition in Moscow in which she showed more than 700 works. The preface to the catalogue takes the form of a manifesto in which she says that Western art has ‘dried up’ and that consequently she was looking to the East for inspiration. She was interested not only in ancient Russian art, but also in Chinese and Indian painting.

In 1915 Goncharova left Russia with Larionov and after settling in Paris in 1919 she devoted herself mainly to designing settings and costumes for the theatre, particularly Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; this aspect of her work is well represented in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She also did a good deal of book illustration and continued to paint intermittently to the end of her life, but after the death of Diaghilev in 1929, her main period of achievement was over. Goncharova and Larionov became French citizens in 1938 and were married in 1955. By this time they had been virtually forgotten, but there was a great revival of interest in them in the early 1960s.