Rayonism

Rayonism (Rayonnism, Rayism; in Russian, Luchism). A type of abstract or semi-abstract painting practised by the Russian artists Goncharova and Larionov and a few followers from about 1912 to 1914 and representing their own adaptation of Futurism. Rayonism was launched at the Target exhibition in Moscow in 1913. In the same year Larionov published a manifesto on the subject, although it bore the date June 1912 (he claimed to have been painting in a Rayonist manner as early as 1909, but Russian artists of this time were not averse to backdating their works in an effort to stake their claims as pioneers of modernism). The manifesto stated: ‘Rayonism is a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism and Orphism', and Rayonist pictures do indeed combine something of the fragmentation or splintering of form of Cubism, the dynamic movement of Cubism, and the colour of Orphism. The style was bound up with a very unclear theory of invisible rays, in some ways analogous to the ‘lines of force’ that were postulated by the Futurists. These lines or rays were thought to be emitted by objects and intercepted by other objects in the vicinity, and it was the artist's task to manipulate them for his own aesthetic purposes: ‘The rays which emanate from the objects and cross over one another give rise to rayonist forms. The artist transfigures these forms by bending them and submitting them to his desire for aesthetic expression.’ In early Rayonist paintings an underlying subject is broken up into bundles of slanting lines, but in later ones the lines take over the picture completely so that there is no discernible naturalistic starting-point and the work becomes completely abstract, as in Larionov's Rayonist Composition: Domination of Red (MOMA, New York, dated on painting 1911, but thought to have been executed c. 1913–14). Rayonism was short-lived as both Goncharova and Larionov virtually abandoned easel painting after they left Russia in 1915 and they had no significant followers.