Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde

This book reconstructs the efforts of avant-garde artists, primarily Natal’ia Goncharova and her Muscovite colleagues, to reclaim Russia’s ‘Eastern’ cultural heritage. Before the First World War, art addressed a crisis in self-representation that was a consequence of Russia’s dual cultural legacies, Asian and European. This text represents Goncharova’s leading role in this project, both as a spokesperson and a painter. The animated and often polarizing debates concerning the cultural identity of contemporary art were often preceded by Goncharova’s practices that react to a critical tradition that, for at least a decade, had accused the radical ‘left’ Muscovite artists of failing to create a national tradition.

• First study of Goncharova’s work in English • Discussion of Orientalism, primitivism in early 20th century Russian Art • Social history of avant-garde in Moscow before 1914

1. Orientalisms; 2. A westernizing avant-garde; 3. Art into life; 4. Nationality on display: official versions, avant-garde interventions; 5. Orientalism in reverse; 6. Anti-artist: the year 1913–1914; 7. Vsechestvo: Russia’s other modernism.