Exploring Color

Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1918

Nina Gurianova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9789057011924
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136648724
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

This is an examination of the paintings, books, poetry and theoretical work of Russian avant-garde artist, Olga Rozanova. The text assesses Rozanova's life and work, aiming to recreate the spirit of the counterculture milieu that contributed to the transformation of 20th-century art.

QUEEN OF SPADES. FROM THE SERIES PLAYING CARDS, C. 1915.

OIL ON CANVAS. 77.5 × 61.5 CM. COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, SIMBIRSK.

Olga Rozanova belonged to that new race of twentieth-century artists who “came from afar, from the outside, when the rebellion was already under way; no one knew their faces or names, these junior officers and privates. But come they did, pure as a glacial lake and hard as the granite cliffs surrounding it, and threw the rebels into confusion. That is why Futurism found itself at an impasse and became overheated, as it were.”¹ In the categorical statement of Kazimir Malevich, these artists came “to purge the personality of academic clutter, burn out the mold of the past in the brain and establish time, space, tempos and rhythm, movement—the foundations of the present day.”²

Rozanova’s independent concept of art and her development as an artist were as intimately connected with her stimulating environment as they were shaped by her extraordinary personality and her exceptional talent as a painter. Links of friendship and collaboration bound her to Mikhail Matiushin and Elena Guro, Nikolai Kulbin and Aleksei Kruchenykh, Pavel Filonov and Velimir Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Pougny (Puni), and Aleksander Rodchenko. A continual search for a new expressiveness and consistent innovation were natural and regular processes in her art, and this may be why it immediately defies all attempts to enclose it within the bounds of any single tendency or group. Rozanova cannot be “assigned” only to the Union of Youth or, say, to Malevich’s group, for her art is so whole and unique that it breaks all such boundaries. Her career reflects in miniature the fate of the early Russian avant-garde, which was driven by an inexorable and constant striving for renewal and a denial of previous achievements. She perceived the meaning of art in the necessity of this movement, remarking in one of her essays that “There is nothing more awful in the World than an artist’s immutable Face … only those who have a presentiment of themselves as new can create.”³ Paraphrasing Nikolai Berdiaev’s remark about Aleksander Scriabin one might say that her development as an artist was “an amazing manifestation of the creative evolution of an individual. This creative evolution sweeps aside art in the old sense of the word, which seemed eternal.”⁴

As a kind of contrast with Rozanova’s rich inner evolution and the striking intensity with which her talent developed (her entire mature artistic life spanned less than nine years, between 1910 and 1918), her biography seems ordinary and not very eventful. Only a page or two are devoted to her in the entry compiled for a never-published encyclopedia of the visual arts by her contemporary, the artist Varvara Stepanova:

Rozanova, Olga Vladimirovna.

Innovative painter, one of abstractionist members of the Union of Youth, Jack of Diamonds, Supremus, Left Federation of the Professional Union of Artist-Painters.

Received her training as an artist in private schools in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

All her life Rozanova championed radical new ideas in art, for which her works are especially valuable. Her highest achievements were in abstract painting (suprematism and tsvetopis’ [literally, “color painting”; see chapter 4 of this volume—N. G.], which afforded her an ample scope to ambitious use of color. Color was enormously important in her art and constitutes the foundation of her painting. Besides painting, Rozanova wrote essays on art for the journals Supremus and The Union of Youth and the newspaper Anarchy and composed futurist and abstract poetry. She collaborated with the poet Kruchenykh on a number of interesting books to which she contributed drawings; some of these books were printed by hand and had wood and linoleum engravings. She worked a great deal in decorative art, in which area she also demonstrated considerable accomplishment.

At the height of her creative powers, Rozanova died in 1918 from diphtheria following a cold she had contracted while working at an airport on preparations for the first anniversary of the October Revolution.⁵

The sudden death of the thirty-two-year-old artist came as a shock to her fellow leftist artists, underlining even more forcibly the uniqueness, authenticity, and value of everything she created. Her few extant letters convey the sincerity, charm, and gentle irony of her person—the same features that account for the immediate fascination with her work.

A daring and brilliant artist, Olga Rozanova was incredibly helpless in practical, everyday matters, and she was constantly forced to steal time from her painting to do boring office work to support herself. “I have a job,” she bitterly mocked herself, “which to me amounts to firewood and a bowl of porridge.” There were times when she literally did not have money for paint and canvas, when “all my doubts grow into a tangle of immense proportions….”⁶ But all this in some sense belonged to another life that she refused to take seriously (“Don’t complain of anything; complaining is a return to the past, while the future is bright,” as the self-named “futurians” believed).⁷ In the “furious struggle” of theories and tendencies, amid everyday cares and all those things usually referred to as “the tribulations of war and the first years of the Revolution,” she managed to preserve her inner freedom and a romantic outlook on life that was alien to sentimental rapture or obtuse bitterness. For her, truth and reality consisted of everything she understood by the notion of art, by which she meant the source of joy and the will to live: “The world is a piece of raw material—for the unreceptive soul it is the back of a mirror, but for reflective souls it is a mirror of images appearing continually.”⁸ This is also evidenced in her correspondence: “I would like to paint big pictures, but I am waiting to get the time, for there is no point in painting in fits and starts. I only like doing things if I enjoy them! And unexpected, accidental interruptions in my work torment me and disrupt the integrity of my ideas. Speaking generally, I want to be an artist first and only then all the rest… I want as soon as possible to paint pictures and write articles, and I am absolutely convinced that this is what I must do!”⁹

Because her personal archive is scattered and very little of it has survived, there are almost no factual records of Rozanova’s early “apprenticeship” period as an artist. For this reason, newly discovered family documents and visual materials from her brother’s collection (now in the private collection of Aleksander Fedorovsky, Berlin) are especially valuable. Of particular note are her early sketch pads of drawings in pencil and ink from her Vladimir period and her time at Anatolii Bolshakov’s school and with Konstantin Iuon in Moscow (1906—1907). There are also albums with pencil and watercolor drafts done in 1913 and watercolor Suprematist sketches for the Verbovka exhibition of decorative art in 1916 and 1917. ¹⁰ In 1904, at the age of eighteen, she graduated from school in Vladimir, where she had grown up, and went to Moscow to study painting. She began in Bolshakov’s art school, where she worked under Nikolai Ulianov and the sculptor Andrei Matveev, and in the private studio of then popular landscape artist luon, who worked in an impressionist mode. The nude studies and landscape sketches in her early notebooks date from that period. It is only her unusual approach to the model that distinguishes her pencil drawings of nudes from many such works by other students. In contrast to the usual distance between artist and model, which causes the human body to be treated as a thing or artistic object, she injects into each drawing an individual, personal element of portraiture and indicates on every page not only the exact date, but also the name of the model, often in a friendly, diminutive nickname such as “Shura,” “Sania,” and so on (figure i). Bolshakov’s and Iuon’s studios, where the atmosphere was fairly democratic and free from ossified dogmas, became the first serious school for many young artists who had come from the provinces to take the entrance examinations for the art colleges. As Iuon recalled later of his classes, “What did I mainly teach? I believed least of all in study that amounted to a review of current work and instructions to the students as to what should be added and deleted, precisely what had to be changed, made redder, more yellow, and so on. I always thought that above all students needed to be taught the ability to see and study the laws of the visual world.”¹¹

By 1907—10 the group studying drawing and painting included Rozanova’s future comrades in the Supremus group, Liubov Popova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Serge Charchoune, and between 1911 and 1915, Varvara Stepanova. Rozanova also audited classes at the Imperial Stroganov Institute, but this was merely a brief episode in her artistic biography.

The years 1907 to 1910 may be viewed as a distinct “first Moscow” period in Rozanova’s career; they were significant years in the formation of her individuali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Foreword
• Translator’s note
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Abbreviations