Today I’m posting Natalia Gontcharova’s manifesto from her landmark 1913 one woman show in Moscow. I continue to use this document as a basis for my exploration of her works. It is vital as we examine a particular artist’s oeuvre to, whenever possible, use their own words as a guide to understanding. Fortunately for us, Goncharova is very specific about her intentions and as we see her life and career develop we can watch (nearly) all of her stated aims from 1913 come to fruition.
She creates this manifesto at age 32 right at the height of her popularity in Moscow and just before her forced relocation to the West. It’s a crux moment in her life and fitting that she offers such a bold statement statement regarding her plan of attack. A true manifesto. I love the intensity and directness of her words (or Zdanevich’s if he was, as some suggest, the actual author). I will do this! i will do that! So demonstrative and unlike the typical artist’s statement which, in my experience, usually has more to do with inspiration and feelings than with action.
Remember as you read the manifesto that she is an anti-individualist. Get that idea solid in your mind. She has no need for individualism or the pursuit of your or her own ends in art. Individualism is perhaps best personified by the man I consider to be Gontcharova’s polar opposite Pablo Picasso for whom art was an extended excavation of his own needs and desires, his individual perceptions. This individualistic concept of art in the West is born in the Renaissance as secular painting eventually supplants religious painting as the focus of art. Goncharova thinks of this as an egregious mistake that has horrible consequences for humanity and thus her goal is to reverse the trend. She wants to take art back from the vulgar and decadent and reinvigorate it with meaning and power for all. A Herculean task for sure and perhaps one we ought to be considering today. (Crazy to me that she thought individualism had run amok in 1913! What would she say about the sorry state of ‘Art’ today?)
The translation I am posting is by John Bowlt from “Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934” (1976)
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