Today I want to talk about the concept of facture. Have you heard of the term before? Until I got into studying Gontcharova I had not and this is after spending my entire life involved with art on one level or another. Dictionary.com defines it thusly: facture- 1. The act, process or manner of making anything 2. The thing made. Everything has facture and can be broken down descriptively to define its made qualities. For example let’s discover the facture of a stainless steel cooking pot. What are its made qualities? Smooth, metal, shiny, volumetric, rigid, heavy etc. We start to arrive at a definition of the object.
In terms of art I think the word usually gets defined a little too narrowly as relating to paint handling and texture. While these are certainly aspects of a given painting’s facture there is so much more to consider as to the made qualities. In particular, what is the painting on? How does the paint relate to the ground? Is there a conscious relationship between the scene painted and the surface on which the scene appears? Generally, there may not be any relationship and the facture is limited to the surface. Pablo Picasso paints a painting on a canvas without creating a connection between the two. He needs a surface on which to paint. That’s it.
In the case of Natalia Gontcharova and in particular much of her work post Russia, the facture of a work is what I call 100% engaged. The surface on which the painting appears supports or influences the meaning of the work. There is a conscious relationship between all the made qualities. To simplify somewhat, if the scene painted is a sad one, the surface on which the scene appears is also sad. There is no neutral. The entire thing is didactic.
Here’s a fine example. I’m posting a paper entitled ‘The Peasant Exodus’ which concerns a work I refer to by the same name. This work of art-and it is more ‘work of art’ than painting- is a good way to look at both Gontcharova’s fully engaged facture as well as her development of the narrative between Russian period works and those from the West (1920 on). She starts to create variations, often contradictions, of earlier works that have significantly altered facture and meaning while still resembling those to which they relate. I find it quite astonishing, the facility with which she executes these later things.
With this living art history stuff and the beginnings of new ideas (2nd generation) on Natalia Gontcharova, it’s important to realize that you, the members of this LinkedIn community, are seeing for the first time works which only I have seen and analyzed. Thank you for being involved. This is made possible because she is so didactic, such a teacher, that works speak so clearly for themselves, that we can with some certainty and clarity, enjoy this living process of discovery.
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