As I think about facture and Goncharova it occurs to me that there may be a directional aspect to it sometimes. Directional facture? Weird but check it out.
It’s evident that prior to her leaving Moscow circa 1914 Natalia Gontcharova was interested in portraying her Eastern qualities in a Western milieu. Transposition or transubstantiation. She takes a familiar Russian (Eastern) thing and makes it using Western means. Western facture. She takes the populist, the generic, the humble, the hand crafted and presents it like it’s Fine Art. Mostly this is accomplished with oil paint and stretched canvas. A lubok print, a thing that is disposable and insignificant, becomes an oil painting. An icon, an oil painting. It’s a one way street. A to B. She’s trying to show us what is important about her Eastern-ness to Western eyes, individualists.
Here’s a great example that Ipicked up from Jane Sharpe’s excellent 2006 book “Russian Modernism between East and West: Natalia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant Garde”. The relationship is lubok print to oil painting. The facture changes from Eastern to Western. It’s not a stylistic difference but a made one. This is the Coronation of the Virgin as a cheaply printed, mass produced broadsheet from the 1830s or 40s that becomes an enormous tripartite oil painting on canvas in 1910. It is one thing at first but becomes another. In these East to West instances the meaning remains the same but it is emphasized. The Virgin is good but she becomes even better. Natalia’s perspective on the Orthodox Christian faith is distinctly matriarchal in y humble opinion. She puts the focus on the female storyline. The Coronation of the Virgin is enormous because the story warrants the important size. The print is small perhaps 40 or 50 cm by 30 or 40cm. It would have been posted on the street or hung like a poster on a wall. The oil painting is HUGE measuring in total 268cm x 145cm. In this sense of scale the meaning does change I guess...the meaning or the...volume more like it.
A good example of the West to East action is the Peasant Exodus on which I posted last week. Here she takes a monumental thing made with the former East to West perspective (Peasant Women with Rakes) and negates it in part by, to use the phrase, ‘taking the piss’ out of it. The progress is reversed or rather what could have been is definitely no more. It’s really sad and where does it leave us today nearly 100 years on? Have we made any steps toward a better world for humanity? What if Individualism hadn’t taken root?
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