Though they are ephemeral and impermanent by nature, the purpose of exhibition catalogues is to freeze things in time, in a moment of value and significance for easy consumption by Western minds who can only conceive of things proceeding in neat, linear order.
Which makes them funny places for information on someone like Natalia Gontcharova whose mind and practice are entirely and emphatically nonlinear and for whom the exact date of a thing’s creation is totally meaningless.
I often think, based on all the discrepancies in dating her works i see in contemporaneous catalogues, that if she is being forced by the context to attach a temporal marker to her creation, she will place it so that it’s meaning corresponds to it’s position within her oeuvre as she sees it with zero regard for the date of it’s creation. What matters for her is beauty, meaning and skillful execution. This is a constant.
Take for example the painting known as alternatively The Ice (La Glace, Beyeler 1961), Looking Glass (Leeds 1961) and The Mirror (Le Miroir, Paris 1963) which appeared in three successive shows with not only three separate titles (which is a story in and of itself) but with three different dates of creation.
Galerie Beyeler has it at 1907, Leeds at 1912 and Paris at 1908. Which is correct? Which is most appropriate? Why does it matter? Great questions to ponder as we dive more deeply into Natalia Gontcharova
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