Fakes and forgeries, fakes and forgeries, fakes and forgeries! This is what you are met with when you bring up Natalia Gontcharova. There are too many fake and forgeries! It’s all wrong! While this is certainly part of the equation when looking at works of the Russian Avant Garde (RAG) in general and face it, forging Malevich or Rodchenko would appear to be comparatively easy-it’s just geometry after all- this, in my opinion is not the case with Gontcharova. Fakes and forgeries of her work have no narrative quality, no connection to her concepts and very few positive qualities. She has no superficial ‘hand’ or style and therefore her work is difficult to fake or forge.
Back in the summer of 2017 (its been five years already?!) I wrote a paper entitled ‘This is not Natalia’ which you can see as a featured post on my LinkedIn profile if you’re curious to read it. In it I called out a painting that was an obvious fake to my eye that had come up for sale in Monte Carlo and drew some connections between it and paintings that appeared in a now notorious ‘catalogue raisonne’ that came out in 2010. If you do as I suggest and look deliberately and with a sober and serious eye at these paintings, I am confident that you will see what i saw.
Point being I suppose is that in the late 1990s and early 2000s when this particular group of bad paintings came out there wasn’t a serious or correct understanding of what Goncharova does. Remember she is only now starting to truly emerge as an important figure. As I have said she ought not be looked at like other modernists whose emphasis is on themselves and this individualistic path through the arts. If you approach her with that point of view you are likely to get it wrong as the various other writers and scholars often did at that time. She must be approached as a writer of narratives. If you adopt this perspective it’s much easier to see when something fits or doesn’t. It’s a much different way of looking. She is more like an icon writer than she is like Pablo Picasso.
My visual aid for this week is a group of non Natalia works that includes a couple of different types of paintings. First is the painting from the 2017 Ghent RAG show that got definitively shut down after a group of serious people voiced concerns about the authenticity of all the included works. This group of works, which included all the big names, looked suspiciously like tha art from the also shut down Denver RAG show from 2010 but this is a different story for another time. Then I have included some other things I’ve seen over the years. Some are pretty funny actually. Love to know what you’re thinking.
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