Natalia Goncharova

(Russia, 03/07/1881 - 17/10/1962)

Cyclist (1913)

A pioneering avant-garde artist, Goncharova is best known for her radical contributions to Modern art in the early 20th century. As a key figure in the Russian avant-garde movement, she co-founded the Rayonism movement along with the influential Jack of Diamonds and the more radical Donkey’s Tail artist groups, challenging academic conventions and championing traditional Russian styles over Western expectations, ultimately playing a decisive role in shaping the artistic climate that would define the modernist era.

Born in 1881 in Imperial Russia, she was raised in a cultured, aristocratic family and began her studies at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1901. Soon turning her attention away from sculpture and to painting, she quickly flourished and began exhibiting in major Russian salons in 1903, being awarded a silver medal for sculpture in 1904.

Goncharova’s early work was heavily influenced by Russian folk art and the traditional crafts of her rural upbringing which she reinterpreted with a modernist sensibility. Her peasant scenes and still lifes, with their bold contours and flattened forms, rejected academic realism in favor of a raw, direct vitality. In doing so, she helped to redefine what modern art could mean in a distinctly Russian context.

When Der Blaue Reiter group was founded in 1911, she was one of the first to join with her experimentations with Cubism and Futurism leading to the development of the Cubo-Futurism movement along with her own style, which she called Rayonism, that emphasised a dynamic intersection of light rays and the dissolution of solid forms into vibrant, abstract fields.

Her work during this period was often controversial, especially her depiction of female nudes which led to her arrest in 1910 for displaying ‘corrupting’ images, and her religious paintings which were denounced by the Orthodox Church for their perceived blasphemy. But such notriety led her to become the first avant-garde artist of any gender to have a major exhibition at a Moscow museum when she showed over 800 works at the Mikhailova Art Salon in 1913, which consolidated her reputation as one of the most prolific and versatile artists of her generation.

In 1921, Goncharova moved to Paris, joining a vibrant community of Russian émigré artists and exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne that same year, followed by regular showings at the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des Indépendants. In France, her artistic practice expanded to include costume and stage design, most notably for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where her bold sense of colour and form found new expression in theatrical settings. Though she remained in Paris for the rest of her life, her work continued to engage with Russian themes, synthesising the iconographic traditions of the East with the modernist impulses of the West.

Image: Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist (1913). Oil on canvas, 78 x 105 cm. The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.