Natalia Goncharova

• 1. Introduction

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  Natalia Goncharova was born on the 3rd of July 1881, the same year as Picasso and Fernand Leger, in the small village of Nagaevo in what is now the Chernsky District of Tula Oblast. That coincidence of birth years was no accident of fate. Goncharova would go on to reshape Russian art alongside those European giants, not by following them, but by insisting on a different path entirely.

  She painted faces on the streets of Moscow. She walked through crowds with hieroglyphics on her cheeks and flowers on her brow. She appeared topless in public with symbols on her chest, distributing a manifesto titled "Why We Paint Our Faces." At a time when women in Russian art institutions were denied diplomas even upon completing their studies, Goncharova was already building a career that would define a generation of avant-garde movements.

  Her work moved from Russian icons and peasant folk art through Cubism and Futurism, eventually arriving at a style she and her lifelong partner Mikhail Larionov called Rayonism. The censor seized her religious paintings. Ballet impresarios courted her. And decades after her death, a single painting sold at auction for more than nine million dollars. How did a sculptor's student from Tula Oblast become one of the most expensive women artists in auction history?

• 2. Family and Formation

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  Sergey Mikhaylovich Goncharov, Natalia's father, was an architect who had graduated from the prestigious Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He designed and built the family home himself, where Natalia and her brother Afanasii were raised and educated by their mother and grandmother. The family considered themselves politically liberal, and that openness shaped the household in which Goncharova came of age.

  The family's main estate in the Kaluga province, called Polotnianyi Zavod, left a lasting mark on her early work. The life there blurred the leisure and working worlds together, and Goncharova drew her inspiration from watching the everyday activities of the servants and peasants on the property. Her gardening images, which can be identified with the landscape of that estate, reflect that quiet observation. Photographs of her at the estate show her wearing peasant clothes paired with city shoes, a detail that captures the contradiction she would carry into her art.

  When she moved to Moscow at age ten in 1892, Goncharova carried that rural background with her into the fast-paced city. She graduated from the Fourth Women's Gymnasium in 1898 and tried several career paths, including zoology, history, botany, and medicine, before settling on sculpture. That decision led her to one of the most consequential encounters of her life. Goncharova was a great grandniece to Natalia Pushkina (nee Goncharova), and the family's proximity to Russian cultural history ran deep.

• 3. School and Larionov

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  In the autumn of 1901, Goncharova was accepted to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where she trained as a sculptor under Pavel Trubetskoi, who was associated with the World of Art movement. By 1903 she was exhibiting in major Russian salons, and in the academic years 1903-04 she was awarded a silver medal for sculpture. It was at that school that she met Mikhail Larionov, her fellow student and lifelong partner. They soon began sharing both a studio and a living space.

  The school's institutional barriers were a constant presence. Although gender segregation in official art institutions had officially ended by the close of the century, women were still denied the right to receive a diploma upon completing their studies. In 1909, Goncharova withdrew from the Moscow School, not in defeat, but in pursuit of something better. She moved to classes at Ilya Mashkov and Alexander Mikhailovsky's studios, where she could study both male and female nudes and received training equivalent to what the Moscow School would have granted her had she been male.

  In 1910, a turning point came when a group of students, including Goncharova, Larionov, Robert Falk, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Alexander Kuprin, and Ilya Mashkov, were expelled from Konstantin Korovin's portrait class for imitating the contemporary style of European Modernism. That expulsion did not end their careers. It started a movement.

• 4. Jack of Diamonds, Donkey's Tail

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  The students expelled from Korovin's classes, along with others, soon formed Moscow's first radical independent exhibiting group, named by Larionov the Jack of Diamonds, which ran from 1909 to 1911. The name was deliberately provocative: it alluded to both boulevard literature and prison uniforms.

  The group's first exhibition, held from December 1910 through January 1911, included Primitivist and Cubist paintings by Goncharova. But the group fractured in 1912 when Larionov split from Aristarkh Lentulov and Pyotr Konchalovsky to form the more radical Donkey's Tail, which ran from 1912 to 1913. At the Donkey's Tail's first exhibition, held in March-April 1912 and organized by Larionov, more than fifty of Goncharova's paintings were on display.

  The Donkey's Tail was conceived as a deliberate break from European art influence. Its goal was the establishment of an independent Russian school of modern art. Goncharova drew her Primitivist inspirations from Russian icons and folk art, known as luboks. The exhibition drew a swift response from authorities. The censor confiscated her religiously-themed work The Evangelists (1910-11), ruling it blasphemous on several grounds: the painting was displayed in a show named after a donkey's rear end, it blended sacred and profane imagery, and there were longstanding taboos against women painting icons at all. The painting's seizure did not slow Goncharova. She was already moving in several directions at once, each one more ambitious than the last.

• 5. Rayonism and Russian Futurism

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  In 1911, Goncharova and Larionov developed Rayonism, a style they produced paintings in through 1914. Yellow and Green Forest (1913) stands as one of her Rayonist works, while Airplane over a Train (1912) represents her Cubo-Futurist output from the same period. These were not peripheral works. They placed her among the leading artists in both Rayonist and Cubo-Futurist circles.

  As leaders of the Russian Futurists, Goncharova and Larionov organized provocative lecture evenings in the same vein as their Italian counterparts. She was also involved in graphic design, writing and illustrating several avant-garde books. She exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, known as the Exposition de L'art Russe, in 1906. Another significant exhibition she participated in was The Target (March-April 1913) and No. 4 (March-April 1914).

  In an interview, she acknowledged drawing inspiration from Picasso, Le Fauconnier, and Braque, but noted that her first Cubist works predated her exposure to those figures by as much as a year. She was also a member of the German-based Der Blaue Reiter group from its founding in 1911. Her exhibitions held in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1913 and 1914 were the first promoting a new artist by an independent gallery, a distinction that spoke to her central place in Russian avant-garde life before the revolution. When the censor was seizing her icons and the expulsion from Korovin's class was still fresh, Goncharova was already shaping the vocabulary that Russian modernism would speak.

• 6. Paris and the Ballets Russes

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  On the 29th of April 1914, Goncharova and Larionov left Russia together and traveled to Paris. That same year, she designed the costumes and sets for the Ballets Russes's premiere of The Golden Cockerel in the city. The collaboration with Sergei Diaghilev would define much of her later career. She also designed costumes for the company's production of The Firebird and worked closely with Diaghilev and Bronislava Nijinska.

  In 1915, she began designing ballet costumes and sets in Geneva, and started work on a series of designs for a Diaghilev-commissioned ballet to be titled Liturgy. The project included designs named Six Winged Seraph, Angel, St. Andrew, St. Mark, and Nativity, among others. Igor Stravinsky was invited to compose the score, and both Larionov and Leonide Massine were also involved. The ballet never materialized.

  Goncharova moved to Paris permanently in 1921 and designed stage sets for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. She also exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1921 and participated regularly at the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des Independants. Between 1922 and 1926, she created fashion designs for Marie Cuttoli's shop, Maison Myrbor on the Rue Vincent in Paris. Her embroidered and appliqued dress designs drew on Russian folk art, Byzantine mosaic, and her Ballets Russes work. Her influence on French fashion of the period extended to the legendary designer Paul Poiret. Goncharova became a French national in 1938, and on the 2nd of June 1955, four years after Larionov suffered a stroke, the two married in Paris to safeguard their rights of inheritance.

• 7. Legacy and the Art Market

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  Natalia Goncharova died on the 17th of October 1962 in Paris, after a debilitating struggle with rheumatoid arthritis. She was the first of the pair to go. In 1961, the Arts Council of Great Britain had held a major retrospective of her work alongside Larionov's, and subsequent recognition arrived in waves across the following decades.

  In 2019, the Tate Modern in London held a retrospective of her work, and that same year an exhibition opened at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. In 2020, that cooperative exhibition traveled to the Ateneum in Helsinki, Finland, running from the 27th of February until the 17th of May. Her work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. Her paintings now sit in collections at the Guggenheim, the Israel Museum, the McNay Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Te Papa Tongarewa in New Zealand, and the Tate.

  The art market has placed extraordinary values on her work. On the 18th of June 2007, her 1909 painting Picking Apples sold at Christie's for $9.8 million, setting a record for any female artist at the time. Later that year, in November 2007, Bluebells (1909) brought £3.1 million, or roughly $6.2 million. In 2008, her 1912 still-life The Flowers, formerly part of Guillaume Apollinaire's collection, sold for $10.8 million. And in 2019, a scholar researching the Czech Futurist painter Ruzena Zatkova discovered two previously unknown gouaches by Goncharova in a private collection, both dedicated to Zatkova and both dated to 1916, made while Zatkova was ill with tuberculosis during their time together at Diaghilev's Swiss villa.