LARIONOV, MIKHAIL (Russian, 1881-1964)

The painter, stage designer, illustrator and draughtsman Mikhaïl Larionov was, together with his lifelong companion the artist Natalia Gontcharova, a leader of the Russian avant-garde, the originator of Rayonism and a leading exponent of Neo-primitivism. Neo-primitivism was a Russian art movement which emerged around 1909. It proposed a new consciously unsophisticated style of painting that, using bright, decorative and sumptuous colours, fuses elements of Cézanne, Cubism and Futurism with traditional Russian folk art conventions and motifs, notably the Byzantine icons and the lubok woodblock prints, which Larionov is known to have collected.

Mikhaïl Larionov entered the School of Art and Architecture in Moscow 1898 and was suspended three times for his advanced tendencies. In 1908 he staged the Golden Fleece exhibition in Moscow which included paintings by international avant-garde artists such as Matisse, Derain, Braque and Van Gogh. As a result of this exhibition and the first of a series of trips to Paris, he started to experiment with the Post-Impressionism and Neo-primitivism styles. He was a founding member of two important Russian artistic groups, Jack of Diamonds (1909 - 1911) and the more radical Donkey’s Tail (1912 -1913). Both groups adopted elements of the popular and folk art while they demonstrated also the heritage of French paintings from Cézanne to the Cubists. His first solo show was in 1911 in Moscow. After creating Rayonism, the first near-abstract art in Russia inspired by Italian Futurism, he moved with Gontcharova to Paris where they settled permanently in 1918 and achieved renown through their work for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. During the 1920s Larionov played a significant role within the École de Paris and continued to make impressive contributions to painting, graphic art and theatrical design until his death.

In the work Soldat à Cheval, the flattened space and distorted dimensions of the horse and its rider recall the immediacy of children’s art and the simplicity of Neo-primitivism. This work is one of a series of paintings devoted to the daily life of the soldiers that the artist made at the time of his military service and some of which were exhibited while being part of the Jack of Diamonds group.