Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova

A gift from the artist to Barnett D.Conlan, a journalist for The Daily Mail and stepfather of the present owner
Thence by descent

Original canvas. The paint surface is slightly dirty with some light abrasion to the canvas edges. There are fine lines of craquelure where pigment has been applied most thickly. UV light reveals no retouching. Held in a wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Executed between 1920 and 1930, the offered lot is exemplary of Natalia Goncharova's most accomplished work and combines several elements characteristic of her oeuvre.

 

In 1916, Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov travelled to Spain to join Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes in San Sebastian. Goncharova stayed there for six months, and during took up the theme of a new national imagery. As Raymond Coigniat writes: "Spain struck her so profoundly that she lived under its influence for many years and her subsequent paintings would remain shaped by its inspiration". The influence of Spain and, above all, of Spanish women with their mantillas and lace, features in Goncharova's work up until the end of the 1940's. In her series of Spanish portraits, her chromatic range becomes pared down to what the poet Marina Tsvetaeva described as 'the Goncharovan spectrum'. She executed her Castilian subjects in a palette of black, white, ochre and brown, all of which are evident in the offered portrait. Completely inspired by her experiences in Spain, it is typical of the work Goncharova executed in Paris between 1920 and 1930.

 

It is possible to talk of stylistic synthesis here since the work betrays the influences of those French artists who guided and inspired Goncharova's oeuvre from the outset of her career; notably Paul Gauguin who abandoned the notion of three dimension in his canvases, and painted in flat planes.

 

Finally, this canvas also references the Russian culture so deeply instilled in Goncharova's art. The influence of Russian fairy tales is evident here, with the mantilla serving as a substitute for a Russian kokoshnik, not to mention the figure's pose which harks back to an Eastern culture. There are also allusions to Orthodox iconography in the manner in which the figure dominates the space, and in the partially gilded and abstract background that bears all the archetypal attributes of a Russian icon. Goncharova's Spanish portraits have been compared to cathedrals because of their monumentality within the pictorial space.

 

The offered portrait can thus be appreciated as an apex in the body of work of an artist, who sought in her painting to "merge that which was foreign and that which was her own" and championed an art of perennial development and progression.