David Davidovich Burliuk

Acquired directly from the artist in 1961
Eric and Salome Estorick Collection
The Estorick Museum, London

London, Grosvenor Gallery, David Burliuk, 1966, cat.no. 45 (titled Industrial Landscape), stock number 6541
Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, David Burliuk, 1966, cat.no.38

Colour and Rhyme no.34, 1959, p.7 (illustrated)
Colour and Rhyme no.45, 1961, p.7 (illustrated)
Colour and Rhyme, London, 1966, p.10, (illustrated)
L'Arte Moderna, vol.VI, 1967, no.48, (illustrated)
David Burliuk, exhibition catalogue at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 1995, p.8

Original canvas which is a little loose on the stretcher. There are some minor spots of paint-loss to the impasto (e.g. to the lower left hand quadrant of the composition) and some light abrasion along the inner frame edge. Fine lines of craquelure are visible in places. UV light reveals Some of the pigments fluoresce under UV light and some stabilising adhesive appears to have been applied to the craquelure in places. Held in a white painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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This painting was executed in 1924.

Shortly after he moved to New York in 1922, Burliuk invented a personal style of painting that was intended to capture the dynamic power of electrical energy and wave patterns, which he called his Radio Style.  The concept is best described as abstract painting of coloured space inspired by the invasion of mechanics. Though it was never a formalist orientation, it echoed Robert Delaunay's apotheoses of technological icons such as the Eiffel Tower and anticipated Marinetti's acoustical depiction of the world, described in the 1933 manifesto Radia, as 'reception, amplification and transfiguration of vibrations emitted by material'. Power Station on Harlem River is a typical example of this style, expressing jubilant confidence in the complimentary relationship between man and the modern world; these colliding spheres become enmeshed in a single field of vision, the intersections mapped by a network of textured strands of colour that weave together primordial rhythms with smoke and electrical surges of technological advancement.

Burliuk's works may lack stylistic uniformity, but his American canvases display the same immense energy that was the trademark of all his actions, and as in his early paintings, an overriding concern for texture and surface. As Burliuk writes in his 1912 essay Faktura, it is through the raw, tactile display of pigments that we are brought face to face with brute modernism as if 'touching the coat of some fabulous wild beast'. 

Unsentimental and vital, Power Station on Harlem River captures a reality that Burliuk understood as being kinetic. His early affiliations with Der Blaue Reiter initiated his pursuit of transcendent energies that set him apart from the sheer abstraction of Mikhail Larionov's Rayonism, and when modern science duly harnessed electromagnetic fields to explore a world of flux, it could not have been better described than through his Radio Style. "The artist must paint not only what he sees but all that he knows and all that he imagines," Burliuk was known to say, which reflects the urge, exemplified so powerfully in this painting, to challenge the purely rationalistic and restore connections to larger metaphysical forces.

'We now want to cross surfaces of coloured frozen lava, fused in the vermillion, red-black and sky cobalt of coloured lava, preserving the picture of a titanic race, a maelstrom of enthusiasm and inspiration, forever of its brows'

( 'A Slap in the Face for Public Taste' 1912)