Elena Genrikhovna Guro

Elena Guro worked across many artistic disciplines. She was a true synaesthete and is credited by some as being the real inventor of Zaum, the trans-rational poetry made famous by Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov. Guro and her husband, the artist and composer Mikhail Matyushin, were pivotal figures in the Union of Youth and Cubo-Futurist movements however, unlike their peers, they sought to resolve questions of space and movement through a return to nature and the application of organic principals to the creative process. Guro's work was cut short by her death from leukaemia at the age of 36 but her discoveries were continued in the work of Matyushin and the Ender siblings at the department of Organic Culture and culminated in Matyushin's 1932 treatise on colour theory.

The Soviet art critic and dealer Victor Kholodkov (1948-2015) was particularly drawn to the graphic works and typographical experiments of the Russian avant-garde. He published a number of articles on the subject and contributed to exhibitions after his emigration from the Soviet Union in 1989, including the 1992 Guggenheim exhibition The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde. His extensive collection of papers and artwork relating to VKhUTEMAS was acquired by the Getty Museum in 1995 and his collection of Soviet music sheet covers is now in The Library of Congress.

The present selection of graphic works, oils and original film posters (lots 107-138) from the first half of the 20^th century is characteristic of Kholodkov’s interests in the convergence of artistic, cultural and political concerns of the period. He is known to have purchased much of his collection directly from the artists or their families; others were acquired directly from Nikolai Khardzhiev, another well-known collector of the Russian avant-garde.