If Matisse had been a Muscovite…

Natalia Goncharova, subject of a first British show, was a true ‘Amazon’ of Russian art, says Rosamund Bartlett

On March 24 1910 in the heart of old Moscow, the plush surroundings of a club for the cultural elite became the scene of a scandal. In the space of a few years, the Free Aesthetics Society had achieved renown for its

weekly meetings devoted to contemporary poetry, music and art. On this occasion there was to be a lecture, and the first solo exhibition of a young artist.

It was a one-day event for members only, but word had got out, and a journalist of the old school bribed a member of staff in order to gain entry, intent on exposing the decadence of this den of aesthetes. In the next morning’s paper, he denounced as an abomination the 20 or so paintings on show, singling out a few that, in his opinion, were as obscene as illicit pornographic postcards. Most outrageous of all, he thundered, was the fact that the painter, Natalia Goncharova, was a woman.

As well as giving one painting of a primitive stone woman the blasphemous title Deity of Fertility, the artist had also brazenly tackled a genre long considered the preserve of men: the female nude. Her two paintings of artists’ models were executed in a bold manner somewhat reminiscent of Matisse. For this indecency she needed to be punished: the police arrived to remove the offending pictures, and Goncharova was taken to court for corrupting public morals.

But she had thrown down the gauntlet. Within three years she would defy convention to become the undisputed leader of the Moscow avant-garde, and the first among equals of a brilliant generation of fearless “Amazons”. Only revolutionary Russia could boast an avant-garde in which female artists played such a prominent role.

Goncharova was born in 1881, a few months before Picasso, and shared her name with a great aunt who married Alexander Pushkin. When she was 10, her family, impoverished gentry, moved from their country estate near Kaluga to Moscow. In 1901, she enrolled at the city’s School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, along with six other women and 137 men. A rebel from the outset, she chose the unladylike path of studying sculpture, then opted to live openly with her fellow student Mikhail Larionov, who would remain her partner for life. (They finally married in 1955, when they were both in their mid-70s and ill health was looming, purely to ensure each would inherit the other’s legacy).

Larionov’s first advice to Goncharova was that she “open her eyes to her own eyes” and drop sculpture for painting. After she did, her eyes were further opened by the modern French painters whose relentless experimentation was changing the language of art.

Goncharova could not travel to Tahiti, as Gauguin had, but in the summer of 1903 Larionov took her for the first time down to the warm south of Russia where he had grown up. For a young woman brought up on Slavic birch trees and snowdrifts, Tiraspol, Odessa and the steppe were just as exotic as the South Seas, shockingly colourful and ethnically diverse. While there, Larionov and Goncharova painted furiously, propelled by a shared ambition to make a name for themselves and say something new in Russian art.

Returning to Moscow, they found kindred spirits drawn to Impressionism who also rejected the staid world of academic realist painting, just as their French predecessors had in the 1870s. Their artistic ideas still lagged behind the Paris avant-garde – soon to be confronted by the Fauves – but not for long.

In January 1905, in the midst of its disastrous war with Japan, came the first of Russia’s revolutions. By the end of the year, Nicholas II had capitulated to demands for basic civil rights and the abolition of censorship – a cultural and political watershed which provided the necessary conditions for the young Russian avant-garde to flourish.

In 1906, Sergei Diaghilev was given funding to curate an enormous retrospective of Russian art at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in a bid to improve the country’s image abroad. Larionov and Goncharova (then both 25) were the youngest artists represented. Two years later they were invited to contribute to an exhibition in Moscow in which for the first time