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“Everyone, even the most Ignorant and those with no interest in the Spiritual, perceives the eternal gulf that has arisen between the painting of yesterday and the painting of today. An eternal gulf. Yesterday we did not have art. Today we do.” –David Burliuk The early days of the Russian Futurist movement were full of such bold proclamations, many coming from the mouth of one David Burliuk (1882-1967), widely considered the group’s founding father and leader. His clan of painters and poets referred to themselves as the Budetliane—“people of the future” or “those who will be”—and they worked out their ideas of where the Russian avant-garde needed to go in group exhibitions, public debates, and fragments of manifestoes written on the backside of cheap wallpaper. Burliuk liked to say that Russian Futurism was born in 1910 in a gray room in St. Petersburg; certainly it was the year his group began to coalesce in earnest, moving and thinking more as a unit. As such, Burkliuk’s 1910 painting “Abstraction” is an important work to consider, marking a critical turning point in his career. The years leading up to 1910 had Burliuk experimenting heavily with color, pulling from both the Fauvism he’d encountered in Paris in his travels there in 1904 as well as the Russian folk art he’d grown up with. But as new technologies emerged (cinema, radio, automobiles, planes) and permanently altered the pace of modern life as well as the experience of time itself, Burliuk felt a propulsive drive to locate the visual vocabulary that would reflect the world both as it was (in all its dizziness) and as it might be (in all its vagueness). He started operating within the language of the four D’s—disharmony, disproportion, dissonance, and deconstruction—something like the Russian Futurist’s guiding principles (though you’d be hard-pressed to find any clearly-stated ideology among its members). They weren’t setting out to destroy the old canon so much as create a parallel one, an alternate reality to better express reality. “Abstraction”’s journey takes place primarily in that final of the four D’s—deconstruction. The puzzle of polygons that jockey and fit together just so inside the frame make immediately clear Burliuk’s admiration for the Cubism he’d discovered, one of the slew of potential artistic futures he’d brought back from Paris and that became so central to the Russian Futurist’s imagery that they are commonly referred to as the Russian Cubo-Futurists. (“Painting,” Burliuk remarked not long after creating “Abstraction”, “has begun to live for itself.”) Don’t fail to note, though, Burliuk’s own inflections and overlays of color (never losing that Russian folk aspect) and texture (taking on, in some places, the cragginess of rocks or the strange fungal blossom of a Petri dish). “Abstraction” is a painting about painting, about shattering and making sense of what is left, but it is not an impersonal exploration. The years to follow were explosive for Burliuk: exhibiting with the Knave of Diamonds in Moscow, befriending Wassily Kandinsky and joining Der Blaue Reiter (Burliuk was the group’s last living member), resettling in the United States in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Yet always he retained that sensibility of being something of a prophet or a madman, just a few steps ahead of the rest of us, reveling in illegibility because illegibility was the state of the world. At an exhibit in New York organized by John Sloan in 1926, Burliuk was there, a string of beads dangling from one ear, passing out pamphlets. “America is worthy of the great new art,” they announced. The future had arrived—Burliuk was just there to show us what it looked like. To inquire about this piece, head here.
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