Catalogue: Important Russian Art Auction
15 October 2020
40. BURLIUK, DAVID (1882–1967)
Kherson, signed, titled and inscribed "1908".
Oil on canvas, 51.5 by 76.5 cm.
60,000–90,000 GBP
Executed c. 1950s.
Provenance: Estate of the artist.
Private collection, USA.
Private collection, Europe.
David Burliuk’s picture Kherson was painted from recollections of his youthful, innovative, avant-garde endeavours and the happy times of creative experimentation during the summer spent in Ukraine.
Arriving in Moscow in Autumn 1907, Burliuk met Mikhail Larionov and quickly struck up a friendship with him based on their shared enthusiasm for Neo-Impressionism. During the following summer, in 1908, the two friends went off together to Chernyanka in Kherson Province, where Burliuk’s father managed the estate of Count Mordvinov. Subsequently, the future avant-garde artists were to visit the estate repeatedly as they took their first steps towards the new trend of “barbarisation” in painting and paved the way for the switch to “primitive” works, a significant development in the history of Russian art.
The landscape and genre composition to be auctioned is executed in a style that imitates naïve painting, and forms part of Burliuk’s late “peasant” cycle. His characters – peasants with their farm implements, a red and green horse and a dandy-like figure sporting a top hat and cane – come to be constant subjects of the canvases in the series and are found in A Peasant and His Wife, Peasant Woman Watering a Vegetable Garden, Looking Down on a Peasant Homestead and other works by the artist that were destined to firmly establish his fame as “the father of Russian Futurism”.
Notes on symbols:
* Indicates 5% Import Duty Charge applies.
Ω Indicates 20% Import Duty Charge applies.
§ Indicates Artist's Resale Right applies.
† Indicates Standard VAT scheme applies, and the rate of 20% VAT will be charged on both hammer price and premium.