Chasing the Sun: Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde

Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 7-9pm

Lecture featuring Taras Koznarsky, Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

The lecture will explore the evolution of Mikhail Larionov, most known for his neoprimitivist contributions to the avant-garde movements of the 1910s. His work Untitled Composition, which is featured in the exhibition, Framing Narratives: Renaissance to Modernism, will be discussed in the context of his experiments as a Russian émigré artist in Paris in the 1920s and of a futurist poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky it purports to illustrate. It is a striking piece that we shall investigate collectively: monumental in composition and color choices, adventurous in the blending of the primitivist,cubist and constructivist vocabularies, enigmatic in its imagery and message.