Dancing Soldiers

© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
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Dancing Soldiers

Russia, 1909-1910
Paintings
Oil on canvas
34 5/8 × 40 1/8 in. (87.95 × 101.92 cm)
Purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection, Mr. and Mrs. John C. Best, and Friends of the Museum, Charles Feldman, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Kantor (80.3)
Modern Art
Currently on public view:
Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Since gallery displays may change often, please contact us before you visit to make certain this item is on view.

Provenance

The artist (1881- 1964).  Henryk Berlewi (1894-1967), Paris; [Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York]; sold in 1980 to LACMA.

Label

With their use of bold colors, heavy outlines, and flat figures, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova achieved a modern yet unmistakably Russian look associated with the movement called Neoprimitiv...
With their use of bold colors, heavy outlines, and flat figures, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova achieved a modern yet unmistakably Russian look associated with the movement called Neoprimitivism. Dancing Soldiers and Religious Composition: Archangel Michael (to the right) combine a bright palette adapted from the French Fauves (“wild beasts”) with traditional Russian practices such as icon painting and woodcut illustrations called lubok. Neo- primitivism also typically embraced a deliberately crude visual vocabulary, emphasized by the curse words emitted by Larionov’s soldiers.

Both paintings were featured prominently in the Jack of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow in December 1910, which evolved into an influential avant-garde artists society. Eventually Larionov and Goncharova left Russia permanently for Paris; numerous costumes and sketches from their collaborations with the Paris-based dance company Ballets Russes are also in LACMA’s collection.

Wall label, 2021.
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Bibliography

  • Gray, Camilla.  The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922.  London: Recorede, 1962.
  • Powell III, Earl A., Robert Winter, and Stephanie Barron. The Robert O. Anderson Building. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986.
  • Gray, Camilla.  The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922.  London: Recorede, 1962.
  • Powell III, Earl A., Robert Winter, and Stephanie Barron. The Robert O. Anderson Building. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986.
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
  • Barron, Stephanie. Acknowledgments, or Every Label Tells a Story. Los Angeles: Art Catalogues: LACMA, 2017.
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