Mikhail Larionov
Dancing Soldiers1909-1910

On view:

Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Oil painting of four figures in green jackets seated on a rust-red ground, one playing an accordion, with Cyrillic text, a pale horse, bottles, and a small dog

Artist or Maker: Mikhail Larionov
Russian Empire (now Moldova), 1881–1964, active France
Title: Dancing Soldiers
Place Made: Russia
Date Made: 1909-1910
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 34 5/8 × 40 1/8 in. (87.95 × 101.92 cm)
Credit Line: 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
Accession Number: 80.3
Classification: Paintings
Collecting Area: Modern Art
Curatorial Notes: 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.
Provenance: The artist (1881- 1964). Henryk Berlewi (1894-1967), Paris; [Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York]; sold in 1980 to LACMA.
Selected Bibliography: Barron, Stephanie. Acknowledgments, or Every Label Tells a Story. Los Angeles: Art Catalogues: LACMA, 2017.

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