A Lasting Legacy: The Estate of Michael Mennello

Provenance:

Sold: Shannon's Fine Art Auctioneers, Milford, Connecticut, October 21, 2004, Lot 44

One of the most exuberant figures of the Russian avant-garde, David Burliuk came from a large creative family of artists and poets. Born in Ukraine in 1882 (then a part of the Russian Empire), he attended art schools in Kazan and Odessa, and then continued to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts. Burliuk’s artistic practice spanned painting, poetry, drawing, and engraving and was devoted to the pursuit of the modern. He and his Futurist compatriots challenged audiences to question the accepted ideals of aesthetics and beauty in the hope of developing a new and more forward-thinking world.

In 1910, Burliuk was enrolled in the Moscow Academy of Fine Art, and it was here that he began to participate in exhibitions and collectives that questioned the conventional standards of beauty in fine art. The same year, the young artist also exhibited with the influential “Jack of Diamonds” group. Their first exhibition, held in December 1910, included works by French Cubists Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, and André Lhote, as well as Wassily Kandinsky and Alexey von Jawlensky. It was also during this time that Burliuk collaborated with a group of artists and poets, including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Benedict Livshits, and Velimir Khlebnikov, to form a literary and artistic group known as Gileia (after the Greek name for Scythian lands at the mouth of the Dnipro River). Originally founded on the principles of Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” the group rapidly transformed into the Cubo-Futurists, which amalgamated artistic elements found in Italian Futurism and French Analytical Cubism. Abstraction, 1910 (Lot 20), dates from this developmentally significant period for Burliuk. Its fractal composition, delineated with thickly applied paint and pared down to the essentials of line, surface, color, and texture, seems to unify elements of Cubism and Futurism and reveals the bold experimentation of the young artist.

Burliuk continued to actively promote Russian Futurism in Europe, participating in Munich's Der Blaue Reiter (1911, 1912) and exhibited at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin (1913) and at the Parisian Salon des Independants (1914). His articles "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" (1912) and "Die 'Wilden' Russlands," in the Der Blaue Reiter almanac (1912) brought the iconoclastic ideas of the Russian Futurists to the attention of a wider circle of Western artists and critics. However, the turmoil of World War I led to his departure to Japan via Siberia with his wife and two sons. Eventually the family moved to New York City in 1922 and then to Hampton Bays, Long Island in 1939. Here, the artist embedded himself with a group of pioneering artists that shared his politically progressive views, including Nicolai Cikovsky and the brothers Moses and Raphael Soyer. They became known as the Hampton Bays Art Group, as the Russian émigrés created a bohemian paradise of artistic progression and political discourse while making the most of the landscapes in their art.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Burliuk developed his own kind of socialist realism that depicts thick-set, round-faced figures that appear rooted in the earth. These works celebrate the vitality of ordinary people and their daily life. Naturally, one of his favorite artists was Vincent Van Gogh, with his highly expressive brushwork, bold colors, and depictions of rugged peasants. After a 1949-1950 trip to Europe, Burliuk’s admiration for Van Gogh came to the fore and inspired him to create a series of works dedicated to the Dutch artist. It is likely that The Sower (Lot 21) was made after this trip to Europe as an homage to Van Gogh’s own rendition, painted in 1888 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). This work perfectly embodies the ethos who once stated: “Let your eyes rest upon the surfaces of my pictures…I throw pigments with brushes, with a palette knife, smear them on my fingers, and splash the colors from the tubes…Visual topography is the appreciation of paintings from the characteristics of their surfaces…In my works you will find every kind of surface one is able to imagine or meet in the labyrinths of life.” The artist died in Hamptons Bay in 1967 at the age of 85.