Olga ROZANOVA — one of the few women attached to movements such as Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism
Disclaimer: The information provided in this episode comes from multiple sources and are not my scientific studies or discoveries. Bear with me as I am editing all the texts and crediting the authors. Thank you!
Welcome to HerArt podcast, a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. In our sixth episode, we will talk about Olga ROZANOVA — one of the few women attached to movements such as Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism. My name is Nata Andreev and I am going to tell you seven curious facts that you didn’t know about an exemplary artist of her era, by bringing her individual theories of spiritual energy and color interaction to bear on those movements, resulting in a unique and emotionally dynamic body of work. It will be amazing if you could join me for the seventeenth session of my Wknd Study Group project this Sunday, June 23rd. We will watch an amazing movie based on the life of French painter Seraphine de Senlis.
Curious Fact #1
Olga Rozanova was born in a small town about 200 kilometers east of Moscow. Her father, Vladimir Iakovlevich Rozanov, was a district police officer, while her mother, Elizaveta Vasilevna Rozanova, was the daughter of an Orthodox priest, educated to a high level for a woman of her generation. Olga was the couple’s fifth child. At 17 years old Rozanova loses her father, leaving Olga’s mother as the head of the household. Rozanova studied at the Vladimir Women’s Gymnasium for eight years, before leaving her home-town to train as a painter in Moscow, where her brother was already based as a law student.
Curious Fact #2
Little is known for certain about Rozanova’s early artistic education, but she definitely trained in private art schools in St. Petersburg and Moscow, working under the tutelage of the Realist painter Nikolai Ulyanov, and with the Impressionist landscape painter Konstantin Yuon. The critic Nina Gurianova notes that Rozanova’s early works are primarily distinguished by the artist’s “unusual approach to the model,” whereby Rozanova brings “into each drawing an individual, personal element of portraiture”, indicating “on every page not only the exact date, but also the name of the model, often in a friendly, diminutive nickname…”.
Curious Fact #3
The aesthetic of Rozanova’s middle period is a striking example of what is now known as Cubo-Futurism, a term for various painting styles developed in Russia during the early 1910s which combined the ideas and techniques of French Cubism with a range of native influences and, and later the influence of Italian Futurism. Cubo-Futurism is often referred to as one of the staging posts on Kazimir Malevich’s journey towards the Suprematist style achieved with his Black Square of 1915 (itself based on a 1913 curtain design for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun). But if works like Malevich’s wear the influence of Cubism on their sleeve, Rozanova’s Cubo-Futurist aesthetic was unusual in its relative lack of reliance on French models, and for its unique affinity with contemporary Italian painting.
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Curious Fact #4
Rozanova exhibited at the so-called Last Futurist Exhibition held in St. Petersburg in 1915, where Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square made its debut. Writing to the Russian poet Alexei Kruchenykh after the exhibition, Rozanova declared that her collages had been the uncredited inspiration for Malevich’s Suprematist style, which she described as “entirely [based on] my paste-ons: a combination of planes, lines, discs (especially discs) and no incorporation whatsoever of real objects. And after all that these scum hide my name.” Oh, girl! I would’ve definitely cursed him out for this.
Despite the tone of this letter, Malevich and Rozanova were said to have enjoyed a close and productive professional relationship, Rozanova acting as Malevich’s secretary while he worked on his unrealized magazine-project Supremus. What a toxic relationship! We often tend to focus on others, letting them influence our lives so much, that we easily let them steal from our ideas, calling it “inspiration.”
Malevich and Rozanova were often seen as working along the same stylistic path, but Rozanova’s interest in color set the Suprematist work of her later years apart from Malevich’s. During 1916–17, she worked on a theory called “tsvetopis”, involving what she called a “transfigured” color scheme. This represented Rozanova’s most concerted attempt to distance her aesthetics from Malevich’s and to establish her own place in relation to the Suprematist aesthetic of the time. Roughly meaning “color painting,” the idea of “tsvetopis” reflected Rozanova’s belief in the primacy of color and color effects in the composition and activation of the painting surface.
Curious Fact #5
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Rozanova became involved in political activism and helped to establish the Bolshevik art schools intended to extend artistic education and training to the worker and peasant classes, which Rozanova saw as reviving the role of the traditional Russian craft workshop. She was also at the center of debates between Suprematists and Constructivists in post-Revolutionary Russia as to which style should define the new artistic culture of the USSR. In the midst of all this activity, on November 8, 1918, Olga Rozanova died at the age of 32 from diphtheria, contracted while she was working on converting Tushino Airport into a domestic architectural space, a project intended to mark the first anniversary of the October Revolution.
Curious Fact #6
Art historian Nina Gurianova describes Olga Rozanova’s art as “so whole and unique” that it “defies all attempts to enclose it within the bounds of any single tendency or group.” Traversing various of the styles and aesthetic groupings which went into making up early-twentieth-century Russian avant-garde aesthetics, her brief career and its untimely end, Gurianova suggests, represent “the fate of the early Russian avant-garde […] in miniature.” The critic Charlotte Douglas notes that Rozanova’s oeuvre was exemplary of its epoch in extending into applied and decorative arts; she received particular acclaim for her designs for books by poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh.
Curious Fact #7
But although Rozanova was an important figure in the Russian avant-garde — one of the “Amazons” of early-twentieth-century Russian art, according to Cubo-Futurist poet Benedikt Livshits — her work has received little sustained critical attention except in Russian-language publications. This relative neglect stands in striking contrast to the reception of her work amongst her peers, such as Aleksander Rodchenko. Other contemporaries described Rozanova’s art as “full of diversity and promise”, while a post mortem 1919 exhibition was visited by 7,000 people, with the art historian Abram Efros either contributing catalog essays or writing favorable reviews. Efros’s article, published in 1919 and republished in 1930, remained the definitive scholarly text on Rozanova until the 1970s. Even the writing on Rozanova that began to appear after that point was often riddled with factual errors and inconsistencies, but a more recent generation of critics such as Gurianova has helped to bring Rozanova’s life and work back from obscurity — to some extent.
Thank you so much for listening to the sixth episode of HerArt podcast — a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. If you want to follow more of what we do, find us on Facebook and Instagram. Tune in next month, when I am going to tell you about Frida KAHLO — the artist that never painted dreams, just the reality. See you later!
