Burliuk, David (1882-1967)

Among the most accomplished and internationally known of the New Deal Gallery artists, Burliuk called himself “The Father of Russian Futurism” with good reason. He was an important figure in early 20th-century avant-garde circles, collaborating or exhibiting alongside painters like Kandinsky, Picasso, and Rousseau; writing poetry with Mayakovski, Yessenin, and Gorky; and counting as friends composers like Rachmaninoff, Scriabine, Gershwin, and Prokofiev. He painted a portrait of groundbreaking filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. The multitalented artist—whose name sometimes is spelled Burlyuk—was born in Kharkov, Russia, attended various art schools in Europe, and became an energetic creator of multi-media happenings that anticipate performance art: drinking tea under a suspended piano; staging an exhibition of paintings in a coal mine. His constantly changing style has been characterized as Fauvist, Cubist, Futurist, Social Realist, and Neo-Primitivist. Burliuk lived through the Russian revolutions before relocating to Japan (1920-22) and then eventually to America (1922), claiming to have crossed into Alaska using as his passport a Vanity Fair article about him. He became a US citizen in 1930 and lived the rest of his life on Long Island. Between 1923-1940 he worked as art editor and proofreader for a communist newspaper published in New York called Russkiĭ golos (Russian Voice). Throughout his life Burliuk was a prolific painter (creating an estimated 18,000 pictures), self-published with his wife Marussia the art magazine Color and Rhyme (1931-1966), and wrote several important manifestoes—including “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912). Of particular interest for his two works at the NDG and others from the 1930s is a 1926 manifesto entitled “Universal Camp of Radio Modernists” and its vision of an animistic force in the world that infuses his paintings regardless of style: “Everything—from the tiny bug to a tea-spoon—has its specific soul. The whiskey bottle that was on the table is there still forever, but abstract. Consciousness is the possession not only of man, the insignificant particle of creation, but of Mother Nature as well.” 6 works at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 18 works at the Museum of Modern Art. 16 works at the Ukranian Museum. 399 works at WikiArt. 1 more image at FAP. His papers are at Syracuse University.

 

Works in the New Deal Collection at GVCA by David Burliuk:

Featured
Easter Bouquet
Easter Bouquet

In this still life we see upon a sideboard a pot planted with large lilies, as well as smaller flowers growing around them. There is a book open, which looks to be a highly stylized Bible, propped up in its own rectangular vessel. Given the painting's title which one is the Easter Bouquet--the one including lilies (a traditional symbol of resurrection) or the Bible itself? Both are illuminated against a dark background that seems to encompass more than just shadows.

Steamboat
Steamboat

We see a steamboat on a river, its importance shown via a stack located at the center of Burliuk's composition and by how much space the boat itself occupies--seemingly the width of the river. The watercolor is drawn in a neo-primitive style, especially with the squat figures in foreground. Earth and sky are painted using the same hues; the steamboat incorporates some of them into itself.

burliukGVCA