Artist Dossier: Natalia Gonchorova

From the Files

+ In 1986, Sotheby's New York sold the 1911 oil Flowering Trees for $34,100. That same canvas hit the block in June 2007 at Sotheby's London, where it earned a tidy £580,000 ($1 million).

+ Goncharova was 57 when she married her lifelong partner and artistic collaborator, Mikhail Federovich Larionov, in 1955. His top auction lot is Still Life with Jug and Icon, 1910-12, which fetched £2.3 million ($4.5 million) in a Sotheby's London sale in June 2007.

+ In September 2010, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London will stage "Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 1900-1939," featuring the work of Goncharova alongside that of other Diaghilev artists, such as Matisse and Picasso.

+ London's Grosvenor Gallery sold a large Cubist work by Goncharova for $600,000 in the 1980s; recently another dealer sold it again, this time to a Russian collector, for $5 million.

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“It’s clearly the arrival of Russian collectors on the auction scene overthe past three years that has changed her market,” says Olivier Camu, the head of Christie’s Impressionist and modern art department. He points to the fact that the steep ascent in Goncharova’s prices began with the house’s February 2006 sale of her energetic, slightly abstracted oil Les Rameurs, 1912, for £1.2 million ($2.1 million)—against a high estimate of £250,000 ($442,000)—coinciding with the revival of the Russian economy.

Since then, four lots by the artist, including Picking Apples, have surpassed Les Rameurs at auction. One of these was Bluebells, circa 1909, “painted around the time when she began to discover primitivism,” says Jo Vickery, Sotheby’s head of Russian art. It brought £3.1 million ($6.2 million) at the house’sRussian art evening sale in London in November 2007.

A central figure in the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century, Goncharova was born in Nagaevo, Siberia, to a well-educated, politically liberal family. In 1901 she enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where she met the man who would be her lifelong partner, the artist Mikhail Larionov. (They married in 1955 for estate-planning reasons.)  During the next decade, the two held several scandalous exhibitions of their work in Moscow and showed with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter in Munich. Goncharova gained notoriety for her personal displays as well: She painted her face then paraded topless through the streets of Moscow, and she staged a one-day exhibition of her nude paintings in 1910, prompting her arrest for pornography, although she managed to avoid jail.

This early chapter in Goncharova’s career—known as her Russian period, before she moved to France, in 1917, and began to work as a stage designer for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—is considered her most creative and most attractive to collectors. Her work during this time reveals many influences, but she is known for her contributions to three concurrent art trends: Rayonism, a landscape-based abstract style characterized by linear forms that derive from rays of light, which she and Larionov invented; Cubo-Futurism, a fusion, as the name suggests, of Cubism and Futurism; and Neoprimitivism, a consciously naive style, born in turn-of-the-century France, that drew inspiration from traditional religious and folk art. Goncharova’s record-setting lot is a prime example of the last category.

How often does a canvas of Picking Apples’ caliber hit the block? “Once every 10 years,” says Camu, who adds that the artist’s early oils are incredibly rare and that Picking Apples’ impeccable provenance enhanced its appeal. “It was completely fresh to the market and had been with the family of the artist until her death, when it was bought by the sellers, who are American collectors.”

Goncharova was prolific throughout her lifetime; in the exhibition catalogue that accompanied her 1913 Moscow retrospective, she bragged, perhaps falsely, that she had already painted some 700 canvases. The majority of her oil paintings, however, are housed in museums throughout Russia, Europe and the United States. The largest collections belong to the Centre Pompidou, in Paris; the Russian Museum, in St. Petersburg; and the State Tretyakov Gallery, in Moscow. Among the U.S. institutions with examples of her work are New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.