Footnotes

Provenance
With the Grosvenor Gallery, stock no. 5467
Acquired from the above in 1975 by His Honour Judge Bruce Griffiths, QC, for £250
Thence by descent

His Honour Judge Bruce Griffiths, QC, (1924-1999), was chairman of the Art Committee of the Welsh Arts Council, the Welsh Portrait Sculpture Trust and the Contemporary Art Society for Wales.

Lev (Shekhtel) Zhegin, 1892-1969, who confirmed the authenticity of the offered lot and inscribed its verso in 1962, was a painter and graphic artist and close friend of Larionov. Along with Nikolai Vinogradov, Zhegin organised the sending of works by Larionov and Goncharova from their Moscow studio to Paris following the couple's relocation to France after 1915.

The offered lot is an exceptionally rare work and a significant discovery in the field. Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova drew a series of illustrations which were published as lithographic illustrations to the poem Le Futur by Konstantin Bolshakov. The poem garnered a scandalous reception when it was published in Moscow in 1913 and was subsequently confiscated by the police.

Konstantin Bolshakov (1895-1938), was an important Moscow Futurist poet and his long poem, Le Futur was deemed provocative because it focused on the appearance of a naked woman in a city who inflames the menfolk, arousing the 'ancient Adam' in their loins. An ensuing frenzy of lust results in the death of the men from exhaustion and their bodies litter the streets. Ultimately, the poem ends on a positive note because from the fruit of the men's loins a new world will be born, but the authorities were blinded by the scandalous subject of the work and it was confiscated. Many copies were destroyed and the poem was supressed, along with the beautiful and pioneering illustrations by Larionov and Goncharova.

The artistic union of Bolshakov, Larionov and Goncharova for the publication of the poem in 1913 was a successful one. Bolshakov's text lends itself to geometric forms: at the beginning of the poem he likens a triangular sunset to the female's body, while the lines of verse to which the offered lot pertains emphasise the energy and power of the woman. Larionov's illustration depicts a woman about whom nothing is soft and vulnerable and everything is angular, determined and pre-determined: she herself will prove to be the final fate of the men of the city.

Вышла на площадь / Женщина / Дерзко нагая / Походкой, распаляющей страсть...

She came out onto the square/ This woman/ Walking, flagrantly unclothed, setting lust aflame... [K. Bolshakov, Le Futur, Moscow, 1913]

Interestingly enough, the rarity and significance of Bolshakov's poem with illustrations by Larionov and Goncharova, was underscored when a copy of the 1913 publication was stolen, alongside Newton's Principia from the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg in 2002. Thankfully the books were recovered but the theft underlines contemporary appreciation of the importance of the book.

The preparatory drawings for the lithographic illustrations for the poem by Goncharova are presently in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery, a bequest of George Costakis.