Footnotes

Provenance
Robert Chanler collection
Private collection, Connecticut
Private collection, acquired from the above circa 1995
Christie's, New York, 23 April 2010, 29; erroneously entitled 'Mythological figure'
Christie's, 10 December 2018, lot 45, offered with the same erroneous title
Acquired at the above by the present owner

Literature
The Pilgrims Almanach, 1925, Vol.II, illustrated p.33

In 1922 Burliuk arrived in New York where he soon met collector and art critic Christian Brinton (1870-1942), as well as an eccentric millionaire and artist Robert W. Chanler (1872-1930), grandson of John Jacob Astor. Both of those connections proved to be critically important for the artist's growing reputation and acclaim in America. Katherine Dreier describes Chanler as follows: "He was a gifted artist... His home was always open to all painters and writers and Burliuk thoroughly enjoyed the people he met around the table in the spacious, hospitable house, representing as they did, both the Arts and the bohemian life of New York. Here he met, among others, Marcel Duchamp...Stokowsky, Sorine, and Augustus John" (Katherine Dreier, Burliuk, 1944, p. 102). In the group of artists who gathered around Chanler and who lived in his 'fantasy house' in Greenwich Village in New York, Burliuk met Constantin Aladjalov (1900-1987), Vladimir Bobritsky (1898-1986), and Nikolai Cickovsky (1894-1984). Their first co-operation was the performance of a play entitled The Skygirl, an erotic pantomime dystopia in three acts on a star with prologue and epilogue on Earth, 3 scenes on a star, written by the Russian émigré and eclectic writer, self-promoter and social climber Ivan Narodny (1870-1953). On 8 July 1923, the play was performed by the American and Russian artists at the home of Mary Harriman Rumsey, the widow of sculptor Charles Carey Rumsey. She was a key figure in the contemporary New York art scene and, like Burliuk, took an active interest in the political and social problems that America faced. She turned her late husband's midtown studio into a small theater and exhibition space, where she promoted artistic experimentation above all else. Burliuk designed the scenery for the first act and the costumes for the entire show, and he also performed in the role of Luna. The present work was painted by Burliuk in connection with that production and was also published in a 'bohemian publication', backed by Chandler's fortune, in which the group announced that Narodnyi created new cosmocratic religion calling for the union of science and art and for the liberation of arts from the yokes of commerce and machinery. This publication, called The Pilgrims Almanach, in which Burliuk was one of co-editors, resulted in only five issues. The first three issues, published in 1925, mainly focused on the publication of the play The Skygirl. The present painting, showing one of the characters of the play, Dr. Phoebos, was published in The Pilgrims Almanach, Vol. II, p. 33 in 1925.