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Lot 69
David Burliuk(1882-1967)Servant Girl
26 September – 7 October 2025, 12:00 EDT
Skinner Marlborough, MassachusettsSold for US$1,280 inc. premium
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Jelena James
Senior Specialist, Head of Sale
Claire Dettelbach
Cataloguer
Jewel Bernier
Cataloguer
David Burliuk (1882-1967)
Servant Girl
signed 'Burliuk' (lower left); with a label from Harbor Gallery, Gold Spring Harbor, Long Island (affixed to the reverse)
oil on board
6 1/4 x 4 3/4 in. (15.9 x 12.1 cm)
signed 'Burliuk' (lower left); with a label from Harbor Gallery, Gold Spring Harbor, Long Island (affixed to the reverse)
oil on board
6 1/4 x 4 3/4 in. (15.9 x 12.1 cm)
Footnotes
Provenance
Harbor Gallery, Gold Spring Harbor, Long Island.
A private collection (acquired from the previous).
By descent to the present private collection.
N.B.
Poet, artist, and writer David Burliuk was born in Riabushky in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) and studied in Kazan, Odessa, and Munich. He became a central part of the early 20th-century Russian Futurist and Avant Garde movements, and in 1910 he formed a group of poets and artists called the Gileia. This would eventually become the Cubo-Futurist movement. The Cubo-Futurists sought to shake off the classical ideas of the past and step beyond the boundaries of acceptability in art. It sought to, as they put it, 'deconstruct' - question, analyze, and dissect - aesthetics and art. Elaborating on this mission, Burliuk wrote:
'deconstruction is the opposite of construction.
a canon can be constructive.
a canon can be deconstructive.
construction can be shifted or displaced.'
(David Burliuk, 'Cubism', in John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 76.)
Their work was controversial, scandalous, and unexpected; of one poetry performance in 1913, artist Alexander Rodchenko wrote that it was 'the first time I had seen such a frenzied, furious audience' (Robert Leach, Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) pp. 42–4).
The Russian Revolution of 1917 signaled the beginning of the end of Russian Futurism as artists and writers fled to less politically perilous nations. Burliuk settled in the New York in 1922 and continued his genre- and expectations-defying work, including utopian manifestos and paintings such as Advent of the Mechanical Man, which was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum's International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1926. Burliuk would always remain closely involved with the artistic groups and movements of his homeland. In 1925, he and other displaced artists created the Association of Revolutionary Masters of Ukraine.
The present work will be included in The David Burliuk Foundation's forthcoming catalog raisonné of the artist's work.