Neo-primitivism was a Russian art movement that took its name from Aleksandr Shevchenko's 1913 pamphlet Neo-primitivizm. It proposed a modern painting built from the collision of Western modernism - Cézanne, Cubism, Futurism - with the native conventions of the Russian icon and the lubok, the cheap popular woodcut. Where the preceding Blue Rose painters looked backward into Symbolist haze, the neo-primitivists flattened space, thickened outline, and colored boldly, treating peasant and folk subjects with a deliberately coarse, direct hand. Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov led the way, joined by Shevchenko, Marc Chagall, Kazimir Malevich, Ilya Mashkov, Pavel Filonov, and David Burliuk. Within a few years the same energy split into Rayonism, Cubo-Futurism, and Suprematism, but this folk-rooted modernism remains one of the avant-garde's freshest chapters.
Defining characteristics
- Flattened, unmodelled forms with thick, emphatic outlines
- Bold, often unmixed color laid down with a coarse, direct touch
- Motifs borrowed from the lubok popular print and the Russian icon
- Naive perspective and simplified, blocky figures
- Everyday folk subjects: peasants, village work, fairs, saints
Key figures
- Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) — Painted peasant and folk subjects in flat, forceful color; later co-founded Rayonism
- Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) — Championed the naive, folk-derived aesthetic and co-founded Rayonism
- Aleksandr Shevchenko (1882-1948) — Painter who named the movement in his 1913 pamphlet Neo-primitivizm
- Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) — Passed through neo-primitive folk subjects on the way to Suprematism
- Marc Chagall (1887-1985) — Wove village and folk imagery into dreamlike modernist pictures
Example works
- Haymaking — Natalia Goncharova (1910)
- Bather — Kazimir Malevich (1911)
- I and the Village — Marc Chagall (1911)
Sources
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