David Burliuk (Russian/American, 1882-1967)Morning still life inscribed with blue pencil 'N18', 'David Burliuk' (stretcher), bearing Kakhovka typography label inscribed in Cyrillic 'David Burliuk, Morning still life' (verso) oil on canvas50 x 70cm (19 11/16 x 27 9/16in).Footnotes:ProvenanceCollection of V. A. PushkarevAcquired from the above by the present owner in the late 1990sThe creative legacy of David Burliuk has come down to us in an extremely disproportionate manner. As it is known, most of his works are made up from his American period. Fate turned out to be not so favourable to his earlier works created in Russia. Many paintings, the existence of which we know from press reviews and exhibition catalogues, turned out to be irretrievably lost. This is especially true for works in the avant-garde style. In contrast to the artist's impressionistic paintings, which were always appreciated and were in demand by private collectors even in Soviet times, his primitivist works, as well as experiments in the style of Cubism or Fauvism, were not taken seriously for a long time. Being unclaimed, they were primarily destroyed as a result of improper storage, and often intentionally ruined. Morning still life in this sense can be attributed to the happy exceptions to this rule.Burliuk was well aware of this state of affairs. Having settled in the early 1920s in America, the artist, several times, tried to get back something from his 'Moscow' artworks. We know from Burliuk's correspondence that most of it was kept at the old Kuntsevo dacha and was left in the care of new tenants, to whom the artist managed to transfer small funds for some time. However, in the autumn 1923, an old acquaintance of Burliuk, photographer Nikolai Yarovov, visited the Kuntsev house. The photographer wrote to him and mentioned that most of the works stored there had fallen into disrepair, 'on the paintings are two layers of chicken dung', many of them were torn and others used by the new owners for insulation and protection from the wind on the terraces. The letter indicates that there are barely any Russian landscapes left and that almost all of them stolen, and there were only 'cubist-futuristic portraits' and other things that the Yarovov was not certain about. For Burliuk, these works that he has left behind were of particular interest - for personal exhibitions he desperately needed examples of his early works that could visually reinforce his proud title of 'father of Russian futurism.' Therefore, Yarovov was transferred money to repair and put things in order. The artist hoped that he would be able to send at least some of them to New York as he was planning, with I. Garbar, an exhibition of Russian paintings. The condition of the Morning Still Life, like the canvas itself, and the preserved author's stretcher, suggests that it was among those works, which Burliuk's entrusted friend managed to take out of the Kuntsevo dacha. The colourful layer on the whole surface has bits of talus and in other places (especially noticeable on the bread loaf and the painting behind it) craquelure. Clearly, the artist's thick layered painting style facilitated the damage, but also the re-stretching of the canvas, or rather, the rough burlap on which the still life is painted.The work is the earliest known example of Burliuk's later favourite still life construction, in which, along with household items, his own works are used. As an example, we can recall a still life with a bouquet of flowers and a book from the collection of the Arkhangelsk Museum, in which the artist's painting Cossack Mamai is used as a background. In Morning Still Life Burliuk recreates two of his works. On the left, we see one of the artist's Fauvist landscapes, reminiscent of his canvas Dnieper rapids from the Russian Museum. On the right, is a fragment of a painting made in a primitivist manner. It apparently depicted the figure of a lumberjack or a reaper in profile - his right arm bent at the elbow got into the composition of the still life. Stylistically, this fragment echoes the artist's well-known primitivist work depicting a running man, from the Rostov Kremlin Museum. It is worth noting that part of the painting's composition (surface of the table of two clay jugs and a loaf of bread) almost completely repeats the composition of the still life with the dog from the Russian Museum, one of the very first Fauvistic paintings of the artist.These parallels, as well as the pronounced expressionist manner of painting, allow us to attribute this still life to the very beginning of the 1910s. On the canvas's verso, the artist's label, with the name of the painting and the number written by hand, has been preserved. A work with this title is not found in the catalogues of exhibitions with Burliuk's participation; at the exhibition Stefanos, held in the spring of 1909 in St. Petersburg, a still life 'Morning coffee' was exhibited. Such names, which give details of the painted still life are generally not typical for Burliuk, and we only see them in catalogues of exhibitions of 1908-1910. He later preferred to label works of this genre in French (Nature morte). Postage paper was used for the above-mentioned label, which preserved the address of the Bergart printing house in Kakhovka. Since the estate where the Burliuks lived before 1913 was located nearby, the artist often used private printing houses in Kakhovka and Kherson to publish his publications. There were also printed and still unresearched catalogues of several exhibitions organized by Burlyuk in Kherson in the late 1900s. Also unknown is the composition of the works sent by the artist in 1910-1913 to various exhibitions in Yekaterinoslav, Rostov-on-Don and St. Petersburg. One of them could have exhibited Morning Still Life.In the end, neither this work nor other works of Burliuk taken from the Kuntsev dacha by Yarovov could be sent back to the artist in New York. For a while, they were in his apartment on the Malaya Bronnaya, and before his departure to South America, he gave them for storage in the House of Press on Nikita Boulevard. Later Burliuk, through many acquaintances, tried to find out their fate, but with no result. The paintings were kept there in basements, without description. Many of them, including, perhaps, 'Morning still life', subsequently ended up in private hands. Since the 1960s, the painting has been in the collection of the director of the Russian Museum, Vasily Pushkarev, who actively sought and collected works of 'leftist' artists.We are grateful to Vladimir Polyakov, author of Khudozhnik David Burliuk, 2016, for this note.This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: ** VAT on imported items at a preferential rate of 5% on Hammer Price and the prevailing rate on Buyer's Premium.For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com
