A RUSSIAN FUTURIST WITH AN IMPECCABLE PEDIGREE | April 13th 2008

Bonhams

Natalia Goncharova's futurist works whooshed to prominence as part of the Russian avant-garde, then quickly fell out of style. Fiammetta Rocco, Books and Arts editor of The Economist, predicts a resurgence ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

Natalia Goncharova loved speed. She loved it in 1912 when she painted "Les Rameurs" ("The Oarsmen"), which sold two years ago for over £1m ($2m), nearly seven times its pre-sale estimate. She loved it the following year, when she painted "Cyclist", which is now on show, wheels whirring and head bent low, in London at the Royal Academy's "From Russia" show. And she loved it still when she left Russia with the advent of the revolution in 1917 and moved to Switzerland, where she painted "Sailboat" (pictured), a small blue picture of great skill and dynamism that comes up for sale in early June.

Born in 1881, Goncharova was a central figure of the Russian avant-garde in the early 20th century. She began studying sculpture in Moscow when she was only 20, but quickly moved on to drawing and pastels. There she came under the influence of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, whose work was bought in number and with great enthusiasm by Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin (who also bought "Cyclist"). And she made a close study of the ideas of the Italian futurists, who were the speed queens of their age.

Together with Mikhail Larionov, the painter she married and with whom she would eventually leave Russia and settle in Paris, Goncharova developed Rayonnism, a distinctive modernist style whose most common features are reflected rays of light painted with colour and lines.

But the thrill Goncharova felt at being at the centre of the most innovative period of Russian art, and the excitement generated by her first retrospective in Moscow vanished nearly as quickly as it had blossomed. By the 1950s, war, dislocation and the changing fashions in art combined to force the couple virtually into penury. They were all but forgotten.

It was at this moment that they were introduced to Sir John Rothenstein, the director of the Tate Gallery, whose impeccable eye and unusual openness to people drew him to the world of the Russian émigré painters in France, including Marc Chagall and the widow of Vassily Kandinsky, who had died in 1944.

"We established an immediate understanding," he wrote in his diary on June 30th 1953, after meeting Goncharova and Larionov in Paris where they were living. "He seemed to like my few comments on Goncharova's work and his own (wh. he keeps in the background) and said, ‘There can only be abt 4 or 5 people like you alive just now.' V much touched. Chose works for offer to TG [Tate Gallery] and he wants me to have one."

Rothenstein was instrumental in acquiring several Goncharovas for the Tate, including "Linen", which was painted in 1913, the same year she painted "Cyclist" and held her Moscow retrospective, and "Three Young Women", which dates from 1920.

But the picture he kept for his private collection was among the most interesting. The blue painting features a boat, speeding leftwards. The waves are tipped with white and the sail, marked "NG1", billows out in the foreground. You can't see the hands of the figure at the tiller, or those of his companion in the front of the boat, but you know they are pulling tight.

The most surprising features of the painting, though, are the two vertical divides. On the right of the picture the sail is sunny and white on one side of the dividing line and dark grey on the other. On the left, a monumental, dead tree reaches the whole way up the picture, its branches lopped off. Both the tree and the bi-coloured sail represent some of the strongest themes of Goncharova's work: love and loss; life and death.

In less skilful hands the vertical divides might have put paid to any sense of speed or forward movement. Not here. The sailboat hurtles along, its two anonymous figures hell-bent on stopping themselves from losing all control.

"Sailboat" has been in the Rothenstein family for more than half a century. His heirs have finally been enticed to sell by the recent high prices Goncharova has achieved. Last June "Picking Apples", which she painted in 1909, sold at Christie's Modern and Impressionist sale in London for £4.9m, making her the world's most expensive female painter.

The unbroken Rothenstein provenance will reassure buyers who might be nervous about the increasing number of fake Russian avant-garde paintings that have sprung onto the growing market--an important feature if you want to sell for millions.

That the Rothenstein family has chosen to sell the painting through Bonhams with no firm guarantee, and in a Russian sale rather than the more fashionable Modern and Impressionist sale, is an interesting bet.

The picture was shown to all three auction houses. Sotheby's was ruled out almost immediately. Christie's, which boasted it had ten serious buyers interested in the record-breaking "Picking Apples" last year, came close to winning the commission, but in the end it lost out to Bonhams, which came as something of a shock to the King Street firm.

Bonhams is by a long measure the third most important of the auction houses, but this also makes it the Avis of sale rooms. "We try harder" was the car hire firm's slogan. Bonhams, for whom a £2m painting is a big deal, is trying far harder than its rivals. It proposed the best financial terms to the Rothenstein heirs.

But this alone would not have won it the deal. Bonhams was the only one of the three to offer "Sailboat" its own individual catalogue, printed in both English and Russian.

It has already started advertising the picture in the British press, with further advertising planned in Russia and in Ukraine. And it is sending it on an impressive roadshow: first Paris, then Moscow where it will be shown at a private reception at the British Embassy, and finally New York where it will be the centrepiece of Bonhams' new sale room, which opens on May 8th.

If the picture doesn't sell well after all that effort, the markets really are crumbling.

"Sailboat" by Natalia Goncharova will be the star lot of Bonhams' Russian sale in London on June 9th 2008 (Estimate: £1.5m-2m).

(*Fiammetta Rocco writes the Art.view column on economist.com, and is the author of "The Miraculous Fever-tree".)