Khlebnikov by his surroundings on the estate.
In Larionov's works exhibited at the "Golden Fleece" six months earlier, the effect of primitivism had been conveyed by a number of techniques. The rules of shading and of perspective were ignored or broken: the figures looked flat rather than three-dimensional, and appeared to be arbitrarily hemmed in or cut off at the edges by the borders or surface of the painting. Camilla Gray notes:
One thus gets the impression of a brief moment arbitrarily cut short, destroying the idea of a picture as a world complete in itself.[1]
This refusal to create an illusion of "another world" complete unto itself was to be central to Futurism and to Khlebnikov. For the Futurists, an art work would require action by the public: without this, it would be incomplete. Khlebnikov would continually create the impression of an arbitrary cutting short of his work. He would invite others to complete what he had started.[2] The idea that a poem could be "ended" on paper was itself something from which he recoiled. The only time Khlebnikov was to mention "bequeathing the end of the poem" would be early in 1917 when—on a wave of revolutionary enthusiasm—he would associate it with the abolition of all states of space and the unification of the human race.[3]
In 1911, Khlebnikov wrote two of his greatest primitiv-
- ↑ Camilla Gray notes: "The deliberate 'rudeness' of Larionov's work of 1907–13, his disrespect for both pictorial and social conventions, was a general characteristic of the so-called Futurist movement in Russia—so little resembling the Italian movement—of which Larionov's work is the first expression. In Russia, Futurism came first in painting and later in poetry—and indeed almost all the poets came to their writing from painting, and many of the literary devices in Russian Futurist poetry can be directly related to Larionov's painting of this time: for example, the use of 'irreverent, irrelevant' associations; the imitation of children's art; the adaptation of folk-art imagery and motifs." The Russian Esperiment in Art, p 107. For passage quoted above: ibid p 105.
- ↑ Mayakosty, V.V.Khlebnikov, in: E J Brown, op cit p 86.
- ↑ Letter to Petnikov, §§ V pp 313—14.
