Spanish Costume

Currently not on view

Spanish Costume

1916 (design); 1919 (publication)

Natalia Sergeyevna Goncharova (Russian (active Moscow and Paris), 1881–1962)

During the mid-to-late 1910s, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Sergeyevna Goncharova worked on a series of ballets that, had they been realized, would have been perhaps the most radical of Ballets Russes' founder and producer Sergei Diaghilev’s productions to date. Larionov envisioned mechanized figures and stage sets for his Futurist ballets Théâtre des Ombres Couleurs (A Theater of Painted Shadows) and Histoires Naturelles (Natural Histories); while Goncharova fragmented and abstracted the human body in her costume designs inspired by Spanish dances. With no narrative framework, these ballets were abstract in both form and content, and served as precedents for the modernist innovations of the Ballets Russes in the 1920s.

Currently not on view

Object Details

Title:

Spanish Costume
Costume for the Ballet "Foire Espagnole", Plate [13] in L'Art décoratif théâtral moderne (Paris: La Cible, 1919)

Date:

1916 (design); 1919 (publication)

Artist:

Natalia Sergeyevna Goncharova (Russian (active Moscow and Paris), 1881–1962)

Medium:

Color stencil print (pochoir)

Dimensions:

Image: 16 11/16 x 10 1/4 inches (42.4 x 26.1 cm) Sheet: 19 11/16 x 12 11/16 inches (50 x 32.2 cm)

Classification:

Prints

Credit Line:

Gift of Christian Brinton, 1941

Accession Number:

1941-79-52

Geography:

Made in Paris, Île-de-France, France, Europe

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Currently not on view