Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde

A prime force in Russia's early 20th-century avant-garde, Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) distilled folk art, medieval iconography and Siberian shamanism into his own pugnacious brand of neoprimitivism aswarm with archaic animals, strange trees, cats and scrawled words. He applied this style to stage designs for Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, which made this flamboyant painter a celebrity in the West. Earlier, between 1912 and 1914, Larionov launched rayism, an abstract style of painting in which rays of light intersect to create dynamic planes of color. In this lively, kinetically illustrated monograph, Parton, a British art historian, examines Larionov's four and a half decades spent in France, where he settled in 1919, his mutually inspirational association with artist Nataliya Goncharova, and his oils, graphics and stage sets influenced by cubism and futurism. (Dec.)