Ashley Explores The Arts

Hello! I’m Ashley Duncan and welcome to my podcast, The Forgotten Women of Art History. The reason I am starting this podcast is for my Modern Art History class, but also because women are left out of everything. We talk so much in my art class about how women artists were pushed a side or men stole credit for their artwork, and I am tired of that. I am here to shed some light on women artists that were never given the spotlight because of their gender.

On today’s episode, I will be taking us on a trip to Russia during the Russian Revolution and the art movement of Suprematism. During this movement in Russia, there were about two notable female artists, but I will be only focusing on one, Olga Rozanova.

Olga Rozanova was born in 1886 in a Vladimir province, just east of Moscow, Russia. Her father was a district police officer and her mother was a daughter of an Orthodox priest. This gave her mother a higher education than most women of her generation.

Between the years of 1896 and 1904, Rozanova had the chance to study at the Vladimir Women’s Gymnasium. After her years there, little is known about her later education. A lot of sources say she studied at private schools in St. Petersburg. Some say she studied at Bolshatov Art College and then Stroganov School of Applied art, but no source can confirm. I guess that’s what happens to females throughout history. Facts about your education is lost because you were never supposed to have one.

Anyways… I wanted to discuss Olga Rozanova because of her influence on Suprematism. Suprematism is the art movement of colorful geometric shapes on plain backgrounds. It started in 1915 in St. Petersburg, Russia with Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and the exhibition of 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition. As important as Malevich’s contribution is to the art movement, that is not why we are here today.

The point of these such simple figures on a canvas was because they could offer a person a ‘pure feeling.’ Or as it is said in our textbook, …isms: Understanding Modern Art, “the pictorial forms of Suprematism are entirely self-sufficient and independent of the real world.” Olga Rozanova agreed with this, even though it was a roughly coined idea by Kazimir Malevich. She also agreed with the idea that representation was the enemy of Suprematist artists. Which makes sense, seeing as they believed art was independent.

The only issue with Suprematism itself, is that it didn’t last long, much like many other art movements. By the year 1917, Suprematism was endorsed by the new regime of the Russian Revolution. Which was only a year before Rozanova passed away. She passed away in November of 1918. However, before she went, Olga Rozanova accomplished some pretty great things.

Before we get into Rozanova’s artwork, I wanted to discuss the reason I chose to talk about her today. I chose Olga Rozanova specifically because first off, she is a female artist and not a lot of them get talked about. Second off, she is from Russia, which is different from a lot of art movements, which basically all began in Paris, France. However, something that I really admire Rozanova for is the fact that she was a part of different fugitive avant-garde movements and groups pre-revolution Russia.

She was a part of the Union of Youth Group, the Jack of Diamonds, and the Left Federation of the Professional Union of Artist-Painters. In 1913, Rozanova was actually elected to be part of the executive board of the Union of Youth group and ended up writing their manifesto, “The Foundations of the New Art and Why it is not Understood.” I believe this is actually the manifesto discussed in our Art Theory textbook, but under a different title, “The Bases of the New Creation and the Reasons Why it is Misunderstood.” Rozanova not only wrote manifestos but she began sound poetry as well. Sound poetry is basically a combination of literary and musical composition, where the phonetic aspects of speech are in the foreground.

Rozanova learned about sound poetry from her future-husband Alexei Kruchenykh. Which then of course, led to their marriage and all of that fun stuff. However, in 1914, the fugitive avant-garde movements broke apart because of the beginning of the Russian Revolution. When that started, Rozanova began her journey of Suprematism and collage work.

For a while Rozanova dabbled in Suprematist art work and collage-based artwork. One of her most famous paintings is titled, Suprematism. It is a later piece of her artwork, created in 1916, a year after Suprematism supposedly started. I could not find the size of the art work, which can be common for forgotten artists, but it is oil on canvas and located at the Museum of Fine Arts in Russia.

This piece of artwork, of course, is seemingly a bunch of random rectangles with a bunch of vibrant colors. The colors she used in this painting are light yellow, dark yellow, which kind of looks orange at times, black, a dull red and then a brighter red, a dark blue, sometimes looking navy blue, and a light blue, with white, an olive green, hints of purple, and a little bit of brown. In the background of the painting, kind of diagonally from the left of the painting down, there are two very large rectangles. One on the left is that dark yellow/orange color and doesn’t have many shapes layered on top of it. While the rectangle on the right is the lighter yellow, with a lot more shapes on top of it. There are actually a bunch of smaller light red rectangles layered on top of the lighter yellow rectangle. They are also diagonal, but angle from the right side.

On the left large rectangle, there are three smaller rectangles that stair step their way down to the left of the painting. The first rectangle is a little lower than halfway down the big rectangle. The smaller one is black and to the left of it is a dark blue one, that is just a little shorter than it, creating that stair-step look. To continue the trend there is a purple rectangle that stair steps from the dark blue one to the left of it. To the bottom of the purple rectangle there is another dark blue rectangle that over laps it in a stair step manner, but this time it is going to the right of the painting.

Towards the very bottom of the painting and sort of near the left bottom corner, there is a perfect black square. Possibly a reference to Malevich’s black square painting. From the middle of the painting on the right side, there are three larger rectangles that overlap the bottom of the large light-yellow rectangle. They also create a stair-step pattern, also going towards the bottom left of the painting. It starts with a large bright red rectangle, then over lapping that is a large black rectangle, followed by an olive-green rectangle, which its bottom left corner is almost touching the bottom of the painting. There is quite a lot to describe in this painting because Rozanova’s art style is distinguished by the interaction of the colors and the vibrancy of them. Which makes sense why she has the difference of bright colors verses their darker shades.

Olga Rozanova was an inspiration for female artists of her time. Not only did she take part in fugitive avant-garde artists groups, but she also wrote manifestos, created Suprematist artwork and started the way for collage artwork. It is sad to say that she passed away at the young age of 32 and didn’t get the legacy she deserved. She worked right alongside Kazimir Malevich and even exhibited in the 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition with Malevich, yet she didn’t get the credit she deserved. Malevich did live 20 years longer than Rozanova, maybe that is why he got more recognition? Maybe not. We may never know, but at least you can carry with you the facts I have provided here today.

Take the knowledge of this female Russian artist and run with it. Don’t forget about her, as it happens with all other female artists. I have shared all I have learned from my Modern Art History class and I hope you learned something from it as well. I’m Ashley and thank you for listening to my podcast of The Forgotten Women of Art History.

End Notes

Berkowitz, Elizabeth. “Olga Rozanova Paintings, Bio, Ideas.” Edited by Greg Thomas, The Art Story, May 2018, www.theartstory.org/artist/rozanova-olga/.

Elsa Honig Fine, Women & Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the 20^th Century. (Rowman & Allanheld Publishers, 1978), Page 168.

Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe, 2013), Pages 48-49.

Olga Rozanova, “The Bases of the New Creation and the Reasons Why it is Misunderstood,” in Art Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), Pages 205-208.

Sarabianov, A. D. “Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 4 Nov. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Olga-Vladimirovna-Rozanova