Showman Who Dabbled in Many Modernisms

David Burliuk, the subject of a curiously eclectic career survey at the Ukrainian Museum, was not a great painter, but he had an extraordinarily interesting life.

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Ernest Mayer/Ukranian Museum

"Cossack Mamai," 1908.

Ukranian Museum

David Burliuk in top hat, undated, photographer unknown.

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Ernest Mayer/Ukranian Museum

"Court Lunch," circa 1930.

Known to scholars as the father of Ukrainian Futurism, Burliuk (1882-1967) dabbled in Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and Impressionism. In his later years he made imitations of van Gogh’s paintings; large political allegories; odd, fairy-tale-like pictures of gnomish people; and views of vacation spots including Florida; Gloucester, Mass.; and Hampton Bays, N.Y., where he and his wife lived from 1941 to the end of his life.

Organized by the Winnipeg Art Gallery, where it appeared earlier this year, this exhibition has its moments. A garish, semi-Cubist painting from 1908 of a mythic figure called Cossack Mamai sitting like Buddha in a bucolic landscape is an intriguing, ham-fisted wedding of Modernism and faux-primitivism. A lovely, vividly hued landscape painted in Japan in 1921 could almost hold its own in a French Impressionist show.

A large, weirdly cartoonish picture of Lenin steering a plow behind a horse as Tolstoy leads the way (1925-26, repainted in 1943) allegorizes the new and the old Russia. And a lush still life from 1946 depicting lilacs in a glass vase on a windowsill with leafy trees outdoors suggests that Burliuk was at his best when painting directly from nature.

Over all the exhibition gives the impression of a passionate and industrious but unfocused dilettante who, for all his sophistication, was never able to make an authentic, deeply committed connection between feeling and painting.

Nevertheless he had a remarkable, world-roving career. Born near Kharkiv in Ukraine, he attended art schools in Odessa, Munich, Paris and Moscow. (His father managed a huge estate for an absent nobleman.) Along with Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger and others, Burliuk participated in the Blaue Reiter exhibition of 1912 in Munich. “Marriage Proposition,” a lively, Cubist painting of a peasant girl, her suitor and a horse from 1910 was included in that show; a version of it from 1962 is in the present exhibition.

Burliuk also published anthologies of Futurist poetry and, along with his friend the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, toured 17 Russian cities, putting on performances designed to shock the bourgeoisie out of its complacency.

He must have had enormous energy. In his catalog essay the show’s curator, Myroslav Shkandrij, writes, “Between 1907-12, Burliuk and his brothers excavated some 50 ancient tombs in the Crimea, transferring their contents, including about 70 complete skeletons and 200 skulls, into the Kherson Museum and their own family museum” in Ukraine.

Between 1918 and 1920 Burliuk traveled in Siberia, giving performances, organizing exhibitions and for a time running a cabaret theater. Then he lived for two years in Japan, where, in addition to helping mount a show titled “First Exhibition of Russian Paintings in Japan,” he produced more than 400 canvases and sold enough to finance moving with his wife and two young sons to New York City.

In the United States he continued to paint and have exhibitions, and supplemented his income by working as art editor and proofreader for The Russian Voice, a Communist newspaper.

Possibly his greatest strength was his talent for self-promotion. Describing Burliuk at one of his exhibitions in 1929, a reporter for The New York Sun took note of the his 12-colored, patchwork waistcoat (on view in the present show) and the painting on his left cheek of a five-legged, chicken-headed bull. In photographs Burliuk also sports a top hat and earrings.

The writer observed: “Like the Hindu yogis he has been able, by contemplation, to throw himself into such an ineffable state of mind that he can perceive the imperceptible, vision the invisible, behold the unseeable and put down upon canvas that which not only does not exist but never did exist. This is the fourth dimensional idea in the new art, and it takes a rattling good man to get away with that stuff.” Indeed.