Nocturne

Created in 1914, this 'Nocturne' arrives at a pivotal moment in Mikhail Larionov's artistic evolution. Just one year earlier, Larionov and his lifelong partner Natalia Goncharova had invented Rayonism—Russia's first truly abstract art movement. By 1914, he stood at the forefront of Moscow's avant-garde, staging provocative street performances and experimental films. This work captures the twilight of his Russian period; within a year, he would leave for Paris to collaborate with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, never to return to Russia. The nocturnal subject suggests the atmospheric sensibility that connected his earlier Neo-Impressionist experiments with the more radical fragmentation of Rayonism, where light itself became the primary subject, broken into colored rays across the canvas.

Larionov's journey from studying under Isaac Levitan to pioneering abstraction was remarkably swift. After visiting Paris in 1906, he moved through Post-Impressionism and Neo-primitivism—inspired partly by Russian folk art and sign painting—before embracing Cubo-Futurism. By 1914, he had already founded two radical artist groups: the Knave of Diamonds and the more confrontational Donkey's Tail. This 'Nocturne' embodies the experimental spirit of an artist who refused to stay still, capturing the darkness not as absence but as a field of visual possibility, resonant with the energy of a revolutionary moment in art history.