page_title: Natalia Goncharova
section_title: Jack of Diamonds and Donkey's Tail
hierarchical_section_title: Natalia Goncharova / Participation in avant-garde movements / Jack of Diamonds and Donkey's Tail
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Группа художников (М.Ф. Ларионов, С.М. Романович, В.А. Оболенский, Н.С. Гончарова, М. Фаббри, А.В. Шевченко) на выставке «Ослиный хвост». Фотография. 1913
context_page_description: Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer. Goncharova's lifelong partner was fellow Russian avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov. She was a founding member of both the Jack of Diamonds, Moscow's first radical independent exhibiting group, the more radical Donkey's Tail, and with Larionov invented Rayonism. She was also a member of the German-based art movement Der Blaue Reiter. Born in Russia, she moved to Paris in 1921 and lived there until her death.
  Her painting vastly influenced the avant-garde in Russia. Her exhibition held in Moscow and St. Petersburg were the first promoting a “new” artist by an independent gallery. When it came to the pre-revolutionary period in Russia, where decorative painting and icons were a secure profession, her modern approach to rendering icons were both transgressive and problematic. Her work is usually considered too culturally specific to her Slavic heritage to be universally figured as avant-garde.
context_section_description: The students rejected from Korovin's classes, and others, soon formed Moscow's first radical independent exhibiting group, the Jack of Diamonds, which was named by Larionov. This is rather a provocative name, as it alludes of both boulevard literature and the prison uniforms. 
  The Jack of Diamonds' first exhibition (December 1910-11) included Primitivist and Cubist paintings by Goncharova, but the group split in half in 1912 to form the more provocative group, the Donkey's Tail. At the latter group's first exhibition (March–April 1912) organized by Larionov, more than fifty of her paintings were on display.  Goncharova drew inspirations for primitivism from Russian icons and folk art, otherwise known as luboks. The Donkey's Tail was conceived as an intentional break from European art influence and the establishment of an independent Russian school of modern art. The exhibition proved controversial, and the censor confiscated Goncharova's religiously-themed work, The Evangelists (1910–11), deeming it blasphemous partly because it was hung at an exhibition titled after the rear end of a donkey, partly because it blended sacred and profane imagery, and also because there were taboos for women to paint icons.
caption: Goncharova and other artists at a Donkey's Tail exhibition, 1912.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "4724", "Image ImageLength": "3371", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2016:09:06 15:50:42", "Image ExifOffset": "256", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "394", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6067", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1281", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "900"}