Jewish Venus

Painted in 1912 at the height of Larionov's most radical period in Moscow, Jewish Venus was a deliberate provocation aimed simultaneously at the Western canon and at the conservative Russian art establishment. Larionov, already a co-founder of the Jack of Diamonds group and soon to launch Rayonism, was in this moment fascinated by Russian street art, shop signs, and folk prints as sources of legitimate artistic authority. By titling the work a "Venus" (invoking Giorgione, Titian, and Manet's Olympia) while painting a recognizably modern Jewish woman from his social circle in Moscow, he forced a confrontation between high European tradition and vernacular Russian-Jewish urban life. The work was exhibited in the landmark Donkey's Tail exhibition of 1912, the show that formally broke Larionov and Natalia Goncharova from Western-influenced modernism and staked a claim for an indigenous Russian avant-garde. Critics were unsettled; the painting's combination of folk flatness and unapologetic subject matter resisted easy classification within any prevailing Post-Impressionist or Expressionist framework.