Rayonist Composition in Red and Blue

Larionov formulated Rayonism, Luchizm in Russian, between 1911 and 1913, publishing its manifesto in Moscow in 1913 alongside a landmark exhibition. The theory drew on contemporary physics and the Futurists' obsession with depicting time and motion, but redirected those ideas through a distinctly Russian lens: rather than celebrating the machine, Larionov posited that all objects exist only as intersecting rays of reflected light, and that painting should represent those rays directly. Works from this concentrated period, including the present composition, are among the earliest non-objective paintings produced anywhere in Europe, predating or running parallel to Kandinsky's abstractions and Malevich's Suprematism. Larionov had already led the Neo-Primitivist and Cubo-Futurist tendencies in Russian avant-garde circles through the Jack of Diamonds and Donkey's Tail exhibitions; Rayonism represented his most radical theoretical leap. By 1914 he left Russia permanently with Natalia Goncharova to work with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and the Rayonist paintings of 1912–1913 thus form a brief, concentrated climax to his Moscow years, works that have since entered major institutional collections including the Guggenheim and the Tate.