APURBA CHATTERJEE explains how British artists in India used the “picturesque” to reshape colonial landscapes and celebrate imperial power
Natalia Goncharova
Tate Modern, London
A MAJOR figure in Russia’s vibrant pre-World War I avant-garde, aristocrat Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) was born on her family’s country estate and studied art in Moscow. There she met Mikhail Larionov, who became her lifelong partner and collaborator.
Confident and courageous, she delighted in outraging her ruling class’s rigidly traditional moeurs and high-art aesthetics with “primitive” paintings, whose lack of lifelike representation defied academic conventions.
Paintings like Hay Cutting (1907-08) ignore rules of tone, scale and perspective and use raw, often unmixed colours and large areas of flat shapes encased in bold, visible outlines, as did the contemporary French Fauvists and German Expressionists.
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
JOHN GREEN welcomes a remarkable study of Mozambique’s most renowned contemporary artist



