MARIA DUARTE picks the best and worst of a crowded year of films
Still stunning
Works by Natalia Goncharova are as eyecatching today as they were when first produced almost a century ago, says CHRISTINE LINDEY
Sybil Andrews: Speedway. Andrew Power: Wimbledon. Cyril Power: The Eight
JOSEPHINE BARBARO welcomes a diverse anthology of experiences by autistic women that amounts to a resounding chorus, demanding to be heard
PAUL BUHLE recommends an eminently useful book that examines the political opportunities for popular anti-fascist intervention
PETER MASON is entertained by the autobiography of Charlie Harper, one of punk’s most enduring figures
JAMIE BRITTON reaches for the sick bucket as he is forced to engorge detail after detail of the Royal Family’s wealth
STEVE JOHNSON picks his favourites from the many memorable albums of the year, and one stunning new festival
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.
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From van Gogh to Sonia Boyce, from Hew Locke to Patrick Carpenter and... Pablo Picasso