David Davidovich Burliuk, 1882-1967

Sotheby's Parke Bernet New York, Impressionist and Modern Art, 23 June 1982, Lot 29

The board appears sound. There is some surface dirt and two flakes of paint loss to the arm of the sitting man and further inor paint loss around the leg of the chair and along the edges. Uv light reveals no signs of retouching. The board is mounted in a canvas surround and held in a frame behind glass; unexamined out of frame.
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The linear simplicity of shop-signs painted by artists without conventional art training attracted some of the most prominent members of the Russian avant-garde. Mikhail Larionov, David Burliuk and Marc Chagall, who had actually trained as a signboard painter, all collected shop signs. The young Burliuk wrote: "Russian signs have no analogues in Western cultures. The complete (with no exaggeration) illiteracy of our people made it an essential attribute of the communication between the salesman and the customer. The people's genius for painting found its only realisation in signs. Now that there is literacy, we are getting close to the disappearance of signs. It is time they were collected."

In Burliuk's painting At the Barber's, the references to the shop signs which the artist appreciated so much are clearly evident. The human figures are reduced to simple schemas, their constituent parts outlined in black are stylised almost to abstraction. The work should be compared with Larionov's famous series of Primitivist shop-signs, Barbers.  Larionov's The Barber from 1909 (fig.1) was exhibited at the first Union of Youth and Burliuk who also participated in this exhibition must have known the painting. By 1910 Larionov and Burliuk had become close friends and in late 1910, together with Natalia Goncharova, they organised the first Jack of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow.

Burliuk's At the Barber's is a rare example of his early work in which the artist firmly rejects the academic conventions of figure painting in favour of dramatic expression.