David Davidovich Burliuk

The artist
Thence by descent

Munich, Stadtische Galerie and Lenbach Galerie, Futuristen, November 1959, no.6
Southampton, New York, Parrish Art Museum, David Burliuk: Years of Transition 1910-1931, June-July 1978

D.Burliuk, Radio Style Manifesto: Universal Camp of Radio Modernists, New York, 1926, p.2, illustrated
M.Burliuk, Color and Rhyme, no. 43, Hampton Bays, New York, 1959, p.3, illustrated
Parrish Art Museum exhibition catalogue, David Burliuk: Years of Transition 1910-1931, Southampton, 1978, no. 24, illustrated
N.Yevdaev, David Burliuk in America, Moscow, 2002, p.153, illustrated

The canvas has been strip-lined. There are light lines of craquelure throughout. UV light reveals small areas of retouching, including an area in the upper right quadrant, near the top of the tree, where a small tear was repaired. Held in a silver painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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After spending two years in Japan, Burliuk had sold enough paintings to fund his family's trip to America in 1922. They arrived in New York City and Burliuk set about building his reputation in his new home. Perhaps in tribute to the young and eager country of America, brimming with discoveries and a push for experimentation, he embarked on a new painting technique he coined 'Radio Style', intended to demonstrate the force of electrical energy and wave patterns within landscapes. These works depict a harmony between man and the modern world, allowing a view of a landscape that is vibrantly alive with both nature and the sheer force of scientific power.

Harlem River, Inwood Park, was executed in 1925, the year Burliuk first started experimenting with this new technique, and it is even illustrated in his first writings concerning the movement: the Radio Style Manifesto of 1926. Burliuk proclaims himself the ‘…pioneer of the New Universal Art’ and the ‘founder of the Universal Camp of Radio-Modernists in the City of New York’ (D. Burliuk, Radio Style Manifesto, 1926). He identifies the key elements of the movement, declaring ‘The kinetic phase destroys the static forms’ and stating that 'Between the two "real"—physical—skyscrapers there exists the third, the metaphysical, created at the intersection of the mentally prolonged surfaces of the "real" structure. Between the two living beings there is always the third-abstract, metaphysical. Super-nature, metaphysical constructions…are projected in imagination by prolonging lines and surfaces of actually existing objects’ (ibid.). Radio Style clearly draws on the influences of Rayonism, the movement developed principally by Mikhail Larionov in 1911, which sought to depict the spatial forms created from the intersection of reflected rays of the subject. Elements of Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s Orphist movement of 1912, which focused on bright colour palettes and an emphasis on sensation as opposed to recognizable subjects, can also be seen in Burliuk’s Radio Style works from the early 1920s.

The subject of the present lot was near to Burliuk’s heart, and he painted several Radio-Style works featuring Inwood Hill Park in northern Manhattan. It was the perfect setting to depict the relationship between modern technology and the beauty and serenity of nature. Nature shares the canvas with industrial smoke stacks and city buildings. The result is a dynamic force of colour, energy, and innovation. Colliding fields of radio waves are indicated by strands of colour, intersecting at points to create a vibrant feeling of pulsing energy and force. A bright colour palette contributes to this feeling of kineticism, echoing Burliuk’s use of brilliant colours to create a feeling of motion in his Cubo-Futurist works.