Knave of Diamonds (arts association)

Knave of Diamonds, also called Jack Of Diamonds, was a circle of avant-garde artists in Russia, heavily influenced by French styles, who sought "to unite the stylistic system of Cezanne with the primitive traditions of folk art, the Russian lubok and tradesman's signs." Named for the eponymous exhibition held in Moscow in 1910, the group's intention was to provoke the art establishment in Russia, challenge "good taste," and shock. The group remained active until December 1917.

Inception: The ''Knave of Diamonds'' First Exhibition, Moscow, 1910

The inaugural Knave of Diamonds exhibition opened in Moscow in Levisson Building on 10 December 1910, and ran through to January 16, 1911, and included works by thirty eight artists.
The exhibition featured French cubist paintings by Henri Le Fauconnier, André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and Luc Albert Moreau. Curated by Alexandre Mercereau, the exhibition additionally included works by Russian-German expressionists from Munich Wassily Kandinsky and his partner Gabrielle Munter, Alexey von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, Germans, Russian-French Léopold Survage and Russian artists active in the Moscow scene, including the group of young artists recently expelled from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture due to their "leftist tendencies".
A stated objective of the exhibition was "to offer young Russian artists who find it extremely difficult to get accepted for exhibitions under the existing indolence and cliquishness of our artistic spheres, the chance to get onto the main road."
But exhibition's name itself, coined by Mikhail Larionov because "he liked the sound of it." was itself a salvo at the exhibition-attending public of the period. While one contemporary account blandly concluded: "Organizers regard the title Knave of Diamonds as a symbol of young enthusiasm and passion, 'for the knave implies youth and the suit of diamonds represents seething blood,'" the public itself understood the symbolism to trend in a different direction: "unaccustomed to such novel titles," they assumed the show to be "a gambling house or brothel," and "in no way an art exhibition." The reviews that followed were commensurately critical.
The Moscow painters, admirers of modern French artistic styles and frequent visitors to collectors Sergei Shchukin's and his rival Ivan Morozov's houses where they could admire canvases by Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, included Mikhail Larionov and his wife Natalya Goncharova, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Aristarkh Lentulov, Ilya Mashkov, Aleksandr Kuprin, Vasily Rozhdestvensky, Robert Falk, David Burlyuk and his brother Vladimir Burlyuk, Aleksey Morgunov, Artur Fonvizin, Boris Takke, Sergei Lobanov and Victor Savinkov, brother of revolutionary Boris Savinkov.
Kazimir Malevich and Alexandra Exter also participated in the first exhibition.

Notable members and associates

The group was founded by Pyotr Konchalovsky, Aristarkh Lentulov, Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova, Ilya Mashkov, Aleksandr Kuprin, Vasily Rozhdestvensky, and included Robert Falk, David Burliuk, Wladimir Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Osmerkin, Alexander Shevchenko, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Adolf Milman, Lyubov Popova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Antonina Fedorovna Sofronova, and Moisey Feigin. Their works demonstrate the artists’ interest in the developing of the new styles that emerged around their first exhibition as a result of their integrating folk art of the provinces in the artworks. Other new styles and genres, such as performance and body-art, emerged from this unlikely blending of fine European art, Russian folk art, and urban folk of the masses in Russia. The artistic significance of the individual members of The Knave of Diamonds aside, their activities conditioned a qualitative shift in Russian art of the 1910s. Among the most important changes was the democratization of the art society in Russia.

Moscow's Fractious Avante-Garde

The show's title was subsequently adopted to form a new artistic association in Moscow, an association which soon became the largest and one of the most significant exhibition societies. This group of artists contended that Moscow would be the future of the contemporary art scene, with its artists revitalizing depleted Western European culture with the purity and vitality of their work. With a nod to Dadaist ideas, the group as a whole paid close attention to traditionally crafted toys, indigenous art forms, signboards, and even icons. The lubok print style was exalted, and folklore motifs embraced. "The Russian artists were following the paths that Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso had gone down in discovering the primitives of Africa and Oceania, with the only difference that they did not need to go far away to find inspiration but got it at home - in shop signs, in tin-ware or the works of other non-professional folk artisans."
In 1912, the more radical members of the group, including Mikhail Larionov and Goncharova, split to form the Donkey's Tail.

Exhibitions

Knave of Diamonds at Levisson house, Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, Moscow
Knave of Diamonds at Moscow Military District Economic Society of Officers, 10 Vozdvizhenka str., Moscow
Knave of Diamonds at Levisson house, Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, Moscow, 3 – 28 April, St. Petersburg
Knave of Diamonds at Society of Lovers of Art, Moscow
Artists of Moscow for Victims of the War
Knave of Diamonds at Kira Mikhailova Art Salon, Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, Moscow
Knave of Diamonds at Kira Mikhailova Art Salon, Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, Moscow
Vystavka proizvedenii khudozhnikov gruppy 'Bubnovyi valet' Moscow

The Fifth Exhibition (1916)

The Fifth Exhibition at Kira Mikhailova Art Salon, Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, Moscow due to the 1WW could not show the works of the foreigners and included only the Russians Alexandra Exter, Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kljun, Lyubov Popova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Olga Rozanova, Ivan Puni, Xenia Boguslavskaya, Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, Vera Pestel, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Aleksandr Kuprin, Aristarkh Lentulov, Robert Falk, Victor Savinkov.

The Sixth Exhibition (1917)

The Sixth Exhibition opened from 21 Nov 1917 to December 3 at R.Levisson House in Moscow, the very same place where the First inaugural “Knave of Diamonds” Exhibition had opened in 1910, and became the group’s last exhibition. In 1916, Knave of Diamonds was left by its original founders Pyotr Konchalovsky and Ilya Mashkov, with Alexander Kuprin replacing Konchalovsky as Chairman, and in 1917 the last of the original founders, Alexander Kuprin, Aristarkh Lentulov, Adolf Milman, Robert Falk and Vasily Rozhdestvensky also left. On October 14, 1917, Kazimir Malevich was elected new chairman of the board, while Lev Bruni, Ivan Malyutin, Alexander Osmerkin, Lyubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, Nadezhda Udaltsova became full members of the society. The new members dominated the last Sixth Exhibition: Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun, Olga Rozanova, Alexandra Exter, Vasily Kamensky, David Burliuk, Vladislav Khodasevich, Alexander Baryshnikov, A. M. Gumilina, N. M. Davydova, Xan Krohn and his wife Julia Holmberg-Krohn, Nikolai Kuznetsov, Mikhail Leblanc, Mikhail Menkov, D. V. Petrovsky, Eduard Shiman. At the Exhibition’s closing on December 3, David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky and Kazimir Malevich read the thesis called "Painting on Fences", and Knave of Diamonds was dismissed.

Influences

The Knave of Diamonds defined "the Russian pre-revolutionary culture", a favorite culture of the Moscow intelligentsia in the 1970s.

Related artist groups

Painters Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and a sub-group of artists ceded from the group to form the more radical Donkey's Tail, accusing the Knaves of artistic stagnation. Goncharova called out what she saw as the group's replacement of "artistic creation with theorizing." Despite these period claims, in retrospect, "it is hard to award primacy and originality of pictorial enterprise" to either group.

Literature

Cubism and Its Histories, David Cottington - 2004
Architecture and Cubism, Eve Blau, Nancy J. Troy - 2002
A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten - 2008
Cubism, José Pierre - 1969
Honour, H. and J. Fleming, A World History of Art. 7th edn. London: Laurence King Publishing, p. 784. ISBN 9781856695848
Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 293–295
Cottington, David. Cubism and Its Histories. Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719050046.
Mikhail Lifshitz, The Crisis of Ugliness: From Cubism to Pop-Art. Translated and with an Introduction by David Riff. Leiden: BRILL, 2018
Daniel Robbins, Sources of Cubism and Futurism, Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 4,
Kolokytha, Chara; Hammond, J.M.; Vlčková, Lucie. "Cubism". Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.