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Set Reminder2016-09-17 10:00:002016-09-18 10:00:00America/New_YorkBidsquareBidsquare : Important Fine & Decorative Art Auction https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/shapiro/important-fine-decorative-art-auction-1714 Shapiro Auctions info@shapiroauctions.com
A PAIR OF FUTURISTIC COMPOSITIONS BY ELENA GURO (RUSSIAN 1877-1913) ,
comprising:
a) Futurist Composition, circa 1910, watercolor and gouache on paper (envelope), 11 x 14.5 cm (4 3/8 x 5 5/8 in.)
b) Futurist Composition , circa 1910, watercolor and gouache on paper (envelope), 7.5 x 11.5 cm (3 x 4 1/2 in.)
LOT NOTES Elena Genrikhovna Guro (1877-1913) was a Russian Futurist painter, playwright, poet, and writer of fiction. From 1890 to 1893 she studied art at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St Petersburg. From 1903 to 1905 she studied in the private studio of Jan Ciaglinski where she met her future husband Mikhail Matyushin. In 1905 she illustrated the Russian translation of a book of fairy tales by George Sand. In 1906 she and Matyushin moved to the school of Elizaveta Zvantseva, where Guro worked under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Leon Bakst and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. In 1908 she left the school and established her own studio. By 1908 her home was a central meeting place for discussions on art and literature. In 1913 she continued to write and paint, even though she was suffering from leukemia. She died the same year at her country house in Polyany, Leningrad Oblast, formerly Uusikirkko, Finland. In Russia, Guro was one of the first artists who took interest in what was called the fourth dimension. Guro`s pantheistic formulation of man`s identity as a creature including a merging with cosmos, was a combination of German idealism with ideas on the fourth dimension as "hyperspace" (and not as time). Many artists believed in the existence of another reality beyond the one we normally see, and that it was the task of the artist to show the way into this higher reality by making it visible for philosophers and scientists.