When light became matter: Natalia goncharova and rayonism, the russian avant-garde in the feminine

Yet when we speak of the revolutionary art of pre-Soviet Russia, it is often the names of Malevich, Tatlin, or Larionov that come to mind first. As if history, once again, had erased the traces of women where they dared to innovate. Goncharova did not merely participate in the artistic revolution—she preceded it, sometimes by several years. Her rayonism, with its streaks of color that seem to burst from the canvas like X-rays piercing matter, is much more than a style: it is a philosophy of perception, a way of seeing the world not as it is, but as it radiates.

What if we finally looked at her work for what it truly was—not the appendix of a movement dominated by men, but the beating heart of a modernity where light, at last, took form?

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01Light as the fourth dimension: when art became energy

You must picture Goncharova and Larionov’s studio at 37 Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, a place cluttered with canvases, books of ancient icons, circus posters, and jars filled with metallic pigments. It was there, between 1912 and 1914, that rayonism was born, theorized in a manifesto as poetic as it was technical. "We declare," they wrote, "that the true essence of the world is light, and that art must capture its vibrations as a seismograph records earthquakes."

But how to paint light itself? How to make visible what, by definition, eludes the gaze? Goncharova and Larionov first drew inspiration from the scientific discoveries of their time: X-rays, which revealed the invisible structure of bodies; radio waves, which traversed space without material support; and even Einstein’s theories on the relativity of time and space. Their answer was radical: instead of representing objects, they painted the interferences between them and the light that bathed them.

Take Cats (Rayonist Composition), 1913. At first glance, you can barely make out two felines curled against each other. But look closer: their outlines are nothing more than red and green strokes crisscrossing, as if light, passing through them, had fragmented them into a thousand shards. The colors no longer describe the cats; they become their presence, their warmth, their movement. "The object is unimportant," Goncharova explained. "What matters is the sensation of light it produces." An idea so revolutionary that it later led Kandinsky to say, "They freed color from its prison."

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02The scandal of the evangelists: when the icon met modernism

If rayonism marked the peak of her audacity, Goncharova was first and foremost a painter of earth and the sacred. In 1911, she exhibited The Four Evangelists, four monumental panels that caused an uproar in conservative Moscow. Picture the scene: biblical figures with distorted faces, golden halos like solar disks, dressed in robes of garish colors—blood red, emerald green, electric blue. For critics, it was heresy. "One would think saints painted by a drunken child," wrote one. For Goncharova, it was reinvention.

She drew inspiration from Orthodox icons, those sacred images where perspective did not exist, where bodies seemed to float in a depthless space. But where traditional icons sought to represent the divine, Goncharova captured its energy. The faces of her evangelists are not idealized; they are twisted, as if seized by mystical ecstasy. Their halos are no longer perfect circles but bursts of light radiating in all directions, as if the sacred had suddenly caught fire.

What shocked most was perhaps this way of blending the profane and the sacred. In Saint Luke, hidden beneath the evangelist’s features, one can make out a self-portrait of the artist—a woman, atheist and avant-garde, inserting herself into the pantheon of saints. "Art must be both popular and sacred," she said. "Like icons, like circus posters." A statement that summed up her refusal of categories: she was at once a peasant and an aristocrat, a mystic and a revolutionary, a Russian and a European.

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03The brush wars: when the avant-garde defied the world

In 1914, when the First World War broke out, most Russian artists fell silent or rallied behind nationalist causes. Not Goncharova. She responded to violence with a series of paintings titled Mystical Images of War, where cannons, airplanes, and soldiers dissolved into beams of glowing red light, as if war itself were nothing but an optical illusion.

One of these paintings, The Aeroplane over the Train, shows a plane and a locomotive crossing in a whirlwind of black and gold strokes. At first glance, it is a scene of chaos. But look closer: the lines are not disordered; they obey a secret logic, as if Goncharova had wanted to reveal the hidden order behind the apocalypse. "War is not an end," she said, "but a transformation. Like light that changes everything it touches."

These works were censored by the Tsarist authorities, who deemed them "too abstract to inspire patriotism." The irony of history: a few years later, the same paintings would be banned by the Bolsheviks, who found them "too mystical to serve the revolution." Goncharova, for her part, refused to be confined. In 1915, she left Russia for Paris, where Diaghilev awaited her with a new challenge: to clothe the dancers of the Ballets Russes.

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04The costumes of The Golden Cockerel: when painting took the stage

If Goncharova is celebrated today as a painter, it was perhaps in theater that she reached her full potential. In 1914, Diaghilev commissioned her to design the costumes and sets for The Golden Cockerel, an opera-ballet inspired by a Pushkin tale. What she created then surpassed everything seen before.

Picture the scene: dancers dressed in tunics with geometric patterns, where red, black, and gold clash as in her rayonist paintings. The characters’ headdresses resemble futurist architecture, the sleeves of the costumes striped with bands of color that seem to vibrate under the stage lights. And above all, there is that giant cockerel, its plumage made of hundreds of fabric pieces sewn together, like a living mosaic.

"A costume is not clothing," she said. "It is an extension of the body, a second skin that must dance with movement." For The Golden Cockerel, she invented an aesthetic where every fold, every seam, every color was calculated to amplify the choreography. The result? A visual revolution. Critics spoke of a "painting in motion," of "painting become flesh." And when the curtain fell that night in Paris, it was not just an opera that had been performed, but a new way of conceiving total art.

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05Exile and oblivion: when history erased women

In 1921, Goncharova settled permanently in Paris. She was forty years old, with an international reputation, and yet something had broken. Russia, which she had left in the midst of revolution, no longer wanted her. The Soviet avant-gardes, now under state control, had relegated rayonism to the rank of "bourgeois deviation." In the West, she was still celebrated for her costumes, but her paintings were beginning to disappear from the narratives.

Why? Because the history of art, like all history, is written by those who remain. Malevich, with his Black Square, became the symbol of pure abstraction. Tatlin, with his Tower, embodied the constructivist utopia. Goncharova, however, was a woman, an émigré, an artist who refused labels. Her rayonism, too poetic for revolutionaries, too radical for conservatives, found itself trapped between two eras.

For decades, her canvases remained in the shadows. Sometimes they were attributed to Larionov, as if a woman could not be the author of such audacity. It was only in the late 1990s, with the exhibition e-commerce giantss of the Avant-Garde at the Guggenheim, that the world rediscovered her pioneering role. And yet: how many art textbooks still mention her in a single line, as a footnote?

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06The return of the rays: when contemporary art rediscovers Goncharova

Yet if you listen closely today, you can hear an echo. In Julie Mehretu’s paintings, where streaks of color intertwine like flows of energy. In Olafur Eliasson’s light installations, where perception becomes matter. In NFTs that play with the dematerialization of art. Everywhere, one finds the idea that Goncharova had glimpsed: the world is not made of objects, but of relationships, vibrations, light.

In 2019, the Tate Modern organized a retrospective of her work. For the first time, one could see her distorted icons, her rayonist paintings, and her stage costumes side by side. And suddenly, everything made sense: this woman had not merely invented a style, she had invented a way of being an artist. A way where painting, theater, fashion, and spirituality were one.

Perhaps that is Goncharova’s true genius: to have understood, long before anyone else, that art is not a question of technique, but of gaze. And that light, when you know how to capture it, can transform everything—even history.

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07Postscript: the canvas that watches you

There is one last work by Goncharova, less known than the others, but which encapsulates her mystery. Titled Self-Portrait with Brushes, it dates from 1907. One sees a young woman with piercing eyes, dressed in a red dress, holding brushes as one would hold weapons. But the most unsettling thing is her face: half in shadow, half illuminated by a golden light that seems to come from nowhere.

Look at her closely. That light is, of course, that of rayonism. But it is also something else: the promise that art, when it is true, does not merely represent the world. It reinvents it.

And you—when was the last time you saw a work that had that effect on you?