Ivan Albertovich Puni

Ivan Albertovich Puni (born Feb. 22 [March 5, New Style], 1892, Kuokkala, Fin. [now Repino, Russia]—died Dec. 28, 1956, Paris, France) was a Russian painter and graphic artist who actively furthered the early (prewar) development of the Russian avant-garde.

The son of a cellist and grandson of the renowned composer Tsezar Puni (1802–70, originally Cesare Pugni from Italy), Ivan Puni was exposed to music and art at home, but at his father’s insistence he entered a military academy. He shunned a military career, however, and took private lessons in drawing with Ilya Repin in St. Petersburg, and by 1909 Puni was already working in his own studio. After a short period of study at the Académie Julian in Paris, he returned to St. Petersburg and married the artist Kseniya Boguslavskaya. About this time he met the leading avant-garde artists—David Burlyuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Velimir Khlebnikov—and his apartment became a centre of contemporary art in St. Petersburg. During this period Puni’s organizational ability came to the fore. Together with his wife, he published the Futurist anthology Rykayushchy Parnas (1914; “Roaring Parnassus”), and in 1915 he organized the famous first Futurist exhibition, “Tramway V.” This exhibition was a panorama of Cubo-Futurism, at the forefront of which were Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. The exhibition was received with hostility by the bourgeois press and led to a succès de scandale. Inspired by this response, Puni organized “0.10,” which he called the last Futurist exhibition. It too proved to be a landmark in the history of the avant-garde movement, because in it Malevich exhibited Suprematist works for the first time. In his own painting, Puni was also drawn to creation of pure forms and experimentation in many styles: he painted Suprematist compositions and Cubist still lifes in which he integrated letters, words, and even short texts. He composed “painting reliefs” in the style of Tatlin and, following the principles of Dada, integrated them with the ready-made.

World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917 interrupted the development of the avant-garde in Russia, but as early as 1918 Puni was taking an active part in the cultural development of the new Russia. He taught at the Petrograd State Free Art Studios and, for a short period, at the invitation of Marc Chagall, at the People’s Art School in Vitebsk (now Vitsyebsk, Bela.). However, in late 1919 Puni and his wife walked across the frozen Bay of Finland into Finnish territory, and then in 1920 they immigrated to Germany. In 1922 in Berlin he published Modern Art, in which he criticized Malevich’s Suprematism.

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In 1924 Puni moved to France and settled in Paris. Under the name of Jean Pougny, he became a key figure in the city’s international art scene.