Yelena Genrikhovna Guro

Yelena Genrikhovna Guro (born Jan. 10 [Jan. 22, New Style], 1877, St. Petersburg, Russia—died April 23 [May 6], 1913, Uusikirkko [now Polyany], Karelia) was a Russian painter, graphic artist, book illustrator, poet, and prose writer who developed new theories of colour in painting. These theories were implemented by her husband, the painter Mikhail Matyushin, after her untimely death. In her work she unified two eras in the development of art—Art Nouveau and the 20th-century avant-garde—in which she occupied a transient but vital position.

Guro was born into an old aristocratic family. From 1890 to 1893 she studied at the school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St. Petersburg, and from 1903 to 1905 she studied at the private studio of Yan Tsionglinsky. In 1900 she met Matyushin. In 1906 they enrolled in the private studio of Yelizaveta Zvantseva, where for a while they studied with the renowned artists Léon Bakst and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky. During this period Guro met the noted Symbolist poets Vyacheslav Ivanov and Aleksandr Blok and also the Futurists Velimir Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, David Davidovich Burlyuk, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, Alexey Yeliseyevich Kruchyonykh, and Kazimir Malevich.

Guro’s early Impressionist watercolours, painted with clean tones and saturated with light, already demonstrated her endeavour to convey space through colour. Her interest in exploring the rules of colour, which began in 1911, was central to her work. In paintings such as Drinking Tea (c. 1910) and The Stone (1910–11), Guro attained a new lyricism and clarity of colour. She derived much of her technique from Art Nouveau with its basic principle of form creation. Another source for her work was Scandinavian folk art. In late 1909 Guro and Matyushin formed the Union of Youth, a group of avant-garde painters in which Guro particularly proved to be a herald of innovative ideas.

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Guro’s literary work was inextricably linked to her work in the visual arts. She achieved an original synthesis of poetry, prose, painting, and graphics, the embodiment of which were her self-illustrated books: Sharmanka (1909; “Barrel Organ”), Osenny son (1912; “Autumn Dream”), and Nebesnye verblyuzhata (1914; “Heavenly Baby Camels”). She joined the literary group Gileya (Hylaea), and her work was published in Futurist anthologies such as Sadok sudei (1910; “Trap for Judges”) and Troye (1913; “The Three”). Like her painting, Guro’s poetry and prose were imbued with the spirit of experimentation and filled with unrealized artistic ideas.