Cubo-Futurism

Cubo-Futurism, Russian Budetlyanstvo, also called Russian Futurism, Russian avant-garde art movement in the 1910s that emerged as an offshoot of European Futurism and Cubism.

The term Cubo-Futurism was first used in 1913 by an art critic regarding the poetry of members of the Hylaea group (Russian Gileya), which included such writers as Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksey Kruchenykh, David Burlyuk, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. However, the concept took on far more important meaning within visual arts, displacing the influence of French Cubism and Italian Futurism, and led to a distinct Russian style that blended features of the two European movements: fragmented forms fused with the representation of movement. The Cubo-Futurist style was characterized by the breaking down of forms, the alteration of contours, the displacement or fusion of various viewpoints, the intersection of spatial planes, and the contrast of colour and texture. Also typical—and one of the prominent aspects of the concurrent Synthetic Cubism movement in Paris—was the pasting of foreign materials onto the canvas: strips of newspaper, wallpaper, and even small objects.

Cubo-Futurist artists stressed the formal elements of their artwork, showing interest in the correlation of colour, form, and line. Their focus sought to affirm the intrinsic value of painting as an art form, one not wholly dependent on a narrative. Among the more notable Cubo-Futurist artists were Lyubov Popova (Travelling Woman, 1915), Kazimir Malevich (Aviator and Composition with Mona Lisa, both 1914), Olga Rozanova (Playing Card series, 1912–15), Ivan Puni (Baths, 1915), and Ivan Klyun (Ozonator, 1914).

Painting and other arts, especially poetry, were closely intertwined in Cubo-Futurism, through friendships among poets and painters, in joint public performances (before a scandalized but curious public), and in collaborations for theatre and ballet. Notably, the books of the “transrational” poetry (zaum) of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh were illustrated with lithography by Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova, Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, and Rozanova and Pavel Filonov. Cubo-Futurism, though brief, proved a vital stage in Russian art in its quest for nonobjectivity and abstraction.