My Favorite Painting

David Burliuk’s My Wife at the Beach

Our Burliuk is small, but it fills all the space of the entry hall. He painted this while on a visit to the American eastern shoreline with his beloved wife, probably in the early 1940s. It was a time of fear and repression within Russia, so I like to think of Mr. and Mrs. “B” romping and running around like kids on the beach. He totally globs on the shades of turquoise and jewel-tone paint, so you feel the pebbles and water. I know he was painting Freedom and Love and Adoration for his wife—it makes me imagine.

by Terri Hightower, mother, business owner, art lover

By the late 1920s, almost a decade after the Bolsheviks came into power, the Futurist movement in Russia had already died away. Its poets and painters either were dead or they fled to other countries or adhered to the more conventional requirements and trends. David Burliuk (1882-1967) was a Russian-American author and a painter of international notoriety even during his own day. He grew up the son of a wealthy peasant and received an art education in Munich and Paris. He came of age as an artist during radical political and social change and the avant-garde movement in art. Young Burliuk adopted the goals and aims of the Futurist movement when he met two of his greatest influences and life-long friends, the Futurist poet Volodymyr Mayakovsky and painter Vasili Kandinsky. Burliuk authored manifestos and essays and lectured widely on the goals of Futurism, becoming a chief exponent of modern art in Russia.