Christ-loving Warriors 1914

Natalia Goncharova made this drawing, Christ-loving Warriors, with ink on paper. She's using a simple monochrome palette, and a direct, illustrative style, to bring together Russian folk art with early modernist abstraction. Look at the way the coats of the warriors are described with these simple hatching marks. See how the lines are dense in some areas, to give a sense of shadow and depth, but sparser in others, creating a dynamic rhythm. There's a real tension between the representational figures and the abstract patterning. The haloed angels, hovering above, feel like they are made of the same stuff as the rain of lines, blurring the boundary between the earthly and the divine. Goncharova, who was associated with the Russian avant-garde, brings to mind other artists like Marsden Hartley who also combined a Modernist vocabulary with a distinctly personal vision. It’s like she is reminding us that art is a conversation, a space for dialogue and imagination.