Nocturne 1914

Mikhail Larionov made this painting called "Nocturne" with oil on canvas. It’s a dance of diagonals, a kind of Cubo-Futurist boogie in browns, yellows, and blacks. I imagine Larionov, brush in hand, almost wrestling with the canvas, trying to pin down the fleeting energy of the night. You can almost see him layering and scraping, building up these chunky lines of paint, searching for some kind of structure. I wonder if he was thinking about movement, about speed, maybe even the urban sprawl of Moscow. See how the paint is thick in some places, almost sculptural, and then thin and washy in others? Look at those confident strokes slicing across the surface, each one a little decision, a little gamble. Larionov, like other painters, was in conversation with his contemporaries, pushing the boundaries of representation. What he left us with is this strange, compelling abstraction of feeling, a nocturne not of what we see, but of what we sense.