Yellow and green forest 1913

Natalia Goncharova conjured this "Yellow and Green Forest" with oil on canvas, a landscape vibrating with energy. Look at the way she's built up this scene, a mosaic of sharply defined shapes. It’s like she’s taken a forest and refracted it through a prism, breaking it into geometric shards of greens and yellows. There's a real tension here, a push and pull between representation and abstraction. It’s not just a painting of trees; it’s about the very act of seeing, about how we piece together the world from fragments of light and color. Notice the thick strokes of paint, how they assert themselves on the surface. Each mark is deliberate, a physical gesture that contributes to the overall sense of movement and vitality. Goncharova, like many of her contemporaries, was deeply engaged in exploring new ways of seeing. I am thinking of Malevich, who took abstraction even further, stripping away all traces of representation. But here, we see the forest, but it is somehow transformed.