As LACMA continues the final phases of its multi-year renovation, I can still envision Natalia Goncharova’s Religious Composition; Archangel Michael (1910) where it long hung in the now demolished Ahmanson Building, overlooking Tony Smith’s evocative black sculpture, Smoke (1967). Goncharova’s fiery portrait is a manifesto, re-envisioning traditional religious imagery with the visual intensity of Russian icon painting filtered through the radical aesthetics of early twentieth-century modernism. The composition is resplendent with warm colors—rich caramels, burnt orange, and scarlet red—capturing a dramatic moment of St. Michael as the triumphant heavenly warrior. The celestial warrior rides confidently forward, a direct reference to Revelation 12:7-9, portraying Saint Michael leading God’s army against the dragon in the apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Goncharova’s brilliant rendition captures the raw energy of the Russian avant-garde at the dawn of the 20th century while seeming to predict the social unrest that would unfurl less than a decade later with the 1917 Revolution.
The painting pulses with symbolic meaning drawn from traditional Byzantine and Russian religious art. Michael, whose name means “Who is like God?,” appears as heaven’s champion, the angel who cast Satan from Paradise. Goncharova depicts him in traditional warrior garb, but her treatment transforms conventional representation through her distinctive fusion of Neo-Primitivism, Cubo-Futurism, and folk art influences. The bold outlines and simplified forms recall lubok—Russian popular prints—while the spatial compression and fractured planes show her engagement with Cubism. Three years later, Goncharova would famously declare, “I have passed through all that the West can offer… Now I shake the dust from my feet and leave the West, considering its vulgarizing significance trivial and unimportant – my path is toward the source of all arts, the East.” However, the bold style here suggests her feet may still have borne some of that Parisian soot.
A Closer Look
The archangel astride a red winged horse dominates the composition, his figure rendered in bold, flattened planes of color that reject Western perspective—as the Cubists had done—in favor of the spiritual symbolism of the Orthodox tradition. His arms and wings spread wide, gospels in one hand and a trumpet in the other, symbolizing the divine message and angelic call to heaven at the Last Judgment or the Second Coming of Christ, drawn from passages like Matthew 24:31 (“He will send his angels with a loud trumpet call”) and 1 Thessalonians 4:16 (“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God”). Goncharova’s portrayal of sacred themes was neither traditional nor ironic; it provided a means for the artist to connect with Russian culture and the spiritual tradition they represented while dramatically recasting it in modern attire.
Color becomes both descriptive and symbolic. Rich reds and golds evoke the jeweled tones of icon painting, where pigments carried theological significance. Gold, in particular, represented divine light, the pure energy of God made visible. Goncharova’s application of color, however, is distinctly modern—applied in thick, visible brushstrokes with bold patches of saturated hues that emphasize the painting’s surface rather than creating illusionistic depth. This technique paradoxically honors the icon tradition where the flat surface was understood as a window to the divine realm rather than a representation of earthly space while also appearing quintessentially modern.
“Yours is an eye for color, but you are too preoccupied with form. Open your eyes to see your own eyes!”
Goncharova was a pioneering figure in the Russian avant-garde, achieving fame alongside her partner Mikhail Larionov. It was, in fact, Larionov who encouraged her to abandon sculpture for painting, as he once proclaimed, “Yours is an eye for color, but you are too preoccupied with form. Open your eyes to see your own eyes!” Together they explored the faceted forms of modernism through many different visions and co-founded Rayonism. The couple’s interests ranged widely from there, from Neo-Primitivism to stage design for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris (1914).
While her work may hint at the coming trauma of revolution, neither she nor her partner would experience it firsthand; what began as a short stay in Paris to work with fellow Russian Diaghilev led to her permanent residence as revolution broke out. Her many colleagues back home, at first partnered with the new government under Lenin, would find brutal suppression under Stalin, their experimental visual language replaced by the official state style of Socialist Realism. The innovations that once supported the new regime — ‘down with easel painting!’ they cried — were later brutally censored and suppressed. Where the Nazis labeled the avant-garde ‘degenerate’ as they confiscated and collected it, Stalin simply erased it. The suppression wasn’t just institutional — works were physically destroyed, hidden, confiscated, and in some cases artists were killed or sent to the gulag. There’s no way to soften it.
Looking back at Goncharova’s innovations, her willingness to draw on Russian folk traditions and religious imagery, combining them with modernist formal innovations, helped define a distinctly Russian contribution to 20th-century art — one that once thrived, was suppressed, and was only slowly rediscovered over the course of the long twentieth century. The dynamic composition of Religious Composition; Archangel Michael, with its fiery red steed and flattened planes of devotional color, demonstrates how traditional symbols could, and still can, be revitalized through new visual languages. The result bridges centuries past and present, making ancient symbols speak with renewed contemporary urgency.
The painting has since moved to the third floor of the BCAM building, as the reshaped campus of LACMA nears its completion. Recent press promises that the new David Geffen Galleries, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, will support “a new curatorial direction at LACMA by creating opportunities to make connections between artifacts from varied disciplines, time periods, and geographies.” We’ll soon find out how well that works out. For works like Goncharova’s Religious Composition; Archangel Michael, and a great many others in the museum’s massive encyclopedic collection, whose histories are obscured and whose context few truly know, the opposite might equally be true. The greater responsibility may be less about following fashion and forging new connections and more about honoring each work’s own historical context.