Stories & Legends

Aleksey Morgunov was the son of the famous landscape painter and wanderer Aleksei Savrasov, from whom he inherited his talent.

After traveling around Europe, Morgunov opened his own studio, known as “Morgunovka”. It became a meeting place for leftist painters and a “free academy” for painters.

Perhaps it was Morgunov, and not Malevich, who became the discoverer of Non-objectivity. The idea is suggested by his “Composition No. 1” with the dominance of a red square in the center.

Malevich called his colleague Morgunov to participate in Februaryism. The Februaryists were a group of artists that used irrational methods, gestures, and actions. The Moscow public remembered them for their “parade of futurists” on the Kuznetsky Bridge on March 1, 1914. On this day, Morgunov and Malevich walked through the favorite walking place of the bourgeois public in Moscow wearing jackets with red wooden spoons in their buttonholes. With this action they wanted to shock the public and achieved their goal, hitting the headlines that day.

Another shocking act of the Februaryists was their speech during the discussion of the exhibition of the “Jack of Diamonds” - an artistic association of the early avant-garde. Morgunov, who disagreed with the criticism of his work, called its author (the art critic Tugenhold) a “fool,” for which he was not given the opportunity to speak in front of the audience and was even asked to leave the exhibition. And in a while expelled from the association. But he received the support of Malevich, who liked the trick.

In the last decade of his creative career, Morgunov completely moved away from the avant-garde and created thematic paintings in the spirit of socialist realism. He glorified the hard labor on construction sites and the life of collective farmers in a post-impressionist, neo-primitivist and realistic manner.