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A COLLECTOR MUST FACE PRIORITIES The basis for the compulsions that drive men and women to collect art and bookworks to the limit and often above the limit of their financial resources irrespective of the space they have to store and display them are legend. Avarice (I have the best toys in my closet), ego (I'm the best in my vocation and should be the best at my avocation!), philanthropy (I want to be remembered for my cultural contributions to humanity), intellectual curiosity (I came, I saw, I conquered), genetic mutation (I have always had collections including coins, stamps, fish, records, books etc. and I don't really understand the motives for my behaviour), excitement of the quest (will I find it and can I buy it?), all play varying roles in the mind of art/book collectors. You can probably guess that all of them apply to me. I'm the collector and my wife, Ruth, is a willing accomplice. One might then ask, 'Why as a collector are you submitting your treasures to auction?' I would answer that a collection has periods where priorities must be set and this is the moment. We decided to part with some of our outstanding examples of Russian Avant Garde, Futurism, and Dada in order to fund collecting of more contemporary work. The mission of our Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (1979) in Miami Beach was to establish a collection of books, critical texts, periodicals, ephemera, prints, drawings, collages, paintings, sculptures, objects, manuscripts and correspondence dealing with antecedent and contemporary, internationally produced, concrete and visual poetry. The antecedent material had at its starting point, Stephane Mallarmé's poem, 'Un coup de Dés' (Cosmopolis, 1897). The historic examples included works with concrete/visual poetic sensibilities from such twentieth century art movements as Italian Futurism, Russian and Eastern European Avant Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Ultra, Lettrisme, and Ultra Lettrisme. We set our sights on the initiators of the contemporary, international, concrete poetic movement that include Oyvind Fahlstrom (1963), Eugen Gomringer (1953) and the Brazilians, Augusto De Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari (1955). We collected their works as well as those of subsequent poets and over the years expanded the scope of the Archive to include unique or small edition artist's books that integrated text and image or consisted of experimental typography. We added examples of typewriter art and poetry, experimental calligraphy, correspondence art, stamp art, sound poetry, performance poetry, micrography, assembling periodicals, 'zines', and graphic design as well as conventional poetry and prose written by concrete/visual poets and artists in the collection. Further, we collected experimental typographic, text and image works from such contemporary art movements as Fluxus, Transfuturism, and Inism. We also acquired postmodernism and, experimental fiction and non-fictional books with uniquely designed layouts. Manuscripts, sketchbooks and letters written by poets and artists including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bob Cobbing, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Tom Phillips, William Jay Smith, Jean-Francois Bory, Jake Berry and F.A. Nettelbeck among others also took their places in the Archive. The Sackner Archive has evolved into a Word/Image poetic and artistic resource rather than a restricted collection of Concrete and Visual Poetry. The selling of the pieces in this auction will help us to keep on course. Marvin A Sackner, M.D. PROPERTY FROM THE SACKNER ARCHIVE, FLORIDA

Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964)

Rayonist Composition

Details

Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964)
Rayonist Composition
signed with the initials 'M.L.' (lower right)
gouache and watercolour on tracing paper
13½ x 9½ in. (34.3 x 24.2 cm.)
Executed circa 1911

Provenance

Annely Juda Fine Art, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owners in 1979.

Exhibited

Miami, The Lowe Art Museum, The Russian Avant-Garde and American Abstract Artists, March - April 1983, no. 14.

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium

Lot Essay

At the end of 1911, having already gained international recognition, Larionov delved into his Rayonist experiments. Perhaps influenced by contemporary developments in photography and cinematography, his works from this period are based upon an almost scientific resolution of the crossing of reflected rays from various objects. Larionov's attention is focused on the rendition of the light's changes - reflections and refractions, in a dynamic and sensually decorative web of linear designs.
The present watercolour, very close to the similarly lyrical Blue Rayonnism (Private collection), is amongst the artist's most abstract essays of 1911 - an important testimony of his early commitment to a non-mimetic art. Its synthetic, non-objective structure opens the way to the aesthetic revolutions of Constructivism.

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