Davyd Davydovych Burliuk and the Ukrainian Avant-Garde

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This website is dedicated to exploring the life and works of Davyd Davydovych as a representative of the often overlooked Ukrainian Avant-Garde movement.

The painter, sculptor, and poet David Burliuk, born in 1882 near Lebedyn, Ukraine, is one of the most influential figures in the artistic world of the twentieth century, often described as the “Father of Futurism in Russia.” In 1912, along with Mayakosvky, Kruchenykh, and Khlebnikov, Burliuk published the Futurist manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” declaring the need to throw “Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, et al., overboard from the ship of modernity,”[1] and develop a new kind of expression and art. Even here as a young man, Burliuk’s artistic mission began to crystalize. Burliuk’s strategy for developing this new art consisted of constant experimentation and production, his search pushing him to create over 1,700 canvases throughout his incredibly prolific career. This massive creative output cannot be categorized by a single style, as Burliuk continually experimented with impressionism, cubism, Radio-style, surrealism and more. The subjects of Burliuk’s artwork are similarly varied, depicting country and city landscapes, portraits, ethnographic scenes, as well as cosmological activities. However, despite the impossibility of reducing Burliuk’s cannon to a single genre or motif, there is an underlying philosophy integrated into all of his works that creates the sense of a cohesive whole; all of his artwork is an attempt to express the invisible horizons which regular human perception fails to capture, or as he sometimes referred to it, the fourth dimension