Ivan Puni and the Everyday Object

Among the names attached to this collection, Ivan Puni (Jean Pougny) is one of the most quietly consequential figures of the Russian avant-garde — and one of its great connectors.

The host of 0,10

It was Puni and his wife, the artist Kseniya Boguslavskaya, who organized and largely financed "0,10 — The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings" in Petrograd in December 1915 — the show where Malevich first unveiled Suprematism. Puni was not a bystander to the movement's birth; he helped stage it.

Reliefs and the language of the street

Puni's most radical work pushed painting into three dimensions. His painterly reliefs mounted real objects — a plate, a piece of board, a number cut from a signboard — onto the picture surface, collapsing the distance between art and the everyday object. A white ball, a stenciled letter, a fragment of wood: ordinary things, made strange and exact.

"The picture is a new conception of abstracted real elements, deprived of meaning."

Emigration and after

Like many of his generation, Puni left Russia after the Revolution, settling eventually in Paris, where his later painting softened into a gentle, intimate figuration far from the shocks of 1915. But it is the Petrograd years — the reliefs, the numbers, the signboards — that secure his place in this story, and that echo in the faceted, number-strewn surfaces of the works gathered here.