David Burliuk helped found Russian Futurism and co-authored the movement's famous manifesto, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." He spent his final decades in America, where he painted the three landscapes now in the Foundation's collection.
David Burliuk is known as the father of Russian Futurism, a title he embraced himself. Born in 1882 in the Kharkiv province, he studied painting in Kazan, Odessa, Munich and Paris before returning to Russia a committed champion of the new art.
In the 1910s Burliuk helped organize the Jack of Diamonds group and co-authored the manifesto "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," signed together with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexei Kruchyonykh and Velimir Khlebnikov. The manifesto called for throwing the classics of Russian literature "overboard from the steamship of modernity," a gesture that defined the Futurists' reputation as art's great rebels for decades to come.
Together with Mayakovsky and Vasily Kamensky, Burliuk toured dozens of cities across the Russian Empire giving lectures and performances to introduce audiences to Futurism. After the revolution he traveled through Siberia and the Far East to Japan, where he lived for about two years and exhibited his work, before moving to the United States in 1922 and settling in New York.
In America Burliuk kept painting and published his own journal, Color and Rhyme. He died in 1967 on Long Island, New York. The Foundation's collection holds three of his landscapes from this American period:
"Bouquet Against the Sea," mid-1950s
"Landscape with Blue Mountain," 1930s–1940s
"Long Island. Summer Landscape with a River," 1944
