A poet, publisher, painter and performer, David Burliuk is deemed to be the father of Russian Futurism. His work was devoted to the pursuit of the modern, at the forefront of the search to develop new ways of expressing creativity within the Russian Empire. With bold typeface, and vibrant, exuberant brushstrokes, Burliuk captured the teetering precipice of the early twentieth century and the desires for progress, dynamism and innovation that not only swept through the Russian Empire, but all of Europe.

Born January 21, 1882, in the village of Ryabushky (near Lebedyn, Ukraine), Burliuk was the eldest son of a family of artists. His father collected books and wrote poetry and prose, and his uncle was a highly successful novelist. Despite his father working for the reactionary Tsarist-Siberian government as a farmer, the family was liberal-minded. Behind closed doors Burliuk would recite forbidden literature including the American journalist George Kennan’s scathing expose ‘Siberia and the Exile System.’ The brochure recounts Kennan’s time in Siberia during the Tsarist regime; vividly describing and illustrating the prison and labour camps, and the harsh lives of those living there. From a young age his artistic talents were lauded. In a letter home from his high school art teacher he was described as possessing ‘a spark of heaven’, a sentiment reiterated by his peers throughout his life.

Having studied with his brother and sister at Kazan Academy, he took the advice of the great Russian painter Repin to leave Russia to see the world. In 1903 he enrolled in Munich Academy, studying under Professor Anton Azhbe who called Burliuk a ‘wonderful wild steppe horse.’ Alongside his brother, they went on to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts between 1904-05. Here he first began to pioneer and organise new forms of art which would go on to become Futurism.

Returning to Russia in 1907, he entered the Moscow Academy of Fine Art in 1911 and fervently interrogated the conventional standards of beauty in art. It was here that he met the renowned Russian poet Mayakovsky, a friendship which shaped the course of Russian twentieth-century art. Mayakovsky, in his autobiography I, Myself (1973), credits Burliuk for stimulating his career as a poet, writing: ‘Burliuk made a poet of me,’ subsidising him with fifty kopeks a day so he could write and not go hungry. The autobiography goes on to assert that it was between Burliuk’s ‘anger of a master who had outplaced his contemporaries;’ and Mayakovsky’s ‘fervour of a Socialist, aware of the inevitable doom of the world’ that conceived and shaped Russian Futurism.

His work, produced at a time of dramatic industrialisation and political change, saw him associated with coinciding movements and groups; particularly Der Blaue Reiter. In 1911 Burliuck and his brother, Vladimir, were invited by Kandinsky and Franz Marc to participate in the first Der Blaue Reiter exhibition. The group’s emphasis to move away from the classical preoccupations of the past towards a new, innovative future was reflected in the Russian Cubo-Futurism’s first manifesto A Slap At Public Taste (1912). The publication was a joint endeavour between Burliuck and Mayakovsky, and their contemporaries Alexandr Kruchenykh and Viktor Khlebnikov. It defined the group as futurists, oracles of a new modern age that they would bring the Russian population into through their publications and art. In response to the publication, both Burliuck and Mayakovsky were expelled from the Moscow Art Academy in 1913.

The following years of his life were marred by war. The First World War cost Burliuk his brother, Vladimir’s, life; an ironic twist of fate given that Burliuk himself was ineligible for battle following a childhood accident in which Vladmir accidentally shot Burliuk in the eye. The glass eye became an iconic aspect of his eccentric appearance that matched his extroverted personality. By 1918, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Burliuk quickly realised there was no longer a place for him in Soviet Russia. In a self-imposed exile, he fled through Siberia to arrive in Japan in 1920. Raising money through selling his art, he eventually made it to New York in 1922. He left with his wife, Marussia Yelenevski, whose Salon had acted as a refuge for Russian Futurists and whose portraits were captured by Burliuk throughout his life.

His entrance into the New York art scene recalled the eccentricism of the Russian Cubo-Futurists, whose movement lasted until the Russian Revolution. In an anecdotal piece published in the Brooklyn Daily Mail in 1924, Burliuk was said to ‘gleam’ within the crowd of an art exhibition. His singular big green and gold earring, and waistcoat of black taffeta scattered with large roses five inches in diameter is recounted. The piece frames him as a shock within the crowd, mirroring his belief that artists must shock and jar the public into recognition of what modern art and painters are doing. Following his arrival to the US he only managed to return to his homeland twice, once in 1956 and the other in 1965. Despite such distance from his homeland, his Ukrainian roots and trauma of war and displacement underpin his work.