Natalia Mikhailovna Davydova

Natalia Mikhailovna Davydova was a Ukrainian artist and aristocrat who championed both avant-garde and traditional Ukrainian art. Her aim to advance and unite contemporary and folk practices was achieved primarily through her work in the village of Verbovka as the owner of the town’s artel, a collective textile workshop where designs by modern artists in the Russian Empire were executed by female artisans working on her estate.

Davydova was born to Mikhail Vasilievich Gudim-Levkovich, a councilor of state and employee at the state bank of Kyiv, and Yulia Nikolaevna Gudim-Levkovich, who ran a prolific artel (artist collective) producing traditional Ukrainian handicrafts. Both were engaged with the arts, helping to organize the Kyiv Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in 1890, an institute dedicated to the promotion of European art that later developed into the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Kyiv Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Folk Art. Davydova married Dmitrii Lvovich Davydov, nephew of the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and together they had four children. In addition to a mansion in Kyiv, Davydova and her husband owned an estate southwest of the city in Kamenka, where her relative, the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, and Tchaikovsky were frequent guests, while Davydova herself owned a second property in nearby Verbovka. There, her neighbors included Karol Szymanowski, a modernist Polish composer who treated Davydova as his muse, dedicating his Piano Sonata no. 2 (op. 21) to her in 1911.

Likely influenced by her mother’s involvement in traditional textile production, Davydova demonstrated an early interest in embroidery, contributing designs for the journal and artist group Mir iskusstva (World of art) inthe early 1890s. In 1900 Davydova opened her own embroidery artel on her Verbovka estate. Initially modest in size, the workshop’s activities quickly grew to employ more than two hundred embroiderers by 1907.

In 1906, along with her mother, Davydova founded the Kyiv Handicraft Society, which helped to establish schools, studios, museums, and craft exhibitions across Ukraine in the regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Volyn, Podilia, and Poltava. The following year, she concluded her studies at the Kyiv Artistic School, where she was a contemporary of the artists Alexandra Exter and Yevgeniia Prybyl’s’kaia, the latter of whom would join Davydova at the Verbovka artel in 1909, serving as its artistic director from 1910 to 1916.

Davydova, Exter and Prybyl’s’skaia collaborated to exhibit textiles from the Ukrainian artels in Moscow. Hoping to generate new income for their enterprise, they solicited designs from avant-garde artists based in Moscow and Saint Petersburg to be executed by the artels’ embroiderers and eventually sold internationally. Though the commercial aspect never materialized, the results were shown in 1915 at the Exhibition of Contemporary Decorative Art: Embroidery, and Carpets from Artists’ Designs, held in Moscow at the Lemercier (or Lemers’e) Gallery under the auspices of the Kyiv Handicraft Society. Included in the exhibition were forty works featuring designs from artists such as Ksenia Boguslavskaia, Davydova, Exter, Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Puni (Jean Pougny), and Georgii Yakulov, among others. Malevich’s contributions were exhibited only as designs, not textiles, as they were received too near to the exhibition’s opening to be embroidered. The three geometrically abstract designs he submitted, now lost, were the first examples to be publicly exhibited of the style he would go on to call Suprematism, anticipating the official debut of his movement at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting just one and a half months later. Two of his designs for scarves relate to later Suprematist paintings, Suprematism: Construction No. 18 (1915; Malevich estate) and Suprematist Composition (mid-1910s, motif 1915; Malevich estate). Contemporary reception of the exhibition was mixed, with the art historian and critic Sergei Glagol’ writing for the Moscow daily paper Utro rossii: “They have attempted to translate the inquiries of various Russian Picassos into the art industry, the Messrs. Maleviches, Yakulovs, and other artists working in this vein; and it goes without saying that there ends up being almost nothing we could call folkloric in the final embroideries.”

In 1917, Davydova and her collaborators organized another exhibition, Verbovka: The Second Exhibition of Contemporary Decorative Art (1917), at Moscow’s Mikhailova Salon, 11 Bol’shaia Dmitrovka Street, where the preeminent avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky delivered a public lecture on the significance of textile design two days before the show’s opening. This presentation expanded to include more than four hundred works, the vast majority of which were sold at an auction hosted during its run, as was typical of such exhibitions in Russia at the time. In addition to the artists participating in the 1915 show, the 1917 exhibition grew to include Olga Rozanova, Vera Pestel, Liubov Popova, and Nadezhda Udal’tsova. Unfortunately, Davydova’s own works of art are known only through photographs of these two textile exhibitions.

In 1916, Davydova moved from Kyiv to Moscow where she frequently hosted members of the Moscow intelligentsia such as Berdiaev, the philosopher Lev Shestov, and the scholar Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon, the last of whom would become one of Malevich’s most prolific interlocutors after having been introduced through Davydova. During the revolution in 1917, her husband and two older sons escaped Russia, while she and her youngest son Kirill returned to Ukraine shortly thereafter. Davydova and her son joined Alexandra Exter in Kyiv in December 1919, where she briefly worked for the Fine Arts Section (IZO) of the People’s Commissariat of the Enlightenment (Narkompros). Kirill joined the Anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, and mother and son were arrested attempting to flee Odessa on December 1, 1920, after being denounced by their landlord. The majority of Davydova’s property, including her artworks, were subsequently confiscated, destroyed, or stolen. Her son died during his imprisonment, and Davydova was transferred to a prison camp from which she was released in May 1921. Able to finally escape to Berlin, Davydova published a 1923 memoir detailing her experiences, Half a Year in Prison: Diary 1920–1921.

In the mid-1920s Davydova moved to Paris, where she worked as a seamstress and embroiderer in the studio of Coco Chanel. She died by suicide in Paris in 1933.