Cyclist by Natalia Goncharova

The picture accurately conveyed the rapid speed of movement. By the rushing biker, street signs flash and merge into one. The rapid movement of the wheels is transmitted through their repeated repetition near each other.

And the man himself, stooped to the helm, is stratified, becoming subject to the general idea of speed. These are the main signs of futurism – displacement of contours, repetition of details and inclusions of unfinished fragments. Expanding the forms of the visible world, Goncharova, however, managed to create a holistic image of dynamics in the life of an individual.

This picture embodies the aesthetics of the twentieth century – the century of technological progress and the accelerated pace of life. The Russian Revolution of 1905 has already occurred. On the eve of the First World War, which began in 1914, the turbulent situation in society was subtly caught by the artist and expressed in an innocent plot – the conventional figure of a man on a bicycle.

This is one of the best paintings of the artist in the style of Cubo-Futurism. The subsequent work of Goncharova went in the spirit of the new, invented by M. Larionov style “Rayonism.”