Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) was one of the most wide-ranging artists of the Russian avant-garde. Fascinated by traditional Russian art, both high and low, Goncharova incorporated images and forms from this source into her own work. She was a frequent contributor to the major avant-garde exhibitions in the prewar period. Most of her stage design work was at the behest of Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in Paris, where she lived (together with her husband the artist Mikhail Larionov) after 1917. Her important productions for Diaghilev included Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Le Coq d'or (1914), Liturgie (rehearsed in 1915 but never staged), and Stravinksy’s Les Noces (1923). To the right is her "Collecting Fruit," an earlier work completed around 1900.

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