Mikhail Larionov

Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov was born on 3 June 1881 (22 May, Old Style) in Tiraspol, then part of the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire and now in Transnistria, Moldova. His family moved to Moscow, where he attended the Voskresensky Technical High School before entering the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1898. He studied there under teachers including Isaac Levitan, Valentin Serov, and Konstantin Korovin, was expelled and reinstated more than once, and was eventually awarded a second-class diploma in 1910. It was at the school that he met Natalia Goncharova, who became his lifelong partner, closest collaborator, and, much later, his wife.

In 1908 Larionov organized "The Golden Fleece" in Moscow, an exhibition that introduced Russian audiences to French Post-Impressionist and Fauvist painting. He became a founding member of the Jack of Diamonds (Knave of Diamonds) group, which staged influential exhibitions in Moscow around 1910 to 1911, and he later founded the rival Donkey's Tail group as his interest turned toward a home-grown, folk-rooted Neo-Primitivism. Around 1912 to 1913 he and Goncharova developed Rayonism, an abstract style built from intersecting rays of color and light.

Around 1914 to 1915, Larionov left Russia to work with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes as a set and costume designer, and he settled in France for the remainder of his life. He died on 10 May 1964 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb of Paris (one major reference, Encyclopaedia Britannica, gives 11 May), at the age of 82, and is reported to be buried beside Goncharova at the Ivry Cemetery in Ivry-sur-Seine. Following the deaths of both artists, his widow, Alexandra Tomilina, arranged for the bulk of their joint studio archive, paintings, drawings, and library to be transferred to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1988 to 1989, where it remains the principal body of reference material for their work.

Larionov's standing rests less on a single defining sale than on his role in launching the Russian avant-garde. His organizing of "The Golden Fleece" in 1908 and his leadership within the Jack of Diamonds and Donkey's Tail groups placed him at the front of Moscow's engagement with Western modernism, and his and Goncharova's development of Rayonism is treated by museums, including the Guggenheim, as a founding moment for nonobjective art in Russia. His later stage and costume work for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes extended his influence into performance and design. Since his death, his and Goncharova's work has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at institutions including the Arts Council Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and a major exhibition drawing on the Tretyakov's own archive opened in Moscow in 2018.

Larionov's market is small relative to his historical stature, and results are infrequent enough that individual sales carry outsized weight. The current highest documented auction result is Head of a Soldier (1911), which sold at Sotheby's London on 24 June 2026; Sotheby's own account of the sale reported a price of USD 4,160,000 against a low estimate of roughly USD 1.07 million (GBP 800,000). Two earlier seven-figure results, both still lifes, appear directly on Sotheby's own artist page: Still Life with Jug and Icon, sold in London in 2007 for GBP 2,260,000, and a second Still Life, sold in June 2019 for GBP 2,175,000. A separate market listing cites Kneading Dough as having sold at Sotheby's London in 2014 for USD 3,140,317; that figure does not appear on Sotheby's own artist page and its exact sale date could not be independently confirmed, so it is reported here as a second, more loosely sourced result rather than a primary auction-house record.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Larionov, and the strongest available body of reference material is the archive and estate holdings at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, so provenance research and comparison against that archive matter more than usual. The auction market is thin, with only a handful of seven-figure results on record and a headline figure that changed as recently as June 2026, which argues for verifying any headline figure against a primary auction-house source rather than a secondary listing. His work's presence in major museum collections, including MoMA, the Guggenheim, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou, is a strong signal of institutional importance, but that stature has not translated into a deep or liquid secondary market.