1912, Moscow | Donkey's Tail

Preface: welcome to this very brief intro to modern art. Please feel free to use this as a guide for museum visits.

Scandal Economy

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist — probably the most influential one of the late 20th century for thinking about culture, taste, and power. His core project was showing that things we think of as "personal taste" or "natural talent" are actually structured by social position — class, education, upbringing — in ways people don't notice because it feels like free individual choice. A few concepts of his that are doing the heavy lifting in what we've been discussing:

• Cultural capital. Not just money — knowledge, taste, credentials, the "right" way of talking about art, the ability to recognize what's supposed to be impressive. You can inherit it (growing up around it) or acquire it (through education), but either way it functions like wealth: it can be accumulated, invested, and converted into other forms of advantage.

• Field theory. Bourdieu treats areas like art, academia, or fashion as semi-autonomous "fields," each with its own internal rules about what counts as valuable, separate from money or official politics. The art field has its own currency — prestige, originality, critical recognition — and its own gatekeepers.

• The inverted economy of art (from The Rules of Art, 1992). This is the piece we've been using directly: in the art field specifically, being too commercially successful or too easily approved-of by the establishment can actually lower your status, because it suggests you're not doing anything genuinely new. Scandal, rejection, and "uncommercial" difficulty can function as proof of authenticity — which is the inverted economy.

• Consecration. The process by which a field's authorities (critics, museums, juries) officially anoint something as legitimate art, retroactively converting what may have started as scandalous into canon.

Bourdieu's argument in The Rules of Art is that the cultural field runs on an inverted economy relative to the regular economy. In the regular market, value tracks demand and approval. In the cultural field — especially its avant-garde sector — proximity to immediate approval is suspicious. Being embraced by the existing establishment (the Academy, the Salon, the Peredvizhniki critics) signals that you're playing by old rules, which means you can't be offering anything new. Rejection, scandal, mockery — these aren't just risks the avant-garde tolerates. They're functionally necessary. They're the only available proof that you've actually broken from the dominant logic, because the dominant logic's own guardians are the ones objecting.

Scandal becomes a strategy, not just an outcome. This isn't really a choice artists make consciously so much as a structural position they're pushed into. New entrants to any field — young, outside the institutions, without access to academy posts, state commissions, or established patron relationships — can't win by competing on the existing terms. They don't have the capital for that game. So the rational move, structurally, is to refuse the existing terms altogether and propose a new set of rules in which they hold the advantage — where "crude," "unfinished," "childish," "ugly" stop being disqualifying and become credentials. Scandal is the mechanism that forces visibility onto a group that has no other route into attention. You can't out-compete the Academy on the Academy's terms. You can make the Academy notice you by offending it.

Back to Jack of Diamonds

As previously mentioned, Jack of Diamonds was a group of people who rejected the Russian formal institutions, or rejected by it, much like how impressionists were rejected by French Salon, or vice versa. The conservative press treating the 1910 exhibition as a joke or a scandal isn't a failure of the show — it's the show working. Mockery from the legitimating authorities of the old field is, paradoxically, evidence of having entered the field at all. Obscurity would have been the actual failure; ridicule means you were seen, named, and taken seriously enough to be worth attacking. (I'd want to verify the actual press record before this claim goes into a draft — what specifically was said, by whom, how widely — but the general pattern of "establishment critic mocks the new group" is extremely consistent across this period: it's almost exactly what happened to the Impressionists with the Salon des Refusés, and to the Fauves, whose name itself — "wild beasts" — originated as a critic's insult that the group then wore as a label.)

Scandal alone doesn't convert into lasting capital — it needs a second actor willing to recognize value in what the dominant field has just rejected, and to back it before that recognition is safe. That's exactly Shchukin's structural role: his submission to what official taste dismissed wasn't passive, it was the conversion mechanism. The artists generate the rejection; the patron who submits early to that rejected material is the one who later gets credited with having "seen it first." Scandal and submission are two halves of the same transaction — one side produces the raw material (provocation), the other side performs the conversion (early, risky validation) that eventually turns it into canonical value. Without the second half, scandal just stays scandal and the work disappears.

If Jack of Diamonds got mocked and absorbed the mockery as a kind of credibility, Larionov's group goes further and names itself with an insult before anyone else can throw one at them — preempting the scandal economy by self-administering it. That's a more aggressive, more self-aware version of the same mechanism, and it's also angrier: it's not just "we'll wear the insult," it's "we'll insult ourselves on our own terms before you get the chance, and we'll insult the entire premise that Paris gets to set the terms in the first place."

Donkey's Tail

Shchukin submits upward — to Matisse, an individual recognized genius, however controversial. That submission preserves a hierarchy even as it looks risky: there's still a "great artist" at the top, and Shchukin is positioning himself correctly relative to that hierarchy before everyone else does. It's daring, but it's not a rejection of the hierarchy's existence.

Larionov's submission with Donkey's Tail goes the other direction. He's submitting to lubok, to icon painters, to anonymous peasant craft — material the Academy and even the more cosmopolitan members of Jack of Diamonds considered beneath serious consideration. There's no individual genius at the top of this hierarchy to be early about. The submission is to something the field has already ranked as worthless. So instead of correctly positioning yourself within an existing hierarchy of taste (Shchukin's move), you're refusing the hierarchy's legitimacy altogether — saying the ranking itself is the lie, not just your position within it. That's the angrier register: it's not "I see value the field hasn't recognized yet," it's "the field's entire criteria for recognizing value is colonial nonsense, and I'm not asking it to update its rankings, I'm rejecting its authority to rank at all."

"Donkey's Tail" is a direct reference to a 1910 Paris hoax: a group of pranksters tied a paintbrush to a donkey's tail, let the animal swish it against a canvas, and submitted the result to the Salon des Indépendants under a fictitious painter's name, where it was accepted and even praised by some critics before the hoax was exposed. The whole stunt was designed to mock the avant-garde — to suggest that experimental painting had become so arbitrary that a donkey could produce something a jury would call serious art. If that genealogy holds (and it's well enough documented that I'm comfortable working with it, though I'd still want to confirm specifics before quoting it in a published post), then Larionov's choice of name is a double inversion. A French hoax originally built to humiliate the avant-garde gets adopted as the banner of a Russian avant-garde group whose entire reason for existing is to reject French aesthetic authority. He's not just claiming an insult the way "Jack of Diamonds" arguably absorbed the convict-patch association — he's taking a weapon that was built specifically to discredit experimental art, aimed by the Paris establishment at people like him, and wearing it as his own name while seceding from Paris's influence entirely. That's submission to ridicule as a deliberate, almost gleeful act of theft.

• January 1911 — Larionov publicly announces the name "Donkey's Tail" for an upcoming exhibition, while still nominally affiliated with Jack of Diamonds.

• Through 1911 — Preparations for the announced exhibition drag on. Nothing materializes for over a year.

• December 11, 1911 — Larionov publishes an attack on Jack of Diamonds in the newspaper Voice of Moscow. He calls his former colleagues "Repin-style realists," points out that he was the one who coined the name "Jack of Diamonds" in the first place, and declares that while the public already accepts Jack of Diamonds, his new group remains "absolutely free."

• January 4 – February 12, 1912 — A small, hastily-prepared trial exhibition takes place in St. Petersburg, folded into the larger "3rd Exhibition of the Union of Youth." Less than half the eventual Donkey's Tail roster participates: Goncharova, Larionov, Malevich, Alexey Morgunov, Vladimir Tatlin, Artur Fonvizin, Aleksandr Shevchenko. This was rushed specifically to beat Jack of Diamonds, which was about to stage its own show.

• January 23 – February 26, 1912 — Jack of Diamonds stages its own exhibition in Moscow, despite Larionov's attempt to get ahead of them.

• March 24 – April 1912 — The actual Donkey's Tail exhibition opens in Moscow, organized by Larionov. Goncharova alone shows more than fifty works.

• During this exhibition — Several of Goncharova's religious-themed paintings are confiscated by police censors, who object to sacred imagery being shown under a title referencing a donkey's tail. Conservative St. Petersburg critics had already greeted the earlier trial show with open mockery, calling it "a kind of mental asylum" and a "complete mockery of both art and the public."

• Sometime after the March 1912 show — Artur Fonvizin breaks away from the group in protest, after Larionov exhibits Fonvizin's work without his explicit consent.

• Through 1912–13 — The group stops exhibiting under the name "Donkey's Tail."

• March 24 – April 7, 1913 — Larionov stages a new exhibition, "Target" (Mishen), in Moscow. The roster now includes Larionov, Goncharova, Shevchenko, Mikhail Le Dentu, Sergei Romanovich, and Malevich (who had joined "Union of Youth" by this point but still collaborated with Larionov's circle). In the catalogue preface, Larionov describes Target as "the last exhibition from the cycle conceived in 1911" — Jack of Diamonds, then Donkey's Tail, now Target, treated as one continuous arc.

• Also in the Target catalogue — The group announces: "We have created our own style — Rayonism."

• July 1913 — Larionov publishes a brochure, Donkey's Tail and Target, containing a new collective manifesto. The signatories now identify as "The Rayonists and the Buduchniki (Futurists)."

• At the close of the Target exhibition — Larionov formally dissolves the group, stating in an interview that he's doing so to prevent the avant-garde from becoming institutionalized. Every exhibition he organizes after this point carries a different name.🌻