Burliuk, David (БУРЛЮК, ДАВИД) (1882–1967)

Deemed by many as the founding father of Russian Futurism, David Davidovich Burliuk was a painter, writer, poet, performance artist, journal editor, and publisher. Burliuk is considered to be a major figure of both the Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde movements. He began his artistic career in the first decade of the twentieth century at the Royal Academy in Germany and at L’ecole des beaux arts in France. He became famous in his homeland in 1912 when the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was published at his initiative. The co-authors of this provocative text were Alexei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov. Burliuk was instrumental in establishing the public stance of Russian Futurism by lecturing, performing and publishing multiple collections of art and poetry. The main heroic activities of the Russian Futurists orchestrated by Burliuk took place in the pre-war and inter-war period. After the Revolution Burliuk moved to the Far East, then to Japan, and eventually settled in the USA where he died at the age of 85.