Self-Portrait

Around 1910, the date the Stedelijk gives this self-portrait, Elena Guro was known in St Petersburg as much for her writing as for her painting. Her first book, The Hurdy-Gurdy, a mix of prose, poems and a play, had come out in 1909. In April 1910 she was among the authors of A Trap for Judges, the first collection of Russian Futurist poetry, alongside the poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Vasily Kamensky, and she and her husband, the painter Mikhail Matyushin, helped to pay for it. The little book was printed on the back of sheets of wallpaper.