Still Life with a Blue Vase, a cubofuturistic painting, was created by Olga Rozanova in 1913. The artwork features a vase with light blue and pink crisscross flowers. Beside it, there is a rectangular mirror in a brown wooden frame and oriental patterns against yellow background placed right above. 

The painting contains three duplicates of the vase’s irregular outlines. For this reason, it seems to be in three places at the same time.

The sunrays reflected by the mirror seem to stretch almost beyond the canvas boundaries. Olga Rozanova used this artistic device under the influence of Rayonism theory popular in the 1910s. The Rayonists did not view surrounding reality as the world of material objects and focused on the rays reflecting these things. According to artist Mikhail Larionov, “Rayonism erases the boundaries between the canvas and nature”.

Olga Rozanova was born in 1886 in Vladimir province. She came from a wealthy noble family. In 1904 Olga came to Moscow to study painting. She attended the art school established by Konstantin Yuon, a theatre artist, and Anatoly Bolshakov’s school of painting and sculpture. In 1910 Olga Rozanova moved to St. Petersburg, where she joined the Union of Youth, the first Russian association of experimental art. The Union stood at the origins of the Russian avant-garde. It was a project intended to unite non-academic artists.

Olga Rozanova was one of the Russian avant-garde founders. An important part of avant-garde painting was abstractionism as objectless art. Abstract artists did not depict any real objects. Instead, their works featured plenty of geometric figures, lines and colors in different combinations.