Artist David Burliuk’s Hampton Bays Home on the Market

The Hampton Bays home of artist David Burliuk is currently on the market for $799,000. The three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,592-square-foot Hampton Bays home on 1.7 acres is where Burliuk, along with his wife, Marussia, lived until his death in 1967.

Burliuk, who has been called the “Father of the Russian Futurist movement,” was born in 1882 in a rural Russian village in what is now Ukraine. He came of age at a time of transition, when art, culture and politics were evolving into the modern world as we know it. The Russian Futurist movement advocated a shedding of the old world and embracing the new world of speed, machinery, youth, violence and industry.

At the time of his birth, Russia was largely an agricultural country, pastoral and quiet. The Industrial Revolution had not yet come. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which began in 1891, would change all of that, making it easier to move raw material from one place to another in a relatively short period of time.

Burliuk studied in Odessa and Kazan until 1902, when he went abroad to the Munich Royal Academy of Arts, where he was known for his larger-than-life personality and outgoing manner, which prompted one professor, according to the Ukrainian Museum’s biography, to dub him “a wonderful wild steppe horse.” He then attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, returning to Russia in 1911 to attend the Moscow Schools of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1911 to 1913.

It was during this time, in December 1912, that Burliuk, along with Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Victor Khlebnikov, created what was to become the manifesto of the Russian Futurist movement, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” The manifesto was a scathing swing at the literati of the time, proclaiming, “The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics. ... Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity. ... From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at their insignificance.”

In 1913, Burliuk was expelled from the Moscow School of Arts. He then forayed into publishing with the futuristic writers group Hylaea, which he founded in 1910 with his brother, Volodymyr, and published the book “The Support of the Muses in Spring.”

Prior to World War I, Burliuk was a busy man, organizing and participating in several exhibitions in Russia and Germany, including exhibiting with the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) at the group’s first exhibition in 1911. World War I broke out in 1914. Burliuk was not eligible for military service due to the loss of an eye as a child during a fight with a brother. His brother, Volodymyr, with whom he worked and collaborated on many projects, was drafted into service in 1916 and was killed on the Macedonian Front in Greece in 1917.

At this point, Burliuk began making his way to America, heading first to the Urals and Siberia, then to Japan, where he lived for a time painting and studying the culture. In 1922, he arrived in New York City, where he continued to be a prolific artist and depicted much of New York in oils and watercolors during that time.

Perhaps pining for the simpler life, like that of his childhood, Burliuk traded New York City for the rural fishing and vacation hamlet of Hampton Bays in 1941. He and his family settled into a nondescript farmhouse on Old Riverhead Road in Squiretown and opened a gallery on Squiretown Road. The gallery property was sold in 2018.

According to the Burliuks’ granddaughter Mary Clare Burliuk Holt, as quoted in artist Ellen de’ Pazzi’s book ”David Burliuk: His Long Island and His World,” “The Hampton Bays property was purchased for a very small sum of money by my father [Nicholas Burliuk] for his father to live in … The property was a very primitive and wild place in those days.”

She went on to state, “My grandfather thought that he could create more by returning to nature. He also felt it was a very beautiful area. Later, an art community developed because of Grandfather’s colorful descriptions of the area and how cheap it was to live here. Artists like Moses and Raphael Soyer, Nicolai Cikovsky and George Constant purchased homes and lived out here in the summer months.”

Burliuk continued to paint, write and publish. He and his wife published the art and literature magazine Color and Rhyme, and his gallery exhibited a cadre of local artists, including Nicolai Cikovsky, George Constant and Moses Soyer. Burliuk continued to create art until his death in 1967.