In 1979, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum held a ground-breaking exhibition dedicated to modern sculpture titled The Planar Dimension 1912-1932. Its curator Margit Howell explored how during this period European artists abandoned traditional ways of making sculptures such as modelling and carving and turned to experiments with planes in space, working with a wide range of materials. Taking Picasso’s Guitars (1912-14) as a starting point, a breakthrough moment in modern art when the artist created a three-dimensional work by extending the picture plane into space, the exhibition included works from a variety of artists and movements, including Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism and Dadaism. Russian and Ukrainian artists were well represented, and the exhibition featured works by Arkhipenko, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitsky and Chashnik among others, as well as Ermilov whose Self-Portrait relief included in the show sold at Replica Shoes ’s London in June 2014 for £986,500 (fig.1).

The Guggenheim show featured four works attributed to Puni, two lent by Herman Berninger, one of which was the present lot. According to the exhibition catalogue it is a reconstruction based on a drawing from 1916 of the original created in 1915 (fig.2). Most, though not all, later exhibition catalogues acknowledge that the present work is a reconstruction. Some more recent catalogues suggest that the reconstruction dates from the early 1920s, whereas others such as for The Great Utopia, simply give the date of 1915, the year when the original version is thought to have been created. The fact however that there is no record of the present reconstruction having been exhibited during the artist's lifet.mes , and the fact that it was first published in the 1972 catalogue raisonné, suggests that it was likley done after the artist's death in 1956, either by the artist's widow Xana Bogulsavskaya, or under her supervision.

After her husband's death, Xana was instrumental in promoting her husband's work. In 1958 she organised four retrospectives, which included early drawings, but no sculptures and reliefs from the 1910s, most of which are thought to have been destroyed or left behind when the Punis fled Russia. Since such works first appear in exhibitions from the early 1960s onwards, its is reasonable to assume that unable to find the originals from the 1910s, Xana had them reconstructed after the 1958 exhibitions in order to give a more complete picture of Puni's early work at future shows.

Puni had first shown his reliefs at The First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings ‘Tramvay V’ which he organised in Petrograd in March 1915. Of the eleven works he exhibited, only two are thought to survive: Accordion, an oil painting which includes three-dimensional wooden elements, and the Cubo-futurist oil Portrait of the Artist’s Wife. Both works are now in the collects ion of the State Russian Museum. One of the most controversial exhibits was Puni’s Card Players, a relief, half-way between easel painting and sculpture, for which he used non-artistic and found materials such as wallpaper and tin. Known only from black and white photographs (figs.3-4), it caused a storm when it was shown and was ridiculed in the press as an assembly of random materials (quoted in Berninger, 1972, p.45). Tatlin showed seven Painterly Reliefs dating from 1914 and 1915 at Tramvay V and Kliun his Landscape Rushing By now at the Tretyakov Gallery, a relief for which he used wood and metal (fig.4).

Later that same year, Puni organized another key exhibition in the history of the Russian avant-garde, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings ‘0,10’. There, Tatlin exhibited his Corner Counter-Reliefs, and Malevich showed his Black Square alongside other Suprematist works. As well as being the driving force behind the exhibition, Puni also showed 23 works, including five listed in the catalogue as Painterly Sculptures.

Relief with Saw comes from the collects ion of Herman Berninger, who knew Puni personally and was instrumental in preserving his legacy. His Puni catalogue raisonné, which acknowledges that the sculptures and reliefs included are reconstructions but is not clear on dating, features a Relief with Saw under no.108, with another version illustrated. In any case Berninger lent the version presented here to the Guggenheim in 1979, and the entry in the Planar Dimensions exhibition catalogue references no.108 in the catalogue raisonné. Since then the work has been included in exhibitions on three continents.