Important Russian ArtSunday 27 May 2012 17:00

MacDougall's Fine Art Auctions30A Charles II St

LondonSW1Y 4AE

Lot: 1* BRODSKY, ISAAK( 1884-1939) New Moon ,signed anddated 1912. Oil on canvas, 62 by 80 cm. Provenance: Collection of E.I. Brodsky, the artist’s son, Leningrad. Privatecollection, St Petersburg. Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert V.Kruglov. Exhibited: Isaak Israilevich Brodsky. Vystavkaproizvedenii. K 90-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya , Museum of theAcademy of Arts, Leningrad, 1974. Isaak Israilevich Brodsky.Vystavka k 100-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya , Museum of theAcademy of Arts, Leningrad, 1984. Literature: I.I. Brodsky,Sbornik statei, Leningrad, Izdanie yubileinogo komiteta , 1929,illustrated in black and white. Isaak Israilevich Brodsky. Stat’i,pis’ma, dokumenty , Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1956, p.179, listed under works from 1912. Exhibition catalogue, IsaakIsrailevich Brodsky. Katalog vystavki proizvedenii. K 90-letiyuso dnya rozhdeniya , Leningrad, Iskusstvo, 1974, p. 32, listed.Exhibition catalogue, Isaak Israilevich Brodsky. Vystavka k 100-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya , Leningrad, Iskusstvo, 1984, p. 42,listed. Isaak Brodsky painted New Moon soon after returningfrom his travels round Spain, France and Italy, and the paintinghas noticeable signs of the romanticised approach to naturewhich is characteristic of the artist’s work in the 1910s. Theattraction of this painting is a poetry that tugs at the heartstringsand its lyrical image of evening. It is a work of symbolism, but atthe same time it retains a sense of naturalism in its vision ofnature. The moon is a pale sickle, the branches of the treesglint, and a softly diffused light shines on the ground. Thegenerally subdued palette of this landscape and the delicaterelationships between the cold and the slightly warmer blue-grey tones, with no sharp contrast between dark and light,create the feeling of a sonorous and transparently clear dewyautumn evening. The painting comprises several layers: againstthe delicate blue-grey background the foliage is painted inpatches of Umber and Sienna and later the twigs are touched inwith a fine round brush to add expressive detail. Brodsky madethe transition from a relatively fluid, Italian use of paint to aslightly fuller-bodied technique on a “thinned out―background. In his recollections Arkadiy Rylov gives a veryexact description of the artist’s landscape technique:“Brodsky – like a jeweller or a weaver – covers hislandscapes in patterns... These colourful patterns are originaland lovely. He does not paint, but rather he draws with a finepaintbrush―. In fact, among the various means of expressionemployed in New Moon it is drawing that plays the leadingrole. Everything is subordinated to a stylising delineation. It iseasy to discern strong admiration for the creative alignment oftwo associations – the Union of Russian Artists and World ofArt . The conventionality of the painting’s rendition and theaccentuated decorativeness of the composition are reminiscentof a theatrical backcloth created by the brush of a virtuoso artistand glimpsed, as it were, through the branches of the wingsand scenery borders. It is surprising that Brodsky never turnedhis hand to theatre design. It is hard to find landscapes moretheatrically constructed than his. The tree canopies andbranches in the wings guide the eye into the open space of thelandscape, allowing the focus to fall on the delicate, fragilebeauty of nature lapsing into sleep and the barely discerniblevillage floating in the distance. The view through branches intoa landscape’s depth was one of the artist’s favourite and oft-repeated devices: indeed, one of Brodsky’s paintings from the1910s was called Through the Branches . A contemporary ofBrodsky’s, the renowned painter Konstantin Yuon, recalled: “I always understood his landscapes as pieces of music, thefine violin part led by his drawing, ever melodious―. And theartist himself, giving rein to his thoughts at the time, wrote:“My favourite motifs have remained, as before, landscapesseen in breadth, with wide open spaces and a perspective

receding into their depths. I have been striving to constructlandscape as a compositional entity, as a picture, intuitivelyresisting preoccupation with landscape sketched from nature,as inspired by Impressionism, which the imitators of that schoolelevated to a value sufficient in itself, driving out the idea ofcomposing large creative works of art―. During the periodwhen New Moon was painted, and right up until theRevolution, the vast majority of critics described Brodskyprimarily as a landscape painter, which was partly due to hisexceptional productivity in this genre.Estimate: £250,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 2* YUON, KONSTANTIN( 1875-1958) Gates of the RostovKremlin ,signed. Oil on canvas, 63 by 81 cm. Provenance: Previously in the collection of I. Isadzhanov, Moscow. Privatecollection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmedby the expert Yu. Rybakova. Exhibited: Vystavka kartin K.F.Yuona. K 25-letiyu khudozhestvennoi deyatel’nosti , The StateTretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1926, No. 7. Sovetskiekhudozhniki starshego pokoleniya , Moscow, June 1958 (labelon the reverse). Literature: A. Koiransky, K.F. Yuon , StPetersburg, A. Kogan, 1918, p. 68, listed under works from1906. Exhibition catalogue, Vystavka kartin K.F. Yuona. K 25-letiyu khudozhestvennoi deyatel’nosti , Moscow, 1926, p. 30,No. 7, listed. N. Tretyakov, K.F. Yuon , Moscow, 1957, p. 103,listed under works from 1906. Yu. Osmolovskii, KonstantinFedorovich Yuon , Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1982, p.226, listed under works from 1906. The present work waspublished as a postcard by the Community of Saint Eugeniabefore 1926. Konstantin Yuon’s cycle of works dedicated tothe ancient Russian town of Rostov the Great dates back to1903, when a record in his handwriting appeared in thevisitors’ book of the Rostov Museum: “Konstantin Yuon, artistfrom Moscow―. From that time on Rostov was for many yearsa place of pilgrimage for the artist. He came to work here from1904 to 1906 and again from 1913 to 1916. The majesticancient architecture became the subject of many of Yuons’sRostov paintings. The majority of these works are now held inthe State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum aswell as local museums in Omsk, Ryazan and Serpukhov. Oneof the few exceptions is the outstanding Gates of the RostovKremlin , well known from books, which has hitherto remainedin a private collection but which MacDougall’s now offers forthe first time at public auction. It is one of the most importantworks in the Rostov cycle. Painted in 1906, it differsdramatically from Yuon’s other works of this period which arebased on the interaction between a genre element in theforeground and a wide panorama of the kremlin ( Fine Day.Rostov the Great , 1906; Spring Evening. Rostov the Great ,1906; Winter. Rostov the Great , 1906). Painted from life, Gates of the Rostov Kremlin astounds the viewer with thesheer strength of its architectural mass. The artist is seeking toconvey the powerful resonance of the white stone of the mainholy gates of the kremlin, the harmoniously aligned rhythms ofthe two fortress towers adjoining the gates and the gatehousechurch of the Resurrection, the window apertures of which intheir rhythmic tread echo the arcades of the gallery. Thisstriking effect is strengthened by the minimalism of the details,carefully selected and positioned, providing colour accents inthe monochrome mass of stone. This piece clearly indicates theinfluence of Serov with his delicate nuances in composition andlighting. Yuon depicts a bright summer’s day but does notdrench the scene in light, instead he makes his sunlit world,and first and foremost the architecture, extremely clear and well-defined in terms of its mass, while at the same time conveyingthe tremulousness and transparency of the summer

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atmosphere. The variety of the colour and light effects, the airand sunshine which pervade the picture, the purity of thepaints, the colour in the shadows, the lively texture of his freebrushwork – all these superlative aspects of Yuon’s techniqueare present in Gates of the Rostov Kremlin . Thanks to theauthentically Impressionistic treatment of the motif, in Yuon’scharacterisitc generalisation of forms, the fragmented composition and the broad brush-strokes, this canvas becomesa true paean to light, the nation’s history seemingly come tolife before our eyes. The artist explained his Rostov works thus:“At that time it was as if I were painting and living in twodifferent eras – encompassing both the past and the present.―Estimate: £220,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 3* VINOGRADOV, SERGEI( 1869-1938) Gathering Mushroomsin the Forest ,signed and dated 1927. Oil on canvas, 73 by 92cm. Provenance: Previously in the collection of ChristenOvergaard (1876–1954), director of Burmeister & WainShipyard, Denmark. Private collection, Europe. Authenticity ofthe work has been confirmed by the expert V. Petrov. Exhibited: XLIX Exhibition , Prague, 1928, No. 126. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, XLIX Exhibition , Prague,1928, No. 126, listed. N. Stankevich, Sergei Vinogradov ,Leningrad, Iskusstvo, 1970, p. 132, listed. Sergei Vinogradovpainted Gathering Mushrooms in the Forest in Latvia where,having decided not to return to Soviet Russia after his trip toAmerica, he settled in 1924. Vinogradov quickly slotted into thelocal Russian cultural community, and the Latgalian estates ofhis hospitable new pupils and friends became his favouritesubjects to paint and places to spend time. Here he producedhis celebrated forest landscapes, drew Latgalian peasants innational costume and even produced some works on thefolklore motifs that were popular with artists of his generation.Among these are the drawing Game , now in the Ufa ArtMuseum, and the present lot, Gathering Mushrooms in theForest . This painting, with its emerald fir trees and dark wall offorest in the background, is imbued with an atmosphere oflyricism. Bright summer sunshine penetrates through thebranches, illuminating the green crests of the trees. An early-morning mist still creeps along the ground, clearing at thedistant forest border to reveal white birch-trunks within. In theforest glade we see the green of fir-trees and small pines – afavourite subject of this artist. White flowers show brightlythrough the grass, and in this joyous natural setting is abeautiful maiden, reminiscent of Russian legends, gatheringmushrooms. This unity of humankind with nature is portrayedwith an easy, fluid hand. The bold use of an intense, saturatedcobalt blue for the maiden’s dress suggests to the viewer notso much a Latgalian village of the artist’s time, but ratherromantic recollections of the folk-tale characters of Nesterovand Vasnetsov, and of Pushkin’s “peasant lady―, roamingthe forest in a sarafan of “blue nankeen― with a basket ofbirch-bark, anticipating a meeting with the son of theneighbouring landowner. In the effort to perfect his technique,Vinogradov did not search for a new, original expressive form inhis Latvian work. On the contrary, the picture GatheringMushrooms in the Forest emphasises his painstakinglypreserved adherence to the traditions of the Russian Realistschool, of which he once proudly said: “I know my art: all mystudying, observing, remembering and working was not in vain.Now technique poses no problems to me. Provided I live longenough, I have accumulated sufficient sundry ideas, themesand, most importantly, nuances in my visual memory to fill tenexhibitions.― And there was indeed, in a Copenhagen galleryin 1927, the Free Exhibition of Russian Art, to whichVinogradov, visiting the Danish capital for the first time, brought

40 of his best canvasses. Calm in mood, executed withunimpeachable skill, they were so good that Danish journalistswere continually noting the “artistic veracity and freshness― ofmany of the artist’s works. Today, unfortunately, we do nothave reliable information as to whether Gathering Mushroomsin the Forest was included in that exhibition, but its impeccableprovenance – it was in the collection of the celebrated Danishcollector and art connoisseur Christen Overgaard, who in 1926became chairman of the Danish Industry Council – leads us tobelieve that he may have acquired this canvas along withothers exhibited at this exhibition.Estimate: £320,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 4 SHILDER, ANDREI( 1861-1919) Before the Storm ,signedand dated 1918. Oil on canvas, 160 by 120 cm. Provenance: Private collection, UK. Authenticity of the work has beenconfirmed by the expert V. Petrov. Exhibited: Pervayagosudarstvennaya svobodnaya vystavka proizvedenii iskusstva, Palace of the Arts, Petrograd, 1919, No. 1584. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Pervaya gosudarstvennaya svobodnayavystavka proizvedenii iskusstva , Petrograd, 1919, p. 83, No.1584, listed. Before the Storm stands out in the oeuvre ofAndrei Shilder, not only because it is rare to find a genreelement in the landscapes of Shishkin’s talented pupil, butalso for its particularly poetic composition. Painted in 1918, thisstriking, monumental work merits special attention for the light itsheds on the attitude of the new generation of Wandererstowards the aims of Russian painting of the 1880s. In thispicture Shilder consciously initiates a dialogue with ChildrenRunning from the Storm by Konstantin Makovsky, paintedalmost half a century earlier. Shilder’s little girls take upMakovsky’s theme, returning home from the forest with theirbasket filled with berries, they are caught in the elements. Butif the clear-cut genre designation of Makovsky’s painting prevents us from a “landscape― reading of the work,Shilder’s Before the Storm prompts us to view nature as anequally important aspect of the composition. Undoubtedly,nature, which in its restlessness and apprehensioncorresponds to the human feelings and emotions, plays amajor role in both works. Makovsky’s frightened children runfrom the terrible thunder-clouds; Shilder’s little girls hurryhome to their village. In both works they will encounter on theway the narrow planks of a bridge across the stream – theymust not trip on them as they run, must not fall into the darkwater. In both pictures there are elements of a certain tendersentimentality, but here the resemblance ends. In Makovsky,the essence of the picture derives from the emotional state ofthe children, as if they themselves are narrating their adventure:how fearful the cloud was, how thorny the undergrowth, howcold the stream. In Shilder, conversely, the descriptiveresonance of the canvas is achieved largely through theinclusion of the little figures of the girls in a carefully plannedand precisely conceived landscape environment, of which they are a surprisingly organic element. The figures of the childrendo, of course, immediately draw our attention, but here they donot dominate, do not seem monumental, do not subjugate theirsurroundings, but rather exist in unbroken unity with thelandscape. At the same time the countryside itself is depictedin a way we could consider to be the artist’s “signature―style, with the polished draughtsmanship – learned from Shishkin – of the plants in the middle ground and the extremely expressive silhouettes of the trees against a background, ofvivid contrasts between the dark sky and last bright ray ofsunlight. In this composition the dominant element is theemotional mood generated by colour and chiaroscuro,stimulating the viewer’s imagination and endowing the picture

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with particular mysteriousness. For this reason we can safelysay that Before the Storm is a seminal work in the oeuvre ofShilder, an artist for whom a beautiful landscape, as a skilfullycrafted work of art possessing its own means of expression,could in no way be equated with the precise rendering of thereality of nature.Estimate: £150,000.00 - £200,000.00

Lot: 5* JAWLENSKY, ALEXEJ VON( 1864-1941) Stillleben mitHeiligenbild und Blumentopf (Still Life with a Picture of a Saintand Pot of Flowers) . Oil on board, 54.5 by 44 cm. Painted c.1910–1912. Provenance: Collection of Hermann Stern,Germany. Private collection, Europe. Literature: The work hasbeen included in the Jawlensky catalogue raisonné and hasbeen published in Bild und Wissenschaft. Forschungsbeiträgezu Leben und Werk Alexej von Jawlenskys , Locarno, Alexejvon Jawlensky-Archiv AG, 2006, vol. 2, p. 14, No. 2347,illustrated. Painted in 1910–1912, Stillleben mit Heiligenbildund Blumentopf dates from the most important period in Alexejvon Jawlensky’s extremely fruitful career, when he and hislong-time partner Marianne von Werefkin were at the centre ofthe rapid changes which were taking place in Munich’s avant-garde circles. In 1909, together with Gabriele Münter, WassilyKandinsky and others they had founded the NeueKünstlervereinigung München, headed by Kandinsky andJawlensky. A year later, Jawlensky met Franz Marc, who wouldalso become a member, and in 1911 he met Kees van Dongenin Paris, where he again saw Matisse. The year 1911 inparticular was a turning point for Jawlensky. In his memoirswhich he dictated towards the end of his life to his friend andassistant Lisa Kümmel, the artist recalls: “In the spring of 1911Marianne Werefkin, Andrej, Helene and I went to Prerow on theBaltic. For me that summer constituted a great step forward inmy art. I painted my finest landscapes there as well as largefigure paintings in powerful, glowing colours, not at allnaturalistic or objective. I used a great deal of red, blue, orange,cadmium yellow and chromium-oxide green.― Stillleben mitHeiligenbild und Blumentopf has all the stylistic elements whichcharacterize Jawlensky’s best works. During this period, hiscolours became gradually more vivid and bold, and his workshows a simplicity of form which is further accentuated by theuse of strong contours. Jawlensky’s simplified forms echoRussian icon painting, which held a lifelong fascination for theartist. In his memoirs, Jawlensky remembers his frequent visitsto the Museum of Alexander III in St Petersburg, now the StateRussian Museum, where he would admire the icons and evenwhole iconostases: “a wonderful art of which Europe had sofar seen very little―. The picture of a saint in Stillleben mitHeiligenbild und Blumentopf appears to represent an icon from the artist’s native Russia. Such icons also appear inother still lifes by Jawlensky, such as Stillleben mit Heiligenbild, which the artist painted around the same time as the presentwork. At the same time, the icon symbolises the spiritualdimension central to Jawlensky’s art. In fact, the artist wasconstantly searching for the means to go beyond materialobjects: “I had to paint not what I saw, not even what I felt, butonly what was in me, in my soul―.Estimate: £350,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 6* JAWLENSKY, ALEXEJ VON( 1864-1941) Stillleben mitOrangen (Still Life with Oranges) . Oil on cardboard, laid onpanel, 31 by 37.5 cm. Provenance: The artist’s studio. DomWillibrord Verkade. Gift to Karl Caspar. Crane Kalman Gallery,London. Sotheby’s London, 6 December 1961, Lot 184.

O’Hana Gallery, London. La Motte Gallery, Geneva, 1963.Anonymous sale; Impressionist and Modern Art, Part II ,Sotheby’s London, 28 November 1995, Lot 248. Privatecollection, Europe. Exhibited: Jawlensky , The RedfernGallery, London, 5–28 October 1960, No. 31 (label on thereverse). Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Jawlensky ,London, 1960, No. 31, listed. M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky and A. Jawlensky, Alexej von Jawlensky. CatalogueRaisonné of the Oil Paintings , London, 1991, vol. I, p. 67, No.43, illustrated in black and white. Painted around 1902, Stillleben mit Orangen is a rare early work by Jawlensky whichtestifies to his life-long preoccupation with colour. ForJawlensky, colour was a means of expression in its own rightand it was in still lifes that he could best experiment with it. Helater said of these earlier works: “I was never satisfied withwhat I painted. I now started painting still lifes without anyparticular direction, mostly fruit, always trying to bring harmonyto my work. Of course it was not my own language as yet butsome of these paintings were very beautiful… For me it wasnever enough, though, and I kept on trying with stronger andstronger colours to find a harmonious tone, eventuallyproducing one or two works which really did satisfy me.― Thebeginning of the 20th century marks a turning point inJawlensky’s oeuvre. His training at the Imperial Academy ofArts in St Petersburg and later with Anton Ažbe had refined hisgifts, but it was now, exposed to the work of other artists andengaging with new artistic trends, that Jawlensky’s workentered a new phase. The still lifes he painted around 1902show the influence of Vincent van Gogh, clearly visible in thebrushwork of the present lot, with its short and broadly applieddabs of paint. Even more significantly, his palette underwentradical changes, laying the basis for his later work. Heabandoned the darker tones of his earlier paintings andembraced the bright and strong colours for which the artist iscelebrated today as one of the foremost colourists of the 20thcentury. It appears that Stillleben mit Orangen was of specialsignificance to Jawlensky. He kept it in his studio until 1908,before giving it to Karl Casper, another painter based inMunich. In 1907, Jawlensky had met the Nabi painter and monkJan (Willibrord) Verkade, from whom he learned aboutGauguin’s ideas. During his stay in Munich, Verkade oftenpainted in Jawlenky’s studio and the two artists became closefriends. Sometime in 1907 or 1908, Verkade painted a nude onthe reverse of Jawlensky’s Stillleben mit Orangen , and thetwo artists then gave the double-sided painting as a gift toCaspar, their mutual friend. It remained in his collection forseveral decades before the two works were separated in the1950s.Estimate: £350,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 7* JAWLENSKY, ALEXEJ VON( 1864-1941) Meditation (Kleinerabstrakter Kopf) , signed with initials and dated 1934. Oil onpaper, laid on cardboard, 15.5 by 12 cm. Provenance: GalkaScheyer, Hollywood, 1934. Lette Valeska, New York/LosAngeles. Private collection, USA. Anonymous sale; Impressionist and Modern Day Sale , Christie’s New York, 9November 2006, Lot 407. Private collection, Europe. Exhibited: Alexej Jawlensky: A Centennial Exhibition ,Pasadena Art Museum; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University,Waltham; Winnipeg Art Gallery; University Art Gallery,University of California at Berkeley; University Art Gallery,University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Isaac DelgadoMuseum of Art, New Orleans, April 1964–January 1966, No.177. Literature: C. Weiler, Alexej Jawlensky , Köln, M.DuMont Schauberg, 1959, p. 256, No. 396 c, illustrated in blackand white. M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky and A.

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Jawlensky, Alexej von Jawlensky. Catalogue Raisonné of theOil Paintings , London, 1993, vol. III, p. 52, No. 1484; p. 64,illustrated. The Meditations are not only Jawlensky’s finalseries, but they are also among the most significant andaccomplished works in his oeuvre. In these paintings, thehuman face is reduced to its essentials and colour becomes anautonomous, expressive means of portraying human emotions.In the words of the artist’s granddaughter, AngelicaJawlensky Bianconi, “the Meditations are a highpoint ofstylization and control of colour: Jawlensky’s collectivemasterpiece.― Jawlensky began this series in 1934, when thedeterioration of his health forced him to paint in small format. Ashe later recalled in his memoir, “the stiffness in my elbowsand wrists has tremendously hindered my painting and I havehad to find a new technique. All the work of my final period hasbeen in small format, but my paintings have become evendeeper and more spiritual, speaking purely through colour.Feeling that because of my illness I would not be able to paintvery much longer, I worked like a man possessed on theselittle Meditations . And now I leave these small, but certainlyfor me important, works to posterity and to those who love art.― The present example figures along with eleven other Meditations in the list of works that Jawlensky sent to Galka E.Schleyer, his friend and agent in America, in 1934. In a letter toher said of these paintings: “These 12 works are all verydifferent, but they are all interesting […] They are all beautiful.They need to be looked at up close.―Estimate: £60,000.00 - £90,000.00

Lot: 8  WEREFKIN, MARIANNE( 1860-1938) Nighttime Fishing inAscona . Tempera on cardboard, laid on board, 65 by 50 cm. Painted c. 1923. Provenance: Estate of the artist, until 1938.Collection of Else Messmer, Zurich, until 1989. Privatecollection, Germany. Exhibited: Marianne Werefkin. Gemäldeund Skizzen , Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, 28September–23 November 1980, No. 81. Il Ticino nella pitturaeuropea , Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, 11September–15 November 1987, No. 58 (label on the reverse).Marianne Werefkin, Leben und Werk , Ascona, Munich,Hannover, Berlin, Bad Homburg, Hamburg, 1988–1990, No.92. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Marianne Werefkin.Gemälde und Skizzen , Wiesbaden, 1980, p. 32, No. 81,illustrated in colour; p. 134, No. 81, illustrated in black andwhite. Exhibition catalogue, Il Ticino nella pittura europea ,Lugano, Electa, 1987, p. 115, No. 58, illustrated. Exhibitioncatalogue, Marianne Werefkin. Leben und Werk , Munich,Prestel, 1988, No. 92, illustrated in black and white. B. Fäthke, Marianne Werefkin , Munich, Hirmer, 2001, p. 202, No. 223,illustrated. Painted in 1923, Nighttime Fishing in Ascona iswithout doubt among the best examples of Marianne vonWerefkin’s mature work, in which she achieved new artisticheights after a traumatic period in her life. A major figure in thedevelopment of German Expressionism, the work of Werefkinhas long been overshadowed by her protegé and long-termcompanion, the painter Alexej von Jawlensky. Born into thefamily of a wealthy Russian general, Werefkin’s artistic talentswere encouraged early on in her life by her mother, who was also a painter. She took private lessons in St Petersburg underIlya Repin, who was full of praise for her early, Realistpaintings. Werefkin later wrote: “The great Realist Ilya Repinwas delighted with my things… I admired him a lot, but wenever agreed. At that time I was called the Russian Rembrandt,I exhibited at the famous Itinerant Exhibitions […] I receivedbrilliant reviews and I despaired. The Realist world was asstrange to me as the Romantic. I had other goals in mind.― Itwas through Repin that Werefkin met Jawlensky in 1891, an

event that would change her life forever. In 1896, they movedto Munich and Werefkin gave up her own work in order todevote herself entirely to Jawlenky’s career. It was only in1906 that she again took up painting, influenced by Gauguin,Munch, the Nabis and the Fauves. Werefkin spent the summerof 1908 in Murnau, painting together with Jawlensky, GabrieleMünter and Wassily Kandinksy. The following year they foundedthe Neue Künstlervereinigung München , which prefigured Der Blaue Reiter . The present work depicts the Swiss town ofAscona located on the shores of Lake Maggiore, whereWerefkin settled in 1918. Forced to leave Germany at thebeginning of the First World War, Werefkin had lost everything.Despite these difficulties, she found new creative energy whichallowed her to paint some of her best works. Her paintingsbecame more narrative and lyrical, and acquired a new depth ofmeaning. Nighttime Fishing in Ascona , which has beenincluded in many major exhibitions of the artist’s work,epitomizes this extremely fruitful period in Werefkin’s career.Estimate: £150,000.00 - £200,000.00

Lot: 9* SHUKHAEV, VASILY( 1887-1973) View of Argentat ,signedand indistinctly dated, bearing the artist's studio label on thestretcher. Oil on canvas, 65 by 81 cm. Painted in 1929. Provenance: Collection of A. Chudnovsky, Leningrad. Privatecollection, Europe. Vasily Shukhaev’s painting View ofArgentat belongs to a series of canvasses that the artistpainted during his trip in the summer of 1929 round the oldFrench towns on the western edge of the Massif Central, alongthe banks of the Dordogne River. One of the most beautifulplaces in France – a land without roads, fashionable hotels orgolden beaches – the Tulle district and the Auvergne attractedthe artist with their untouched picturesque beauty. The wideupland expanse with its huge number of extinct volcanoes, itsmany short mountain ranges, narrow river valleys, greenwoodlands and pastoral villages still held the spirit of “Lavieille France― with which Shukhaev’s landscapes areimbued. Having practically never painted views of the cities ofParis or St Petersburg, and now finding himself in the depths ofthe French countryside, Shukhaev creates, one after another,paintings of his beloved towns of Turenne and Argentat andtheir environs. He was captivated by the measured rhythm ofprovincial life, the charm of the 16th and 17th centuryarchitecture, the colours of the little houses with their turretsand balconies, hiding their roofs darkened with age in the dullgreenery of their gardens. All these paintings are withoutdynamism – with scarcely a human being – but they delicatelyportray the special contemplative and harmonious atmosphereof human history in coexistence with the majestic world ofnature. In View of Argentat Shukhaev’s attention is drawn tothe old paved embankment, overgrown with greenery, of theDordogne River skirting the town where a whole row of houseshas grown up with neatly whitewashed walls and tall roofs tiledin grey slate. The present work was in all probability painted bythe artist from Le Pont de la République, as the bridge thatcrosses the Dordogne downstream from the scene is called.The palette is of silvery-olive and the landscape is immersed inthe slumber of a summer’s afternoon, but despite itsemptiness it breathes a deep tranquillity. The artist painted thefine view that opens out from the bridge on to the right bank ofthe river on several occasions. Thus, the two-storey houseseen in the foreground, with its suspended wooden balconyand high, pointed roof, on the promontory immediately by thebridge, may easily be recognised in another view of Argentatalso dating from 1929. Painted as a pair with the present lot,and on a canvas of a similar size, it shows the same landscapebut from a different, closer viewpoint ( Argentat , 1929).

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Shukhaev painted provincial Argentat, so dear to his heart, in atleast two other works. One of them, also of the embankment, isin the collection of the I.V. Savitsky Museum of Arts of theRepublic of Karakalpakstan in Nukus, and the second, of a grey-brown blind alley deep in the embankment, unpopulated andwith a gloomy cluster of houses under grey skies, is in the V.V.Vereshchagin Art Museum in Mykolaiv.Estimate: £250,000.00 - £300,000.00

Lot: 10  ROCKLINE, VERA( 1896-1934) Vue de Tiflis ,signed "V.Rockline", also signed "Schlesinger" in Cyrillic. Oil on canvas,97.5 by 75.5 cm. Provenance: Anonymous sale; ImportantRussian Pictures , Christie’s London, 28 November 2007, Lot425. Private collection, UK. Exhibited: Rétrospective VeraRockline , Galerie Drouart, Paris, 1984 (label and stamp on thestretcher). Femmes et Muses des Impressionnistes auxModernes , Tokyo, Osaka and elsewhere, 1996–1997, No. 47.Elles de Montparnasse , Musée de Montparnasse, Paris, 12April–4 August 2002. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Femmes et Muses des Impressionnistes aux Modernes , 1996,p. 77, No. 47, illustrated, titled Paysage de Tiflis . Vue deTiflis is one of the very few known works of Vera Rockline’sRussian period. The artist developed a passion for paintingCubist townscapes in the late 1910s under the influence ofAlexandra Exter, her tutor in Kiev, whose studio the youngartist, still bearing her maiden name Schlesinger, joined in 1918after her parents moved there from Moscow. Before this, theyoung woman had been studying in Moscow at Ilya Mashkov’sstudio of drawing and painting where, according to hercontemporaries, she painted Neo-impressionist work of whichlittle is now known. In the years 1918–1919, still under thename of Schlesinger, the artist took part in the MoscowFellowship of Artists’ 24th exhibition; the 2nd exhibition ofpictures by the Artists’ Union, the exhibition of Jewish artists’painting and sculpture; and the 5th National Exhibition ofpainting From Impressionism to Non-objectivity . In the sameyear, however, the artist married and left with her new husbandfor Georgia. In 1919–1920 Rockline lived in Tiflis, where shecreated a small series of paintings and drawings of the city. Inthese works, the images of Tiflis are created using precise,sculpturally shaped volumes, and it seems as if all it would takeis just one detail, one component, to be removed for gaps toopen up and the whole thing to collapse. However, Rockline’sCubism never crosses the line into complete freedom of form.Her paintings of this time are restrainedly Cubist and somewhat unreal: although possibly less free in their structure than thecompositions of Exter, they are finer and more delicate inpalette and closer in manner to Cézanne. In the landscapes thatshe painted in Georgia, the contraposition of masses is notquite so forceful as in her work as a student following inExter’s footsteps. The connection between the masses isthrough Cézanne-like transitions that even out the light anddismember volumes into a mosaic of planes turned towards theviewer. In this period Rockline was striving to depict the spacebetween objects rather than accentuating their convexity in theempty space of traditional perspective. She was interestedprimarily in the materialisation of that new urban architecturalspace which she felt in the Georgian capital. For this reasonRockline invariably brings mountains or the Kura River into herurban compositions of Tiflis, acting as a spatial caesura andproviding a rhythmic prop for the viewer. In the present lot,painted in wonderfully harmonious dark blue-greens, brownsand blacks, the caesura is the broad watery expanse of theKura. But in her portrayal of water Rockline’s vision remainsCubist – she breaks down the river’s mass into elements andplanes and portrays the restless motion of the water by colliding

small flat areas of colour and geometrically compact shapes,rearranged and squeezed together by the strict sculptural anddecorative rhythms of the spans of Mikhailovsky Bridgestretching out to Madatovsky Island. Like the majority oflandscapes from this cycle, Vue de Tiflis is deserted, but in noway dead. Although there are no human figures, the boats inthe foreground and the chimneys in the distance are evidenceof life going on around. The main emphasis is on the sculpturalexpressiveness of the shapes. Buildings are vigorously cut upinto shining facets, allowing them to be seen from variousviewpoints at the same time. Rockline makes maximum use ofopportunities to flatten out space, as ever restricting the depthin perspective of her Cubist structures by a succession of wallsor the crested ridge of a mountain. All this makes Vue de Tiflis one of the most expressive and significant works ofRockline’s early period.Estimate: £300,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 11*§ SEREBRIAKOVA, ZINAIDA( 1884-1967) Sleeping Nude(Katya) , signed and twice dated 1934, once indistinctly. Oil oncanvas, 65 by 80 cm. Provenance: Anonymous sale; TheRussian Sale , Sotheby’s London, 10 May 2000, Lot 65.Acquired at the above sale by the present owner. Privatecollection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmedby the experts A. Kiseleva and I. Geraschenko. Relatedliterature: For another version of the same composition, see Zinaida Serebriakova (1884–1967) , Syseca, Malakoff, 1995,p. 15. The present work by Zinaida Serebriakova is anundoubted masterpiece among her famous nudes. Here theartist deploys a distinctive freedom and fluidity in herdevelopment of a classic theme in world art – the depiction of asleeping sitter. Taking up the imagery of the sleeping Venusesof the Venetian masters, the nymphs of Boucher and thebathers of Cabanel and Renoir, Serebriakova does not reduceher model to some anonymous heroine of ancient mythology,rather, it is the “stolen moment― that interests her, catching ayoung girl, languid and flushed from sleep, at her most naturaland without artifice. It is notable that the model here was theartist’s 22 year-old daughter Katya, her favourite sitter sincethe 1920s. We need only cast our minds back to the celebrated1923 work in the Peterhof Museum, Katyusha on a Blanket ,with the figure of the sleeping child sprawling across a vividblue background, which initiated a whole series of similarworks. Later too, in the best works of Serebriakova’sPetrograd and Paris periods we encounter this same, invariablysmiling, mischievous young thing. Undressed and standing bythe bed ( Katyusha Nude , 1922); leaning on the balustrade,head thrown back and draped in a red shawl ( Nude Leaning onBalustrade , 1929); sleeping, arms spread theatrically, amidst amass of red and blue drapery ( Nude , 1928); or lying peacefullyon the bed-sheets ( Nude , 1927). Yet the particularcharacteristics of the scene and the degree of finish in each ofthese works are always different, governed by whateverchallenge Serebriakova has set herself. Thus the picture nowoffered for auction, painted with an extraordinarily free handand splendid understanding of the female form, is among themost developed and finished of the artist’s works.Serebriakova achieves an overarching harmony in thecomposition, finding equilibrium between volume and linearrhythm and introducing colour and variation with the drapery.The delicate light effects and the warmth of the skin tone areparticularly enhanced by the background of plain greencushions and the busily patterned blanket and rug hanging onthe wall behind. Intoxicated by her ravishing model,Serebriakova creates an unreservedly sensual image of thenaked young woman, accurately capturing the complex pose

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with a supple contour line and conveying the delicate, gracefulsinuosity of her body. According to Alexander Benois, who inhis letters often wrote admiringly of Serebriakova’s “peerlessnudes―, this magnificent painting, full of internal movement, isanimated “not by a generalised sensuality but by somethingspecific, which we recognise from our literature, from our music,from our personal experiences. This is truly the flesh of ourflesh. Here is that grace, that comfortable languor, that cosy,domesticated side to Eros – all of which are actually morealluring, more subtle and sometimes more perfidious, moredangerous than what Gauguin found on Tahiti and in search ofwhich blasé Europeans left their pampered life at home and setoff in the footsteps of Pierre Loti, across the whole of the white,yellow and black world― (Alexander Benois, Khudozhestvennye pis’ma , 1930–1936. p. 175). This Sleeping Nude from 1934 is a kind of summation ofSerebriakova’s many years of experimentation and study inthe genre. It combines an expressivity in the silhouette withpainterly accomplishment in the brushwork allowing us toconfidently assert that this represents one of the peaks ofSerebriakova’s distinctive style.Estimate: £900,000.00 - £1,200,000.00

Lot: 12§ SEREBRIAKOVA, ZINAIDA( 1884-1967) Portrait of MariettaFrangopulo ,signed and dated 1922. Pastel on paper, laid oncardboard, 63 by 49 cm. Provenance: Collection of L.G.Loitsyansky, Leningrad. Private collection, UK. Exhibited: Zinaida Serebriakova , The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow,1986. Literature: B. Ugarov et al, Zinaida Serebriakova.Katalog vystavki: sbornik materialov i katalog ekspozitsii k 100-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya khudozhnika , Moscow, Sovetskiikhudozhnik, 1986, p. 165, listed; p. 168, illustrated. V. Kruglov, Zinaida Serebriakova , St Petersburg, Zolotoi vek, 2004, plate75, illustrated. The present portrait of the ballerina MariettaKharlampievna Frangopulo (1901–1979) belongs to ZinaidaSerebriakova’s brilliant cycle of theatre works from the years1922–1924. As early as January 1922 the artist’s motherEkaterina Nikolayevna Lanceray was writing “This winter wehave plunged right into the world of ballet. Zina draws ballerinasabout three times a week, when some young ballerina will posefor her... and twice a week Zina takes her sketchbook into thewings to draw ballet dancers―. Here, behind the scenes atwhat had been the Mariinsky Theatre, the artist also made theacquaintance of a cheerful and sociable young ballerina who inher narrow circle of friends called herself “the free Hellene―(her father was of Greek extraction, a top official in aPetersburg bank). Marietta Frangopulo, soloist at the time withthe Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, had recently been afellow student of George Balanchine’s, graduating in 1919from the Petrograd College of Choreography. She idolisedpoetry, and gave excellent renditions of the verse of AlexeyApukhtin and Igor Severyanin. The first pencil portrait ofFrangopulo by Serebriakova was of her performing anarabesque in a dance class during the winter of 1921–1922: itis now held in the Chuvash State Art Museum. The crowningjewel of the artist’s ballet series, however, is the presentportrait of 1922 in which the actress is depicted in a costumemade after the designs by Bakst for Diaghilev’s one-act ballet Carnaval set to the music of Robert Schumann. The portrait isin pastel and, as Serebriakova’s daughter Tatiana later wrote:“in a manner uniquely hers, using thickly applied pastel, lighthatching and stump-work technique―. In the same year, 1922,her best ballet portraits – Marietta Frangopulo, Lidya Ivanovaand Alexandra Danilova in their costumes for the Pas de trois in Nikolai Tcherepnin’s ballet Armida’s Pavilion , E. Svekis inthe costume for her character in Sleeping Beauty and a

number of others – were shown at the World of Art exhibitionin Petrograd. Their resonance was widely felt and KonstantinSomov liked them very much, writing in his diary: “I have beenpersuading Zina to do a big ballet portrait picture using thesketches I have seen!― Serebriakova followed his advice, andright up until her departure from Russia in 1924 workedpassionately and prolifically to “paint ballet―, creating renownfor herself as “the Russian Degas― as well as a whole suite ofportraits and genre compositions dedicated to the theatricalworld. Among them was one further pastel portrait ofFrangopulo (1924), which is now the pride of the Museum ofthe Academy of Russian Ballet.Estimate: £200,000.00 - £300,000.00

Lot: 13  YAKOVLEV, ALEXANDER( 1887-1938) Nudes Bathing,signed and dated 1929. Tempera on canvas, 155 by 92 cm. Provenance: The artist’s estate. Acquired from the above byVose Galleries, Boston, 1948. Reacquired from the above bythe artist’s estate, 1956. Collection of Roger Prigent.Anonymous sale; Modern and Contemporary Paintings,Drawings and Sculpture , Sotheby’s New York, 28 February1992, Lot 120. Anonymous sale; Russian Art , Sotheby’s NewYork, 17 April 2007, Lot 335. Private collection, UK. Exhibited: Alexandre Iacovleff Memorial Exhibition , Fitchburg ArtMuseum, Fitchburg, January–February 1954. AlexanderYakovlev’s painting Nudes Bathing is a kind of summation ofhis work over many years on the theme of the nude. Thelargest of all Yakovlev’s 1929 Parisian works on this subject, itcombines the artist’s new researches into colour with hisdevelopment of his beloved image of the Russian bath-houseand expressive Neoclassical form. At the same time, alongsidethe artist’s obvious interest in the 17th-century Old Masters,the influence of Cézanne’s Baigneuses is clearly discernable. The painting preserves a legacy from the art of former times: asense of allegory about the female forms, each of themincorporated in a circle and simultaneously turned side-ontowards the viewer, a difference of scale in the portrayal ofprimary and secondary subject matter, a localisation of colour,a smoothness in the manner of execution, glazes, and a brownacademic background. The severe, almost monochrome, useof colour nonetheless brings out as vividly as possible thesensuous, young, statuesque figures of the women, at differentheights, in motion and forming a circle. The treatment of thenudes, their corporality and bevelled structural quality stronglyrecall Cézanne. Yakovlev rejected much unnecessary detail.He brought the figures of the young women closer to the viewerand in a larger scale than normal. The image of women bathingis elevated by the artist to a profoundly universal statement: ithas become a personification of the eternal, timeless ideal ofhealth, femininity and the beauty of the youthful naked body. Despite the presence of objects typically found in a bath-house– the tub of water, stone benches, ladles and thin towels forthe bathers to rub down with – the space is purely notional,stripped of any vernacular features. Only the arched doorwayand steps in the background, which lend the composition theeffect of breaking through into a brightly lit space behind the picture, is redolent of Italian painting. It was no chance remarkwhen Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva gave this description ofYakovlev’s work at the time: “His multi-faceted art, embracingall the developments in modern art, was nevertheless classicalin the best sense of the word... His draughtsmanship wasexact, powerful and simplified. All his creative work producedan impression of profound truth, sincerity and seriousness―. In fact, among the masters of Neoclassicism in the 1920sYakovlev’s name stood in the front rank. His work exemplifiedthis 20th-century artistic movement in an innovative form, which

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came not only from the artist’s deep affinity with the classics,but also from certain entirely new endeavours in art, particularlyCubism and Neoprimitivism, with their techniques ofdeformation. The influence was also felt of his formal educationfrom the Academy of Arts. Even in his student days Yakovlevwas attracted by the impudent idea of showcasing the masteryof the Old Masters. In 1913 the artist finished two paintings forhis degree, The Bath-house and Bathing , in which he gavefree expression to his delight in the Old Masters, and especiallyRubens. This came through in everything: choice of subject,interpretation of the naked body, compositional structure andheightened attention to drawing. Yakovlev came out of theAcademy ardently convinced of the need to continue with whathe had begun – his study of the art of the past. For him hisacquaintanceship with the European painting tradition becamesignificantly instructive, especially in Italy where, together withhis friend Vasily Shukhaev, Yakovlev pursued his artisticeducation. Some critics were offended by the stylisation inYakovlev’s work, and the overt eclecticism. The response ofAlexander Benois, who always appreciated and defended theartist’s talent, was quite rightly to say “You can regardYakovlev however you like, you can love his work or not, butthere is one thing you should be in no doubt about – that this isa phenomenon... What a master he is... What knowledge thisperson has. Without any effort he can sketch a magnificentlyformed figure in a few minutes, bending it to his own capriciouswill..., painting it in whatever colours he likes ... We need tolearn from him… not speculate about his art, not be outraged bythe antics of Apollo’s golden boy toying with the most difficultthings as if it is merely childish nonsense.― WhereverYakovlev lived – Russia, China, France or the USA – theessence of his art hardly changed, and everywhere there werevariations on the theme of bathing among his most famousworks. For a long time, Nudes Bathing remained enshrined inthe collection of the artist’s family and it was only in 1948, tenyears after Yakovlev’s death, that it was sold by his heirs tothe highly regarded Vose Galleries. After the painting wassuccessfully put on public view in 1954 at an exhibition ofAlexander Yakovlev’s work, Nudes Bathing was bought backby the artist’s family.Estimate: £750,000.00 - £900,000.00

Lot: 14* NIVINSKY, IGNATY( 1880-1933) Two Female Figures(Venus) , signed and dated 1916. Oil on canvas, 159 by 112cm. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity ofthe work has been confirmed by the experts E. Ivanova and A.Kiseleva. Exhibited: Ignaty Ignat’evich Nivinsky,1880–1933. Vystavka k stoletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya , PushkinState Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, 1980, No. 357. Literature: V. Dokuchaeva, Ignaty Nivinsky , Moscow,Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1969, p. 42, No. 14, illustrated, titled Venera . Exhibition catalogue, Ignaty Ignat’evich Nivinsky,1880–1933. Vystavka k stoletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya ,Moscow, 1980, p. 74, No. 357, listed. Nivinsky’s reputation asa painter came from the nudes that he painted in the spirit ofNeoclassicism in 1916. In these works the “confirmedItalianist―, as the artist called himself, tried to engage with themethods of the great painters of the Renaissance. It is nocoincidence that Nivinsky even chose titles for his paintings inkeeping with traditional examples of Italian art. Thus thepresent lot, entitled Two Female Figures , was long known as Venus , and other similar studio compositions were called Adam and Eve , The Upbringing of Diana and finally thedarling of Italian art, Saint Sebastian . It is not only the namesof the pictures; it is first and foremost the look of the models heselected, which brings to mind the Venetian masters who

inspired him. Nivinsky’s aim in his pictures was to createsomething equivalent to the Renaissance ideal of beauty.Somehow he sets a full-blooded sense of life, health andharmony against the elegance and refinement extolled as theaesthetic ideal by Art Nouveau and Symbolism, and againstCubism’s distortion of form. The renowned art critic YakovTugendhold wrote: “Nivinsky has this remarkable urge torehabilitate the Renaissance beauty of the human body inmodern Cubist art with its emphasis on the tangible andmaterial―. The artist’s chief source of inspiration was Italianmonumental and decorative painting. Having made several tripsto Italy in the early 1900s with Zholtovsky, the renownedNeoclassical architect, Nivinsky was enthralled by themagnificent legacy of the Renaissance artists. He producedmany sketches and pictorial copies of paintings in thecathedrals and palazzi of Rome, Assisi, Mantua, Pisa andFerrara. In painting, Nivinsky was striving for what Zholtovskywas then trying to do in architecture – to revive the classicaltradition. Nivinsky carries many of the conventions andmethods of decorative and monumental painting over to hissmaller easel compositions: vigorous, intensely vibrant colourcovering large flat surfaces, a treatment of form in which theevocative silhouette acquires special importance (the artistsometimes emphasises it by outlining the figure) and aprecision in rendering rhythm. Nivinsky combines differentprinciples in his work – monumentalism and easel painting,tradition and modernity. For this reason, his canvasses alwaysevoke pictorial associations. Two Female Figures with itspainterly quality, richness and opulence of tone, and sensualbeauty of the female body is reminiscent of the art of theVenetians. His treatment of the image shows the artistoperating in his characteristic borderline space. Nivinskydepicts his nude subject neither in an interior setting, thoughthe drapery to the right continues this tradition, nor in a naturalsetting, though beyond the figures to the left a landscape isclearly visible. His composition is built on contrasting the gentleelastic movement of the crouching figure with the figurethrusting out its arms, yet equilibrium and stability are preserved. The extraordinary tonal richness and painterlyartistry with which Nivinsky communicates the sprightly fragilityof the human body put Two Female Figures (Venus) amongthe most successful examples of the artist’s mythologicaleasel work.Estimate: £260,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 15* NIVINSKY, IGNATY( 1880-1933) Nude ,signed and dated1915. Oil on canvas, 103 by 54 cm. Provenance: Privatecollection, Europe. Authenticity certificate from the expert Yu.Rybakova. Ignaty Nivinsky painted Nude in the mythologicalstyle that is characteristic of his work of the 1910s. Similarworks, painted at the same time as his monumental wallpaintings, reflect the thematic interests of an artist in love withthe art of the Italian Renaissance. It is no coincidence that weencounter complex dynamic perspectives similar to those in Nude in several well-known works by Nivinsky; in Atlas, whosepowerful sculptural form reminds us of Michelangelo’s slaves,as well as in the different versions of his Saint Sebastian . Itseems that, in the complex composition of Nude , the artistwas seeking the exact image that he needed at that period forSaint Sebastian. The model’s pose also attests to this,seeming to invite comparison with the celebrated work of Titian,who for Nivinsky was always an indisputable authority, as doesthe delicate little tree emerging on the right of the picture andsymbolically foreshadowing the hero’s martyrdom. In Nude Nivinsky solves the central problem of the figure’s stability: likeTitian before him, he uses chiasmus, a technique known and

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favoured by Renaissance sculptors and painters. Thanks to thispositioning of the body with cross-wise movement – with themodel’s right shoulder and left leg raised – the dynamiccomposition acquires a visual stability and the artist, basing hisapproach on the experience of classical art, succeeds increating a powerful, heroic image, capacious, collective andsymbolic, as was Saint Sebastian for the Renaissance age. Animpression of strong and expressive modelling of volume iscreated by a deep chiaroscuro and by the very texture of thepainting. Nivinsky’s approach is disharmonious and angular.But the expressiveness of the form, the unity of thecomposition and the play of light, formed by the movement oflight and dark areas, do not undermine the crispness of thecompositional plan. The striking effect constantly sought by theartist consists here not only in the elegant composition andrhythmic organisation but, mainly, in the wholeness of the moodand the generalisation of the image. It is essentially a study of anude model, painted at the point of greatest physical stress; butit is at the same time the most finished and the most integratedof all Nivinsky’s portrayals of nude models.Estimate: £150,000.00 - £200,000.00

Lot: 16* PETROV-VODKIN, KUZMA( 1878-1939) Still Life. Applesand Eggs ,signed with a monogram, inscribed in Cyrillic "S-kand" and dated "1921-VII". Oil on canvas, 35.5 by 47 cm. Provenance: Collection of G. Blokh, Leningrad. Collection of N.Efron, Leningrad. Collection of A. Chudnovsky, Leningrad.Private collection, Europe. Authenticity certificate from theexperts N. Aleksandrova and T. Zelyukina. Exhibited: Avantgarde 1900–1930: Tšudnovskin kokoelma Pietarista ,Ateneum, Helsinki, 14 October 1993–9 January 1994, No. 53(label on the reverse). Avantgarde 1900–1930: Tšudnovskinkokoelma Pietarista , Turku Art Museum, Turku, 5 February1994–6 March 1994, No. 53 (label on the reverse). K.S. Petrov-Vodkin. Izbrannoe , The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg,1996 (label on the reverse). Literature: V. Kostin, KuzmaPetrov-Vodkin , Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1986, No. 64,illustrated; p. 157, listed. Exhibition catalogue, Avantgarde1900–1930: Tšudnovskin kokoelma Pietarista , Helsinki, 1993,p. 102, No. 53, illustrated. Still Life. Apples and Eggs is one ofthe most typical and recognisable of Petrov-Vodkin’s works ofthe early 1920s. It was painted in Samarkand during thesummer of 1921 when he was travelling around Central Asiawith an expedition organised by the Academy of the History ofMaterial Culture and it very clearly reflects his experimentalpath from the abstract space of his early years to themetaphysical world of “planetary reality―, full of colour andlight. On the table, which is covered with a vivid, rich sky-bluecloth or sheet of paper, there are apples – some red andgreen, one yellow – and two eggs. At first glance we are struckby the absolute verisimilitude of the depiction: the sharplydelineated flattened spheres of the apples, with their light,mauve shadows, and the accurately gauged ellipse of the eggs,warmed by the sun. The modesty of this still life, fairly typical ofeveryday life in those hard years, did not prevent the artist fromcreating a serene and exceptionally harmonious piece. In thisstill life we can sense that special sensitivity and pursuit of themetaphysical essence of objects and phenomena that becamethe defining element of Petrov-Vodkin’s works of the late1910s and early 1920s and which resonated with the principles of his Italian contemporaries, Carrà and de Chirico. In its wellthought-out haphazardness and in the seemingly randomscattering of the fruit across the surface we see the artist’scarefully planned game; he is trying to trace, to get a feel for theinherent interconnection between objects by their veryarrangement – the hidden life of inanimate matter. On the one

hand, this “magic of corporeality― allows the artist to conveyfaithfully the concrete attributions of an object (of a greenish,ripe apple, of an egg) but on the other, to create a universalisedimage of that object, its Platonic eidos : the apple is agenerous gift of the earth, the egg a symbol of the eternalbeginning of life. Arranging his colour harmonies around thesubtle juxtaposition of primary and complementary colours,Petrov-Vodkin achieves a striking vibrancy and richness. Theartist is looking at the foodstuffs placed about the table from onhigh so that their configuration can be accurately rendered andwe see them “as if in the palm of our hand―. In this way theartist tries to overcome the one-sidedness of the monocularpoint of view, considering it neither adequate nor a reflection ofgenuine knowledge of the object which can and must be viewedfrom as many angles as possible in order to form a true idea ofit. Thus Petrov-Vodkin’s still lifes always have a peculiarlyintense character generated by the strong lines of “sphericalperspective― which spread throughout the whole space of thecanvas. For Petrov-Vodkin, the problem posed by the object isinseparable from the concept of spherical perspective. Althoughhe noted that this acquires an “even greater kinetic sense― inrelation to large-scale objects – “landscapes and urbanspaces―, which are inconceivable for him without strong“planetary― motion – the apples, matches and violins of hisstill lifes are connected with planetary motion in exactly thesame way. It is no coincidence that a tilted perspective andtilted pictorial axis appear in all of them. The technique basedon his “spherical system of perception―, allows Petrov-Vodkinto convey the whole in part, to retain in any still life a sense ofthe link between the object portrayed and the infinite expanseof the universe. As the artist himself confirmed, it is nocoincidence that his study of the object, and by extension hisprincipal work on still lifes, took place during the years ofrevolution. It seemed to him that without doing this he could notprogress further; he could not solve the new artistic challengeshe was presented with. Petrov-Vodkin succintly defined thisgenre, which was so important to him at this period: “The stilllife is one of the intense conversations the artist has withnature. In it, subject matter and psychology do not hinder thedefinition of an object in its space. What kind of object is it,where is it, and where am I, the viewer? This is the fundamentalquestion the still life asks of us. And in this there is the greatjoy of knowing, which is what the viewer takes from the stilllife.― Petrov-Vodkin had occasionally painted still lifes offlowers and apples earlier in his career, but it was only fromabout 1918 to 1920 that they became central to his work.During this period he also regularly inserted into his landscapesand portraits the motif of an appletree branch loaded with fruitor of a single fruit or vegetable ( Midday , 1917; Portrait of theArtist’s Daughter with Still Life , 1930s). However, thanks totheir wonderfully sculptural forms and their gracefuldraughtsmanship and colour design, each of this artist’s stilllifes with apples ( Pink Still Life, Apple Tree Branch , 1918; Apple and Cherry , 1917; Apples , 1917; Still Life with BlueCube , 1918 etc.) proves to be as beautiful and expressive as itis self-contained. Having resolved his major creativechallenges of this period in both painting and drawing, Petrov-Vodkin did return from time to time to this genre, but the still lifenever again reached such heights in his oeuvre. Theconciseness and creative concentration of his still lifes from thelate 1910s to early 1920s (which invoke fundamental symbols,religious and cultural principles of existence and compassionfor spiritual and physical hunger) make them, perhaps, thebenchmark standards of Russian art of the post-Revolutionaryperiod, alongside Pavel Filonov’s revolutionary Formula paintings.Estimate: £2,000,000.00 - £3,000,000.00

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Lot: 17* PETROV-VODKIN, KUZMA( 1878-1939) Illustration for "ThePrincess of the Tide" by Mikhail Lermontov ,signed with amonogram. Black ink, heightened with white, on paper, 37 by27.5 cm. Provenance: M. Petrova-Vodkina, the artist’swidow. Collection of O. Desnitskaya, Leningrad. Privatecollection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmedby the expert Yu. Solonovich. Exhibited: M.Yu. Lermontov. K125-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya (1814–1939) , The StateRussian Museum, Leningrad, 1939, No. 422. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, M.Yu. Lermontov. K 125-letiyu so dnyarozhdeniya , Moscow, Leningrad, Izdatel’stvo Akademii NaukSSSR, 1941, p. 78, No. 422, listed; p. 116, illustrated. MikhailYur’evich Lermontov. Kartiny i risunki poeta. Illyustratsii k egoproizvedeniyam , Moscow, Leningrad, Sovetskii khudozhnik,1964, p. 111, No. 78, illustrated; p. 125, listed. LermontovskayaEntsiklopediya , Moscow, 1981, p. 414. The present illustrationfor Mikhail Lermontov’s ballad The Princess of the Tide is arare surviving example of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s work inbook illustration. The artist had dreamt for years of illustratingLermontov, whose imagery had always moved him. AlthoughPetrov-Vodkin began creating illustrations for Lermontov’spoems in the 1910s, his dream finally came true in the 1930s,when he became actively engaged in the preparation for jubileepublications of the poet’s work to mark his 125th anniversary.He produced drawings and a vignette for the poem TheCriminal , as well as two illustrations and a tailpiece for ThePrincess of the Tide . Of particular interest is the earlier of thetwo, a large composition dated 1913 depicting the momentwhen the prince first meets the King of the Sea’s beautifuldaughter in the watery depths. It is notable that the artist sawin Lermontov’s prince not the brave hero boasting of hisexploits to his dashing friends, but a slight, innocent boy muchlike the youths on horseback in his paintings of the 1910s.Lermontov’s poetic masterpiece, terse and laconic in form andvivid in its dramatic action, set Petrov- Vodkin the very difficulttask of finding an equivalent condensed and incisive form inwhich to visually express the mounting drama of the romanticencounter. The artist chose to draw laconically with a quill-penin a single tone, rarely having recourse to brushwork orsoftening with white. Taking into account the reduction in sizenecessary for printing, the architectural strictness and abundanthatching, his work is reminiscent of the wood-cut or lino-cutengravings popular at the time. The artist found himself in goodcompany in his work for the jubilee publications that were inpreparation. In parallel with his efforts, drawings were beingmade to accompany Lermontov’s works of prose and dramaby such remarkable artists as N. Tyrsa, T. Mavrina, V.Bekhteev, N. Kuzmin and P. Pavlinov. Petrov-Vodkin did notlive to see the actual jubilee celebrations, the 1939 artexhibition dedicated to Lermontov in the Russian Museum, orthe publication of the book, but this work became a greatcreative triumph for the artist and, perhaps, one of his bestgraphic illustrations.Estimate: £75,000.00 - £90,000.00

Lot: 18* PETROV-VODKIN, KUZMA( 1878-1939) By the Shore ofLake Ilmen ,signed with a monogram, also further signed, titledin Cyrillic and dated 1936 on the reverse. Oil on canvas, 66 by50 cm. Provenance: Collection of G. Blokh, Leningrad.Collection of N. Efron, Leningrad. Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the experts O.Musakova and A. Lyubimova. Literature: Yu. Rusakov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Zhivopis’, grafika, teatral’no-dekoratsionnoe iskusstvo , Leningrad, Aurora, 1986, p. 281,No. 361, illustrated in black and white. By the Shore of Lake

Ilmen is one of several works painted by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkinin 1936 on a summer trip to Lake Ilmen near Veliky Novgorod.It was here that the artist also painted his famous composition Collective Farm Girl at Lake Ilmen and the remarkable portrait of the Fisherman’s Daughter . In his later years, he produceda number of portraits of children – his growing daughterLyonushka, his goddaughter Tatulya Piletskaya, and theunknown Girl in the Woods . It is possible that the girl in By theShore of Lake Ilmen is also his daughter Elena, sitting in thelong grass of the lakeside in a blue swimming costume, her hairstill wet from bathing. In keeping with his later portraits ofchildren, the painting’s composition reflects Petrov-Vodkin’sincreasing desire to strengthen the genre element. In contrastwith his 1925 portrait Girl on the Beach. Dieppe , with its light,neutral background of shingle almost entirely obscured by thefigure of the girl, here the artist strives to set the sitter in a real,everyday environment. Petrov-Vodkin places his study of thegirl, with its immediacy and ingenuousness, in the specificsetting of a summer’s day by the lake. The backdrop to theportrait is the smooth surface of the lake viewed from above –therefore in rather sharp perspective, but painted with greatnaturalism – and, in the distance, little boys bathing. Thecomposition is imbued with that special waterside atmosphere,which hides the artistic incompleteness of the shoreline.Everything is tinted by the sparkling reflection of the setting sun,forming delicate splashes of pink on the water and on thesunburnt skin of the children. At the same time, throughout thisfeast of light and colour, there is the sense of organisationaldiscipline that is intrinsic to all of the artist’s creative oeuvre.Estimate: £220,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 19* PETROV-VODKIN, KUZMA( 1878-1939) Seated Youth.Classical Composition ,signed and indistinctly inscribed inCyrillic. Pencil, ink and watercolour on paper, 22 by 27.5 cm. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of thework has been confirmed by the expert Yu. Rybakova.Estimate: £65,000.00 - £90,000.00

Lot: 20  GRIGORIEV, BORIS( 1886-1939) Russian Peasant Woman,signed, inscribed “Paris― and dated 1923, also furthersigned, inscribed “à chère Madame Atwater de son ami BorisGrigorieff New York― and numbered “18― on the reverse.Gouache and watercolour on board, 37.5 by 62 cm. Provenance: Collection of Adeline Atwater (née Pynchon),USA. Private collection, USA, from c. 1975. Anonymous sale; Russian Paintings and Works of Art , Christie’s New York, 18April 2007, Lot 70. Acquired from the above by the presentowner. Private collection, UK. Exhibited: Paintings andDrawings by Boris Grigoriev , The New Gallery, New York, 18November–15 December 1923, No. 19 (label on the reverse).Exhibition of Paintings by Boris Grigoriev , 4 January–3February 1924, Worcester Art Museum, USA, No. 35. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Exhibition of Paintings byBoris Grigoriev , Worcester, Worcester Art Museum, 1924, No.35. Russian Peasant Woman belongs to the cycle Visages deRussie , an incredibly significant part of Boris Grigoriev’soeuvre which he painted in Paris between 1922 and 1924. It isa logical continuation of the well-known series of pictures anddrawings entitled Raseya [an old misspelling of Russia](1917–1921), begun in Russia and completed after he hademigrated. This picture in particular is based on one of the bestpencil drawings in the cycle (the artist was known as a brilliantdraughtsman and “magician of line―), which was reproducedin every edition of the accompanying book (Petrograd, 1918;

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Berlin, 1921; Berlin, 1922). Like all the Raseya drawings of1917–1918, the young peasant woman in a headscarf wasdrawn from life, and the portraiture is acutely individual.Grigoriev used the drawing for the central half-length figure ofthe peasant woman in his 1918 painting Peasant Earth (TheState Russian Museum, St Petersburg). Three years later, heintroduced the image of the young peasant woman in aheadscarf into the group of characters in the eponymouspainting from the Visages de Russie cycle (1921, Palace ofCongresses, St Petersburg). When Grigoriev painted RussianPeasant Woman in Paris in 1923 he was working intensely onthe cycle which, apart from images of peasants, also includeda suite of portraits of actors at the Moscow Arts Theatre paintedwhen the company was on tour in Paris. In Russian PeasantWoman he allows the cardboard colour of the support to showthrough the paint layer, or simply leaves it untouched, thusadding another colour to his palette. In general, however, thepalette is bright and sunny, with orange, crimson and pale blueprevailing – all colours that the artist loved. The work is alsovery typical of this period in Grigoriev’s artistic career by virtueof its slightly Cubist character, which lends sharpness to theNeoclassical forms of his painting. The specific imagerepresented in the painting acquires a certain timelessness andsymbolic quality through the spherical perspective. Therounded shapes and lines create a sense of completeness ofthe earth’s hemisphere, against which background thewoman’s head appears powerful and monumental. In theautumn of 1923, the work was shown at Boris Grigoriev’ssecond solo exhibition in New York ( Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev , The New Gallery, New York, 18November–15 December, 1923, No. 19 – Russian PeasantWoman ). Afterwards, almost the whole exhibition was shiftedto Worcester, where it was shown at the local museum. Afterthe exhibitions the artist gave the painting to Adeline Atwater,director of the New Gallery, who had helped him for many yearswith the promotion of his work on the American art market.1923 was a successful year for Grigoriev – he sold sevenpaintings and ten drawings through the New Gallery (the bestfigures for any of their represented artists). Dr Tamara GaleevaEstimate: £300,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 21* GRIGORIEV, BORIS( 1886-1939) Children's Masquerade,signed and dated 1912, also further signed, titled and dated onthe reverse. Watercolour, charcoal and ink, heightened withwhite, on cardboard, 34.5 by 47.5 cm. Provenance: Privatecollection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmedby the expert E. Zhukova. Exhibited: Treffpunkt Paris!Russlands Künstler zwischen Cézannismus und LyrischerAbstraktion , Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, 5 September–23November 2003. Boris Grigoriev , The State Russian Museum,St Petersburg, 21 April–29 August 2011, No. 44. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Treffpunkt Paris! Russlands Künstlerzwischen Cézannismus und Lyrischer Abstraktion , LudwigMuseum, Koblenz, 2003, p. 103, illustrated. T. Galeeva, BorisDimitrievich Grigoriev , St Petersburg, Zolotoi vek, 2007, No.34, illustrated. Exhibition catalogue, Boris Grigoriev , PalaceEditions, St Petersburg, 2011, p. 54, No. 44, illustrated. Children’s Masquerade is one of Boris Grigoriev’s earlyworks, nowadays rarely encountered outside museumcollections. From 1910 to 1913 this talented draughtsman wasgreatly involved in book illustration. Working for the well-knownjournalist and publisher Alexander Burtsev, he was responsiblefor the design of many publications on ethnography andfolklore. Grigoriev was closely connected with Russia’sartistic life and maintained creative and social links with themembers of the World of Art group, with whom he began to

exhibit in 1914, and with the Futurists. Despite this, even in theearly years of his career his individuality was already beginningto show through. At that time Grigoriev was interested in thetheatricalisation of reality, the “carnival of life―, and hiscolourful, often grotesque works on paper, attest to his passionfor Symbolism. They are executed in a decorative, flat,modernist style, which was very different from the refined styleof the World of Art approach. In this work, the protagonistswho fill the stage for the children’s masquerade referenceimages of Russian folktale characters, and are reminiscent ofthe protagonists in the works of Sergei Sudeikin and KonstantinSomov, which had had a considerable influence on Grigoriev.The fantasmagorical, merry atmosphere is emphasised by thedecorative forms and colourful embellishments of thecharacters’ costumes, and the enchanting combination ofrounded and fragile forms underlines the fairytale atmosphereof the subject. Boris Grigoriev’s interest in the grotesquebecame less apparent between 1913–1915, around the timehe began to make regular trips to Paris, and his style began tochange under the influence of Cubism. This rare work will be ofparticular interest to collectors as a wonderful example of theearly, very expressive and poetic period of Grigoriev’s career.Estimate: £190,000.00 - £250,000.00

Lot: 22* GRIGORIEV, BORIS( 1886-1939) Still Life with Bread andOnions ,signed. Oil on canvas, 60 by 72 cm. Painted in the1930s. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticitycertificate from the experts N. Aleksandrova and T. Zelyukina. Exhibited: Boris Grigoriev , The State Russian Museum, StPetersburg, 21 April–29 August 2011. Literature: T. Galeeva, Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev , St Petersburg, Zolotoi vek, 2007,No. 211, illustrated. Exhibition catalogue, Boris Grigoriev , StPetersburg, Palace Editions, 2011, p. 172, No. 162, illustrated. In characteristically paradoxical fashion, Still Life with Breadand Onions is both unmistakeably French and unmistakeablyGrigoriev. No other Russian émigré artist assimilated the artistictrends and traditions of his adopted homeland quite sosuccessfully into his own particularly Russian view of the world.It is this, coupled with his distinctive use of line which is soinstantly recognisable as Grigoriev. In the wake of the Visagesdu monde series, still lifes began to take centre stage in hisoeuvre in the mid to late 1920s, which also coincided with hismove towards a more “pure― form of painting. “Purepainting― had emerged from the new sense of individuality andcreative freedom common to many of the artistic movements atthe turn of the 19th century and hinged on the communicationthrough art of pure emotion, of an idea, free from the limitationsof figurative representation. In Still Life with Bread and Onions the distinctive curved black tray and the simple wooden tablefrom his sparsely furnished studio at Cagnes-sur-Mer arerecognisable from other still lifes of this period, such as StillLife with Berries and Apples . Although the setting of theseworks often remains the same, the components change, forwhat is important here is not what is being depicted, but how.The most prosaic, every-day objects serve as vehicles throughwhich the artist can explore sophisticated nuances of colour and form and the expressivity of tone and line because theyhave been reduced to their qualities of colour and shape. Grigoriev’s work of this period is characterised by its wealth ofcontrasts. In contradiction to the Northern European tradition ofthe still life genre, these objects are not endowed with aparticular significance, either on their own or in combination,allegorical or otherwise, but the artist is using recent trends andinnovations to reinterpret this most traditional of genres. In1928 during his brief teaching post at the Academy of Arts inSantiago, before revolution broke out and he was forced to

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return to France, he taught that in order to paint a still life, “youneed to show the relationship between the bottle and thebackground―. This relationship between the component partsis part of the play with space and volume: here in Still Life withBread and Onions we are presented with an elevatedperspective yet simultaneously flattened sense of space, whichcomes from Cézanne via Cubism, but the peculiar flatness andthe very fact that the relationship between objects is not merelyspatial shows compositional similarities with the ancienttradition of icon painting. Grigoriev, ever the master of thebalancing act, brings together the ancient and the modern, thesacred and profane, the Russian and the Western.Estimate: £200,000.00 - £300,000.00

Lot: 23* SHEVCHENKO, ALEXANDER( 1883-1948) Outskirts of aTown ,signed with initials and dated 1919. Oil on canvas, 49.5by 73 cm. Provenance: Acquired directly from TatianaShevchenko, the artist’s daughter, in 1968, Moscow.Collection of Kh. Kagan. Private collection, Europe. Authenticity certificate from the expert T. Levina, curator of theA. Shevchenko exhibition at the State Tretyakov Gallery in2010. Exhibited: A.V. Shevchenko , Moscow House ofArtists, 19 January 1976. A.V. Shevchenko , The State RussianMuseum, Leningrad, 1977. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Alexander Shevchenko 1883–1948. Zhivopis’, akvarel’,guash’, tempera, risunki, gravyury, monotipii , Moscow, Soyuzkhudozhnikov SSSR, 1978. Outskirts of a Town dates fromAlexander Shevchenko’s best period, the late 1910s and early1920s, during which he created his own, exceptionallyharmonious and lyrical version of Cézannism. Shevchenko’sbrand of lyricism in this period is unique. It is not based on themanifestation of heartfelt emotions, but in the experience of thebeauty of plasticity itself. It is no coincidence that the sculpturalway the landscape is rendered is built on a dialogue betweenthe long, thin, bare tree trunks stretching aloft and the massive,chopped-up cubes and parallelepiped forms of the buildings.The way their faceted forms alternate creates a two-dimensional space subordinated to a strict rhythm. Thecomplex linear structure of the composition is built on the desirefor precise, almost mathematical correlations in the proportions, and balance in the masses of colour. At the same time, noless important to the landscape than the constructive principleare its fine tonal relationships and musical rhythm – everythingthat helps to express the artist’s mood and poetic reasoning.The restrained chromatic structure of the canvas and thepainstaking development of its tones of green and ochre arehighly characteristic. The landscape is unpopulated, whichlends it a special emotional poignancy. This sense of isolationfrom the bustle of life and slight desolation has its own specialmajesty and solemnity. At the end of the 1910s, and much latertoo, Shevchenko loved to paint quiet little corners on theoutskirts of Moscow, still free from the invasion of the trappingsof modern life, where the provincial look of places reminded himof his childhood. Among the paintings most closely analogousto the present lot are: Landscape with Washerwomen (1920,The State Russian Museum), Courtyard. Moonlit Evening (1920, The State Russian Museum), and Landscape. Houses (1920, The State Russian Museum).Estimate: £285,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 24* SHEVCHENKO, ALEXANDER( 1883-1948) In the Park,signed with initials and dated 1939. Oil on canvas, 86.5 by97.5 cm. Painted in the 1920s. Provenance: Acquired directlyfrom Tatiana Shevchenko, the artist’s daughter, Moscow.

Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has beenconfirmed by the expert Yu. Rybakova. The story of thepainting In the Park is one of the most interestingrepresentations of Alexander Shevchenko’s creative method.Painted en plein air in the 1920s, when the artist was especiallyinterested in depicting trees, this composition was completelycovered over by a new painting in 1939. Shevchenko resortedto this practice more than once – painting new things on top ofold. Accused in the 1930s of formalism, “aestheticisingdecorativism―, and being a successor to “formalisticallydecadent Frenchmen― (principally Matisse and Derain) theartist saw no sense in keeping his work from the 1920s, andpainted a new Landscape with Heather over the old image.Subsequently, during restoration, the later work was cleaned offto expose the original painting, but the later signature“ASh/39― is still preserved in the lower right-hand corner as alegacy from the layer of paint that had been removed. In the1920s, as in no other period, Shevchenko produced aparticularly large number of studies from life. He would wanderthrough the town and along the bank of his beloved Yauza withhis paint box and sketchbook, and draw scenes andlandscapes of the outskirts of Moscow. The landscapes of thisperiod, accordingly, have a special charm and immediacy,striving to be emotionally expressive at the same time asspecific. Experts have defined this as his path “throughCézanne towards Corot―. In this period Shevchenko does notpaint nature generally, as designed by the artist’s will andsubordinated to his compositional ideas, but, following inDerain’s footsteps, he creates architecturally figuredlandscapes of copses and avenues and, ultimately, addressesthe theme of man in the landscape. The artist attempts toinclude figures in the landscape without generating any sensethat their connection to it is artificial, by trying to achieve anintegrated and homogeneous composition. His arboreallandscapes of this period become gentler and more picturesqueand it is in these works that the artist finally overcomes thechromatic compartmentalisation of earlier years.Estimate: £250,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 25*§ LARIONOV, MIKHAIL( 1881-1964) Flowers on a Veranda,signed with initials, further inscribed with the artist's name anddated 1902 on the reverse. Oil on canvas, laid on board, 54.5by 97.5 cm. Provenance: Alexandra Tomilina, the artist’swidow, Paris. Private collection, Europe. Exhibited: Larionov-Gontcharova , Galerie Beyeler, Basel, July–September 1961(label on the reverse). Michel Larionov , Acquavella Galleries,New York, 22 April–24 May 1969, No. 6 (label on the reverse). Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Michel Larionov , AcquavellaGalleries, New York, 1969, No. 6, illustrated. Flowers on aVeranda is an outstanding example of Mikhail Larionov’searly work. This idiosyncratic piece has an impeccableprovenance which can be traced back to the estate of theartist’ s widow, and is a rare example (even for museumcollections) of his works in oil from the early 1900s. Unlike hisworks in pastel and gouache, very few oils of this period havebeen preserved, so each is particularly precious. It is mostlikely that the artist painted Flowers on a Veranda after hisyear-long exclusion from the Moscow School of Painting,Sculpture and Architecture for sending pieces featuring“obscene content― to an exhibition of student work.Captivated by the experiments of the Impressionists which hehad seen in the Moscow collection of Sergei Shchukin,Larionov was then beginning to consider himself a trulyindependent artist, liberated from academic didacticism. Everysummer he would leave Moscow for his maternalgrandmother’s home in Tiraspol, Bessarabia, where he had

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spent his childhood and where he now wholly devoted himselfto painting from nature. The significance of these works in theartist’s creative development cannot be overestimated. Heconverted a wing of his grandmother’s house, with itsenormous garden planted with apricot trees, into a studio, andthere produced a series of canvasses, paeans to the everydaylife unfolding outside his window. His best works of the first halfof the 1900s are full of sunshine and greenery and depict potsof flowers, lilac bushes, geese and turkeys strolling about theyard. Stylistically these pieces, including Flowers on a Veranda, are reminiscent of his early works in which we recognise theinfluence of Borisov-Musatov and the plein air approach torendering phenomena. Yet these are not studies, in the 19thcentury sense of the word, but finished pictures painted fromnature, which are absolutely consonant with the art of the newcentury. In Larionov’s work of the 1900s, the question ofdistinguishing between a preparatory study and a finishedpicture does not even arise. Rather orangeries, acacias, roseswet from the rain and even pigs grow from the primaryelements of a study into an autonomous painting, whilstretaining both the typically small dimensions and the dynamicpaint application of a study. Flowers on a Veranda is similar incomposition to the well-known 1904 work now in the RussianMuseum, Still Life with Beer , in which the characteristic traitsof Larionov’s celebrated works of the 1900s first appear.Despite their simplicity, the objects arranged on the verandacreate a feeling of dynamic equilibrium. The pot holding theplant with luxuriant foliage emphasises the centripetalmovement of the composition towards the corner of theveranda, literally dividing the picture into two practically equalhalves. At the same time, the general structure of the picture isdefiantly fragmentary: the flowerpots in the bottom row barelyprotrude from the edge of the canvas and the right-hand cornerof the composition is dramatically cropped along both edges.The framing is extremely tight. It is as if the scene has enteredthe artist’s field of vision quite by chance. Larionov was notsitting down at a table to paint his still life, as Cézanne haddone, but standing, and because of his significant heightobjects seem to retreat downwards, beyond the confines of thepicture area. By doing this he creates the impression ofdynamism, so important in avant-garde art of the early 20thcentury, of the motion of the human eye as if it were skimmingacross the line of plants by the window. The artist has placedan analogous counterpoint in the paint layer of the picture: Hecounters the firm, stationary mass of the ochre clay pots, theblue table and solid, wood-clad terrace wall, dappled with apattern of shadow, with the Van Gogh-style light that streamsthrough the window, seemingly “quilted― in thickly-impastoed,multi-directional brush-strokes. The composition is based ontwo main colours, red and yellow, with the addition of blue andgreen to reinforce the contrast. Almost everywhere, the blueserves to demarcate the yellow from the red zones. Only wherelight dominates completely, flooding into the room through thewindow panes, does a fiery red abut directly on to a brightyellow injecting an extraordinary colouristic force into thecomposition. The pot plants seem to be indoors but at thesame time bathed in bright, exterior daylight. According to GlebPospelov, a renowned expert on the artist, “the light inLarionov’s works seemed to shine through a flattened reality.It somehow issued from the phenomenon of life itself… aradiance animated from within which permeated all livingthings: this was the defining essence of his art. The whole ofLarionov’s oeuvre was a benediction on that which was aliveand living, the like of which was completely absent from thework of other Russian painters at this time.― Larionov’spaintings were truly unique in European Post-Impressionist art.His dedication to “the living world― was inseparable from hisextremely perceptive experiments in “liberating the paintlayer―. It is no coincidence that in his pictures of the 1900s the

“element― of paint confronts the elements of nature. Theenergy in Larionov’s best canvasses of the period is createdfrom this very desire for equilibrium in the confrontation ofthese forces and this is clearly seen in the present lot. In Flowers on a Veranda , with its tendency to generalise theimpact of the palette, its fusion of individual brushstrokes intoone splash of colour and its decorative resolution of the whole,we clearly see Larionov establishing himself as one of thefounders of the Russian avant-garde and as a major artist ofthe 20th century, head and shoulders above his contemporaries.Estimate: £1,000,000.00 - £2,000,000.00

Lot: 26*§ GONCHAROVA, NATALIA( 1881-1962) Magnolias ,signedwith initials. Oil on canvas, 55 by 46 cm. Provenance: Collection of Berta B. Mering, Paris. Thence by descent.Acquired from the above. Private collection, Europe. Still lifeswith flowers were one of Natalia Goncharova’s favouritegenres in the 1920s and 1930s, and she gave specialpreference to magnolias. With their longish, pointed leaves andsturdy petals, the naturally highly decorative character of thesesouthern, evergreen blooms truly delighted her eye. Magnolias is one of the most interesting still lifes of Goncharova’sParisian period in the 1920s. The form of the flower seamlesslymimics that of the vase as if emphasising the symbiosis of thenatural and artificial, living and dead. Goncharova painted whitemagnolias and pink magnolias, in vases and in jars, executingthe same motif but varying the style, which ranged fromrealistic sketches to almost non-objective compositions. Overthe course of the 1920s and 1930s when she was involved inthe decoration of Serge Koussevitzky’s Parisian mansion anddecorative panels for the houses of M. Kuznetsova and M.Viborg, Goncharova produced a whole series of pencil andgouache sketches of still lifes and compositions with floweringplants and fruit, including magnolia sprigs. During this periodshe was reproducing the natural forms of plants on canvas asflat, multicoloured silhouettes resembling brightly colouredornaments. She later went on to create a series of pochoirsbased on similar decorative compositions. The style of thesewas influenced by her theatre designs and in its application toeasel painting, became known as “chequered― (from areview of one of her exhibitions). Magnolias , which is renderedin dense, textured paint, is a particularly bright and festive variation of one such composition. The “corporeal― depictionof the glass jug and magnolia sprigs serves to reflect the waythe artist generally aspired to depict “life―. As Goncharovaherself wrote: “As I paint merry images, I can also find newcombinations of forms, new combinations of colour ... I am alsoable to search for abstract formulae, but these are just abstractformulae. The real solution can only be found in life itself. Anunconscious instinct would spur me in this direction―.Estimate: £250,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 27* ROERICH, NICHOLAS( 1874-1947) Banner of Peace ,signedtwice with monograms “NR― and “MR―, inscribed “paxcultura― and dated 1931, further numbered “no. 38― on thereverse. Pencil and tempera on paper, laid on board,15 by 23cm (sheet size). Provenance: Roerich Museum, New York,USA, 1932–1935. Collection of Nettie and Louis Horch, USA,from 1935. Thence by descent. Private collection, USA. Exhibited: Roerich Museum, New York (permanent collection),1932, No. 38. Literature: Nicholas Roerich’s personal list ofpaintings from 1931, listed as “No. 38. Znamya mira―.Roerich Museum, inventory list (1931–1935), listed as“Banner of Peace. 1931. $500, sent to Paris for making

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postcard and later transshipped to New-York.― Throughout hisentire life, Nicholas Roerich addressed the idea of theprotection of culture as being vital to the development ofhumanity. The damage wreaked on historical monuments andworks of art during the First World War convinced him of thenecessity of resolving these problems on an international level.In order to realise these aims, it was proposed that a league forthe protection of culture should be created, and that a treaty onthe protection of artistic and academic institutions and historicmonuments should be drawn up: the so-called Roerich Pact. Inaddition to other measures, the authors of this documentproposed that state governments draw up an inventory ofsignificant cultural monuments which, in the case of militaryconflict, should be declared neutral and not used for militarypurposes and which should accordingly be assured protection.It was proposed that these objects be marked with a Banner ofPeace , much like medical institutions are marked andprotected by the banner of the Red Cross. Roerich had alreadybegun work on the design for the Banner of Peace by the endof the 1920s. He purposefully chose a symbol which is found inall civilizations in some form or another and which would beunderstood without preconceptions by the most varied culturaltraditions. Roerich’s plans began to come to fruition inSeptember 1931 with the organising of the First InternationalConference of the Roerich Pact in Bruges, which convened therepresentatives of more than 20 countries and over 100delegates from numerous social, academic and culturalorganisations. As a result of these endeavours, the RoerichPact was officially signed on 15th April 1935 in Washington. Itwas with this First International Conference, the starting pointfor recognition of the Pact, that the publication of the postcardwith Roerich’s design for the Banner of Peace was timed tocoincide. This design is essentially one of the first publicationsof the Banner in the form in which it was adopted by theinternational community.Estimate: £300,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 28 AIVAZOVSKY, IVAN( 1817-1900) View of Venice. SanGiorgio Maggiore ,signed and dated 1851. Oil on canvas, 99.5by 122.5 cm. Provenance: Acquired by a senior Communistparty official in the 1930s. Thence by descent. Acquired fromthe above by the present owner. Private collection, UK. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert V.Petrov. The work will be included in the forthcomingmonograph Light, Water and Sky by G. Caffiero and I.Samarine, to be published in November 2012. Ivan Aivazovskypainted View of Venice. San Giorgio Maggiore in the early1850s and it is entirely characteristic of the work of this artistwho had then truly come to know the sweet taste of success inEurope. At this point in his career Aivazovsky had forsaken thecharms of life in the capital (the gracious attention of theImperial family, the plethora of high-profile commissions, theprivileges associated with his academic standing) to returnhome to the Crimea, and every new canvas was met with a tideof public enthusiasm. Aivazovsky’s compositions were alwayspositively received and art lovers rushed to commission copiesof their favourite subjects from him. View of Venice. SanGiorgio Maggiore is one such variation, reworking acomposition he had first hit upon in the 1840s. Its captivatingcalmness and technical perfection date back to the cycle ofVenetian works he had painted during his time in Italy.However, despite the shared motifs and structural solutions ofall the artist’s views of the Venice lagoon, Aivazovsky’sexceptional skill for improvisation allowed him to create anemotional resonance that is absolutely distinctive in this 1851work by the development of a “pink― colour range,

characteristic of this new phase of his career. Aivazovsky firstvisited Venice during a study trip to Italy in the second half of1840. It is worth noting that even his first Venetian pictures didnot replicate the veduta , but the landscape – the lagoon,trees, gondolas – motifs similar to those of the artist’s nativeCrimea. He had often heard the melodious Italian languagewhile still in Feodosia and had remembered the odd words andphrases. This knowledge proved extremely useful in Italy wherethe young Academy students quickly found a commonlanguage with the gondoliers and fishermen. Aivazovsky andhis Academy comrade Sternberg sometimes even went out tosea with the fishermen to paint Venice and the nearby islandsfrom the lagoon side. At that time Aivazovsky’s pictures wereregularly shown in Italian exhibitions and brought the youngartist extraordinary success. One of his works was acquired byPope Gregory XVI. His virtuosity at conveying the effects ofmoonlight playing on the water elicited admiring recognitionfrom the Italian public and won the heart of the renownedRomantic ballerina Maria Taglioni. In a letter to the artist shewrites: “My memories of Venice are all the more magicalbecause it is there that I met you.― It comes as no surprise thatmost of the works he had painted during his study tourremained in Europe. However, a real furore awaited theartist’s Venetian pictures upon his return to Russia. A wholeseries was chosen by Emperor Nicholas I to adorn his CottagePalace in Alexandria Park at Peterhof and the dining room ofhis Farm Palace. Following the Emperor’s example, the restwere snapped up by the Petersburg elite. And Venice herself (La Serenissima , as the Italians admiringly call the city) becamethe artist’s regular and invariably romanticised model. In thepresent lot, the depiction of the island of San Giorgio just beforesunset allowed Aivazovsky to fully demonstrate his gift as asubtle, virtuoso colourist. The dazzling resonance of the coloursin this picture hinges on the exploitation of light effects: theseproduce painterly overtones on the water and clouds and makethe sparkling silhouettes of church of San Giorgio Maggiore, thebell-tower and sailing boats moored at the island stand outagainst a sky still red from the reflections of the setting sun. Once Aivazovsky had discovered this view of the island of SanGiorgio it was to reappear in his work several times. As herevisited it over the decades he would occasionally shift theviewpoint or vary the light effects, sometimes adorning thecomposition with the rays of the rising sun, at other times thecold light of the moon. He also varied the combinations ofgenres from year to year, allowing him to change the mood ofhis quiet, dreamy canvasses to encompass both elegiac motifsand romantic nocturnal trysts. This large-scale work of 1851 isamong the most serene and spiritual works of the cycle. With itseffective use of colour, founded upon the delicate gradations ofrestrained pink and blue tones and its resonant dense, physicalpaint application, this work is wonderfully typical of the Italianworks of this celebrated seascape painter – works which, justas much as the great shipwrecks and storms, made the nameof Aivazovsky great.Estimate: £950,000.00 - £2,000,000.00

Lot: 29  AIVAZOVSKY, IVAN( 1817-1900) Gibraltar by Night ,signedand dated 1844. Oil on canvas, 58.5 by 87 cm. Provenance: Collection of Charles E. Sorensen, Principal of the Ford MotorCompany 1925–1944, Detroit. Acquired from the above by aprivate American collector in the early 1950s. Thence bydescent to the previous owner. Private collection, UK. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert V.Petrov. Exhibited: The Hague, 1844. Literature: N. Sobko, Slovar’ russkikh khudozhnikov , 1895, p. 316, No. 110. Thework will be included in the forthcoming monograph Light,

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Water and Sky by G. Caffiero and I. Samarine, to be publishedin November 2012. Ivan Aivazovsky’s painting Gibraltar byNight in a way sums up his tour of Europe which he undertookafter his graduation from the Imperial Academy of Arts. It isthought to have been painted in 1844 in The Hague from theartist’s fresh impressions of a visit to Gibraltar, and was thenexhibited in the same city. By this time the young artist hadmanaged to cover a good half of Europe in four years, andeverywhere he went his journey was extraordinarily successful.Aivazovsky’s travels were accompanied by personalexhibitions in capital cities, the attention of the Pope and otherhighly important people, ubiquitous praise for his talent as amarine artist and the accolade of academician at threeEuropean Academies of Arts. The artist met with no lesshonour on return to his homeland. His colleagues immediatelysubmitted a petition to the Board of the Petersburg Academyeloquently listing the artist’s achievements abroad: “Havingmade his name in Italy and in Paris, he acquired a reputation asthe prime artist in Holland and England, travelled around theMediterranean as far as Malta, busied himself in Gibraltar,Cadiz and Granada, earned praise and awards as no otherprizewinner ever had the fortune to gain for himself, I regard itas my duty to propose, out of respect for his aforementionedmerits, that the rank of academician be conferred on him―.Nine days later, on 13th September 1844, the Board of theAcademy of Arts unanimously awarded Aivazovsky the title ofacademician. In fact, despite Aivazovsky’s rather tender age,in his work of the mid-1840s he comes across as a fullyestablished master who has found his trademark theme andcompositional metier in art, to which he remains true throughouthis life. The ship foundering in the waves of a stormy sea, andthe silhouette of a sailing vessel in the moonlight are depictionsthat have entered the treasury of motifs of Russia’s greatestmarine artist. He created the majority of his compositions of thiskind guided by the dictates of his heart. His visual memory,made many times more powerful by his lively creativeimagination, allowed him, without precisely copying reality, toreproduce in his paintings a variety of emotional states innature, by recalling a landscape motif committed to memory inits most general features, but charging it with imaginary effectsof light and feeling, often disregarding whether this was true tolife in the literal sense. Gibraltar by Night , however, evidentlyhad a basis in reality. The artist, who visited London and theBritish crown possession of Gibraltar in 1843, had certainlyheard a lot about the tragedy that took place that year in theStrait. In 1843 the British Navy’s new paddle steamer Lizard was lost off Gibraltar through collision with a French steamship.This was probably the event, agitatedly discussed in the Britishpress, that inspired Aivazovsky to create his canvas. Throughthe historic collision, the artist’s favourite theme of theshipwreck was enriched by conceptual overtones that led himto enhance the drama of what happened. The modern shipdriven by a steam engine comes to grief, her sailors –desperate to be saved – stretching out their arms towards asailing vessel in the background proceeding peacefully at thewill of the waves. At the same time, Aivazovsky intentionallyshifts the dramatic scene away from the centre to the right-handside of the canvas to give the viewer the chance to appreciatethe dazzling seascape with its solitary rock on the horizon andhis famous, masterfully painted path of moonlight sparkling in amultitude of gradations and splashes of colour on the foamingwaves. The relationship in Aivazovsky’s paintings betweenmain and secondary elements was prompted by artistic instinct.The main elements are the spectacular luminous effect, uniquerhythmic structure and unity of light and air. Outwardverisimilitude – perspective, the distribution of light, the workingof compositional detail – are secondary. Aivazovsky wasalways faithful to this principle. The artist himselfacknowledged: “I believe that my paintings are distinguished

not only one from another, but also from the work of manyothers, by their luminous strength; and those pictures whosemain strength is the light of the sun, moon etc., but also seawaves and surf, should be considered my best―. This paintingis a variation in romantic tones on the theme of theinsignificance of human progress when confronted by theelements. The artist takes the opportunity to build hiscomposition on the contrast of the illuminated night sky and seawith the dark silhouette of the sinking steamship, strangely lit bythe glow of red sparks flying out of her funnel. Aivazovskyseems to have explored to the limit the spectacular butsimultaneously tragic phenomenon of the shipwreck. His aimwas to heighten the emotional tension in his compositions. Ashe later wrote: “I frequently painted shipwrecks, but they wereseen only in the distance, by viewers who had to imagine intheir heart the horrors unleashed within the ship as herfracturing wooden walls were destroyed by the waves...― Theartist felt a special excitement in suggesting that the viewersshould work out for themselves the ending to a situation thatwas invariably presented to them together with much eloquent,symbolic detail. In the case of Gibraltar by Night this is a buoybeing tossed by the waves that precisely centres thecomposition and a sailing vessel that has appeared not faraway, inspiring hope. This device, often used by the artist,when combined with virtuoso effects of colour and light couldbe relied on to impart an emotional charge to the scene.Estimate: £350,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 30  MAKOVSKY, ALEXANDER( 1869-1924) View of Plios,signed, inscribed in Cyrillic "Plios" and dated 1918. Oil oncanvas, 67 by 85 cm. Provenance: Private collection, UK. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert V.Petrov. Exhibited: Possibly exhibited at the Society for theEncouragement of the Arts, Petrograd, 1918, No. 97. View ofPlios is one of Alexander Makovsky’s best-known works. Sonof the celebrated Peredvizhnik Vladimir Makovsky, Alexanderarrived at the banks of the Volga, earlier immortalised byLevitan, as an already mature artist. In the hard years after theRevolution, this small settlement and its picturesquesurroundings which still retained features of the old merchantlife became a bountiful source of inspiration, tinged withnostalgia. Here, during his summer migration from his job ashead of the art department of the Russian Red Cross Society,Makovsky created a whole series of notable canvasses,halfgenre, half-landscape and saturated with light and colour,which have become one of the most brilliant episodes in hisoeuvre. After a long break, the artist in his Volga paintings ofthe 1920s returns to painting large-scale, highly-populatedcompositions, and for these he produces a large number ofcarefully rendered studies portraying distant river vistas andindividual protagonists – peasants, boatmen, merchants andthose out strolling along the river bank. It is no coincidence thatwe sometimes encounter those same protagonists, depicted byMakovsky in his series of tempera works, Volga Types (1922),and in small oils such as Peasant with a Tobacco Pouch and Acquaintances (both 1921), The Mushroom Gatherer , and The Old Beekeeper (both 1922), in such major paintings as thepresent lot View of Plios , and many others: Market Day atPlios (1919–1923), Waiting for the Ferry (1920–1923), Street in Plios (1923), Easter Procession (1921–1923) and At the Ferry (1924). Most works in Makovsky’s Plios cyclehave long since entered the collections of the Tretyakov Galleryand other leading museums of Russian art, thus theappearance on the market of a work of this quality can withoutdoubt be considered a great rarity.Estimate: £250,000.00 - £300,000.00

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Lot: 31* LEVITAN, ISAAK( 1860-1900) The Illumination of theMoscow Kremlin Dedicated to the Coronation of Nicholas II, 18May 1896, inscribed with an authentication by the artist’sbrother, A. Levitan. Oil on canvas, 50 by 81.5 cm. Provenance: Antique Salon J. Dazario, StPetersburg–Moscow (label on the stretcher). Acquired by thefather of the present owner. Private collection, Israel. Authenticity certificate from the expert V. Petrov. Exhibited: Collector’s Choice , Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem,March–April 1964, No. 85. Isaak Levitan 1860–1900.Sketches & Paintings , Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, 24July–28 September 1991. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Collector’s Choice , Jerusalem, 1964, p. 16, No. 85, listed.Exhibition catalogue, Isaak Levitan 1860–1900. Sketches &Paintings , Tel Aviv, 1991, p. 25, illustrated. A. Lurie, Treasured in the Heart: Haim Gliksberg’s Portraits , Tel Aviv,2005, p. 19, illustrated. A landscape artist by vocation, Levitanrevealed the subtle beauty and serene grandeur of nature inRussia with a deep sensitivity and lyrical perceptiveness. Herarely painted urban landscapes. With the exception of the nowlost View of Simonov Monastery , which was referred to byNesterov, the only occasion on which he is known to havedepicted Moscow was that of the coronation in 1896. Adornedwith festive decorations and illuminated by thousands of lights,the ancient capital produced such a dramatic effect that Levitanwas inspired to create several compositions entitled TheIllumination of the Moscow Kremlin within a very short space oftime. Three works bearing this title are known to exist. The firstis offered here for auction, the second is held in the collection ofthe Dnepropetrovsk Museum of Art, and the third was sold byChristie’s on 28 November 2007. The present work combinesa virtuously painted panoramic landscape depicting the artificiallighting and is a lovely example of the free and dynamic stylewhich is characteristic of Levitan’s mature period. Theascension of a new Emperor to the throne briefly reinstatedMoscow in its role as the historic centre of the Russian state. Inthe build-up to the coronation the ancient capital wastransformed. The city was decorated with thousands of lights,and not only Moscow’s residents but also its artistsenthusiastically surrendered to the charms of this “electricmiracle―. A. Bogoliubov painted The Illumination of theKremlin in honour of the coronation of Alexander III in 1883(Omsk Provincial Museum of Arts), and another view entitled The Illumination of the Kremlin , painted by N. Gritsenko, is inthe collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. The festivedecorations which adorned Moscow in May 1896 for thecoronation of Nicholas II and Alexandra Fedorovna were themost magnificent of the century. Those who witnessed thecoronation festivities saw decorative pavilions which had beenconstructed on the streets, triumphal gates, flags, grandcortèges, crowds of people dressed in their finest clothes, and40,000 lamps. “Moscow is one of a kind. A fantastic city―,recalled M.V. Sabashnikova as she described the coronation ofNicholas II, “but on that particular evening it looked like in afairytale. All the towers and churches, the crenellated walls ofthe Kremlin and the contours of the buildings were lit up as if onfire―.Estimate: £400,000.00 - £600,000.00

Lot: 32  ANISFELD, BORIS( 1878-1973) The Garden of Hesperides,signed and dated 1914-1916. Oil on canvas, 178 by 249 cm. Provenance: Estate of the artist. Shepherd Gallery, New York.Anonymous sale; Russian Art , Sotheby’s New York, 17 April2007, Lot 369. Private collection, UK. Exhibited: World of ArtExhibition , Petrograd, 1916, No. 3. The Boris Anisfeld

Exhibition , itinerant: Brooklyn Museum, Boston Art Club,Albright Art Gallery Buffalo, Cleveland Museum of Art, DetroitInstitute of Art, Milwaukee Art Institute, Minneapolis Institute ofArt, St Louis City Art Museum, San Francisco Palace of Honor,The Art Institute of Chicago, 1918–1920, No. 63. The BorisAnisfeld Exhibition , Reinhardt Galleries, New York, 1924, No.10. Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Boris Anisfeld ,Worcester Art Museum, 1924, No. 31. Exhibition of Paintingsand Drawings by Boris Anisfeld , Boston Art Club and TwentiethCentury Club, Boston, 1924–1925, No. 31. Exhibition ofPaintings by Boris Anisfeld , Buffalo Fine Arts Academy andAlbright Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1928, No. 6. Boris Anisfeld in StPetersburg 1901–1917 , Shepherd Gallery, New York, 1984,No. 47. Boris Anisfeld “Fantast-Mystic―. Twelve RussianPaintings from the Collection of Joey and Toby Tanenbaum ,itinerant: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Laurentian UniversityMuseum and Art Centre, Sudbury; Art Gallery St Thomas-Elgin,St Thomas; Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound,1989–1990, No. 11. Literature: C. Brinton, The Boris AnisfeldExhibition, New York, 1918, No. 63, illustrated. L. Weinberg,“The Art of Boris Anisfel", The International Studio , vol. 66,November 1918, pp. III–XI, No. 261. H. Tyrell, “The Exotic Artof Boris Anisfeld―, The Christian Science Monitor , undated, c.1918. W. H. D., “The Anisfeld Pictures―, The EveningTranscript , Boston. N. N., “A Russian Painter and New YorkWater Colorists―, The Nation , 16 November 1918, pp.595–596. F. Coburn, “Russian Artist Exhibits Works―, TheBoston Herald , 10 December 1918. A. Philpott, “New ThrillFrom Anisfeld Pictures―, Boston Daily Globe , 10 December1918, p. 5. F. de Cisneros, “La Opulencia Bizantina: BorisAnisfeld―, Social, Havana , 1918, p. 19, illustrated. C. Brinton,“The Boris Anisfeld Exhibition―, Brooklyn Museum Quarterly ,January 1919, pp. 11, 18. “Boris Anisfeld’s Paintings Big ArtFeature―, Buffalo News , 18 January 1919. M. Kinkead,“Boris Anisfeld: Colorist―, Asia , 19 February 1919, pp.170–172, illustrated. M. Roberts, “The Great Russia Put onCanvas, Illustrated by the Paintings of Boris Anisfeld―, TheTouchstone , February 1919, p. 392. J. Glasier, “Anisfeld’sFantastic and Modernist Canvases Go on Exhibition atMuseum―, Plain Dealer , Cleveland, 16 and 23 February1919. “Cleveland―, American Art News , New York, 29 March1919. M. Williams, “Painted His Pictures as Russian GunsRoared – Boris Anisfeld’s Exhibition in Chicago Full of SlavAtmosphere―, News , Chicago, 5 April 1919. E. Jewett, “NewPaintings at Institute Form Notable Exhibit―, Daily Tribune ,Chicago, 6 April 1919, p. D7. Marcus, “Anisfeld’s PaintingsGive Thrills to Visitors at Institute―, Herald , Chicago, 10 April1919. Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago , May 1919, pp.70–71. “Anisfeld Exhibition Still Big Attraction―, Bulletin ,San Francisco, 28 May 1919. “The Anisfeld Collection―, Argonaut , San Francisco, 3 May 1919. “Boris Anisfeld’sPictures―, Mirror , St Louis, 24 July 1919. “Anisfeld Picturesat Art Institute―, Milwaukee Sentinel , 20 September 1919. M.Mayhew, “Anisfeld Works Attract Critics―, MilwaukeeSentinel , 21 September 1919. P.B., “Anisfeld PicturesOpulent in Colour―, Art News , 29 March 1924. M. Williams,“About a Painter Without Theories―, Chicago Daily News , 8January 1930. Boris Anisfeld in St Petersburg 1901–1917 ,New York, Shepherd Gallery, 1984, No. 47, plate 47, illustrated.R. Mesley, Boris Anisfeld “Fantast-Mystic―. Twelve RussianPaintings from the Collection of Joey and Toby Tanenbaum ,Toronto, 1989, pp. 60–63, illustrated. E. Lingenauber and O.Sugrobova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld. Catalogue raisonné ,Düsseldorf, Edition Libertars, 2011, pp. 110–111, P 084,illustrated. Anisfeld painted The Garden of Hesperides 1914–1916, during his Russian period, which was the mostproductive of his career. The painting is a colourful, dreamlikesymphony reminiscent of the artist’s stage designs whosemagical use of colour earned Anisfeld the soubriquet “the

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alchemist of colour―. He was acknowledged early on in hiscareer as both a painter and theatre designer, and his paintingsof dreamlike reveries and fairy-tale extravaganzas wereparticularly celebrated. From 1907 Anisfeld worked for thetheatre, designing sets for Diaghilev’s ballets andMeyerhold’s productions. This theatrical influence isparticularly visible in his early paintings and his large easelcompositions often look like sets from lavish stage productions.In 1914 he abandoned his work with the theatre devotinghimself entirely to painting; he turned to biblical andmythological subjects, seemingly underlining the timelessnessand universal human application of their ideas during the waryears. This work is based on the legend of the Hesperidesnymphs in Greek mythology. According to the story theHesperides, the daughters of Night, lived with the dragon Ladonat the edge of the world, on the banks of the River Ocean, andguarded the golden apples of youth that Hera, wife of Zeus,had received as a wedding present. When Anisfeld waspainting The Garden of Hesperides he was greatly influencedby the French Fauves and by Symbolism. In 1916, impressedby his uniting of Symbolism and Decorativism, he fell under thespell of Gauguin, whose works he was able to see in thecollection of Sergei Shchukin and at a retrospective exhibitionin Paris, which he visited regularly from 1906. Having chosencolour as his primary means of expression, Anisfeld’s aim wasto transform the real world into a colourful fairytaleextravaganza. He painted with feeling, with spirit and with broadbrush-strokes, not afraid to use exotic hues. As ConstantinSunnenberg keenly observed, his painting was a “reverie ofdeep shades of red, blue, emerald-green and yellow―. Thecombination of audacity and innovation in Anisfeld’s workswas what immediately won over collectors and lovers ofRussian art such as Vladimir Nabokov, Alexei Bakhrushin, IvanMorozov and Sergei Diaghilev. Anisfeld immigrated with hisfamily to the USA in 1917 and never returned to Russia.However, in the turmoil of revolution he nevertheless managedto obtain authorisation to take his works out of the country, andthe majority were shown as early as 1918 in a solo exhibition inthe Brooklyn Museum. The present lot, The Garden ofHesperides , was among those shown in New York andaccording to archival documents was also the most expensivepainting, valued at $12,000, an enormous amount for that time.Estimate: £400,000.00 - £600,000.00

Lot: 33* SUDEIKIN, SERGEI( 1882-1946) Porcelain Figures andFlowers ,signed. Oil on canvas, 92.5 by 71.5 cm. Authenticityof the work has been confirmed by the expert I. Geraschenko. Literature: G. Romanov, Mir iskusstva. 1898–1927 , StPetersburg, 2010, p. 967, illustrated. Porcelain and flowers: thedecorative potential of this combination had at one time beenappreciated for its full worth by the Flemish painters. With thepassage of time, however, this kind of still life fell out of favourand was glimpsed only rarely in the pages of art history, until anew wave of enthusiasm for porcelain and floral motifsengulfed the culture of Art Nouveau. The vulnerable frailty ofpicked flowers and fine china literally became an obsession inpasséiste culture as the 20th century moved from its firstdecade into its second. Their fragile beauty was forever beingrhapsodised in Symbolist and Acmeist poetry and they were depicted in a flood of still life work by the recent Blue Rose and World of Art painters. The most vivid and coherentembodiment of the theme of porcelain and flowers can be foundin the creative work of three outstanding Russian painters of theperiod: Sergei Sudeikin, Nikolai Sapunov and AlexanderGolovin. The exquisite, almost ornate, images they painted,inspired by the desire – in Abram Efros's well-turned phrase –

“to depict beautiful things beautifully―, always bore therecognisable stamp of each artist’s individual creativity. Thiscomposition of Sergei Sudeikin’s Porcelain Figures andFlowers is one of the most original and refined images of thisgroup. In painting his canvas it is as if the artist were weavingthe objects depicted into a fanciful pattern, thereby emphasisingthe decorativeness and deep symbolic significance of thecomposition. The vase with two artificial roses and the littleporcelain figures are portrayed against the background of apiece of wallpaper, or upholstery material, in the Chinoiseriestyle. The density and impasto of the brushwork in thebackground, however, differs from that used for the objects,which makes the surface of the painting start to vibrate, andthe delicate lilac gauze, its tints soaking up the white of theglazed china, creates a special magnetic, contemplativeatmosphere. If in other compositions by Sudeikin, such as Saxon Figurines (1911, The State Russian Museum), Flowersand Porcelain (1910, private collection), Flowers and Statuette (1900s, The State Tretyakov Gallery) or the Still Lifes (1909and 1911, both in the State Russian Museum) the objects oftenconceive a game among themselves, and the china marquisesand shepherdesses play out scenes that are almost theatrical,then in this composition lethargy reigns in a static andenchanted slumber. The porcelain figurines sleep in eachothers’ arms, the naked nymph who only a second before hadbeen pulling on her stocking is motionless, as though prickedby a spindle, the water in the tumbling, sparkling stream paintedon the backcloth has frozen, and the paper flowers in the vaseexude a passionless, timeless beauty. Through this paintingSudeikin transmits the quintessential aestheticism of the Worldof Art – an illusory world populated by ephemeral images.Their life is only a magical dream created by the artist’sfantasy – enchanting precisely because of its impermanence,and ready to vanish like a sleeping vision. The artist casts asort of haze over these still lifes, a gauze that insists thepainting be perceived as a beautiful reverie. The way thepainting is resolved in terms of structure rests on the playbetween plane and depth, pattern and object. On the one handthe artist affirms the substantive reality of a flower, using everymeans to define it, but at the same time he creates a certainfeeling of deception to the flowers in their arrangement andcolour, a sort of sense of mystification. This makes the still lifeseem like magic exposed, a conjuror’s trick with its artifice laidbare. Sudeikin creates a world of image in which artificiality,fabulous invention and the exposure of these qualities act inuninterrupted communication and become the intrinsic idea andcontent of the entire composition.Estimate: £300,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 34° BARANOFF-ROSSINÉ, VLADIMIR( 1888-1944) St Petersburgin Winter . Oil on canvas, 73 by 49 cm. Painted c. 1907–1909. Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist’s family. Privatecollection, France. Exhibited: Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné1888–1942 , Rutland Gallery, London, 1970, No. 14. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné1888–1942 , London, 1970, No. 14, listed as Petrograd,l’Hiver . A work of outstanding quality, the lyrical landscape St Petersburg in Winter is a rare early painting by the talentedand multi-faceted artist Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné. From hisyouth this member of the Russian avant-garde, inventor andtalented painter, was celebrated for his experimentation withthe most varied artistic styles, while at the same time retaininghis individuality. Baranoff-Rossiné painted Cubist landscapes,Realist portraits and non-objective, brightly-colouredsymphonies, which display his accurate grasping of nascentstyles long before his contemporaries. The present painting

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dates from around 1907–1909, when the artist was an activeparticipant in the first avant-garde exhibitions in Moscow andSt Petersburg. Notable among these were the Stefanos and Wreath exhibitions of 1907–1910, in which works of DavidBurliuk, Natalia Goncharova, Alexandra Exter and others werealso shown. Georges Annenkov wrote of Baranoff-Rossiné:“Throughout his whole career he was always at the forefront ofa variety of avant-garde movements, be it Cubism orSurrealism, Futurism, Expressionism etc., all the way toabstraction. He was a companion and comrade-in-arms insome very tough battles, which were convulsing the art world―. St Petersburg in Winter is of particular interest to collectors,being painted at an extremely significant moment in the historyof Russian art, when the avant-garde was for the first timemaking its presence felt, both at a great many exhibitions andvia publications as well as by attracting an ever-increasingnumber of followers.Estimate: £100,000.00 - £150,000.00

Lot: 35  KRAVCHENKO, ALEKSEI( 1889-1940) Reclining Nude . Oilon canvas, 48.5 by 66.5cm. Painted in 1919. Provenance: Collection of the artist’s family. Anonymous sale; Russian ArtEvening , Sotheby’s London, 26 November 2007, Lot 54.Private collection, UK. The nude figure was an integral part ofAlexei Kravchenko’s creative work for more than twentyyears. Having chosen this motif for his creative framework, theartist experimented with colour, texture and compositionthroughout the duration of his life. Of particular interest in thisregard are Kravchenko’s works of the late 1910s and early1920s, when the quest for a style of his own in the torrents ofthe 20th century avant-garde led the artist to create a wholecycle of large nudes, with the common theme of sleep runningthrough them. One of the first such works was the presentcomposition, Reclining Nude , painted in 1919. In this paintingthe direct influence of the artistic principles of Cézanne can stillbe felt – a tendency towards constructiveness and thejuxtaposition of planes. In devising the composition of his nude,Kravchenko is seeking new ways of portraying the interactionbetween the figure and space, between the figurativeexpression of a human and an interior. Though he had underhis belt classical training from the Moscow School of Painting,Sculpture and Architecture; experience of studying in thestudios of V. Serov, K. Korovin and A. Vasnetsov; the I. Levitanprize and high praise from I. Repin, Kravchenko still comesthrough in this work not as a follower of the Moscow school ofpainting, but rather as an accomplished artist who is part of theculture of contemporary European art. In Reclining Nude theinfluence can also be felt of Kravchenko’s experience trainingat Simon Hollosy’s school in Munich, and his personal stylisticinclinations of this time. In addition to the painting offered hereat auction, numerous life drawings of nude models are knownfrom this period. It is quite clear from these that Kravchenkoknew how to simply but effectively place his model, that heenjoyed and had a feel for it. He constantly changes themedium he is drawing in – charcoal, Indian ink, crayon, pastel.He studies the anatomy and sculptural nature of the humanbody in the widest variety of different poses, movements, twistsand turns. The models frequently make the transition fromdrawings to later emerge in paintings. For all the artist’s loveof working from life and his almost daily sessions of drawingnudes, in the majority of these nudes painted in the late 1910sthere is a sense of artificiality to the composition andretrospection to other works of art. Reclining Nude is noexception. In the woman’s pose, her hands behind her head,her white stockings and shoes, one can see an allusion toDelacroix’s Woman with White Stockings and numerous

reworkings of this rather popular subject in art history – fromRepin’s to Picasso’s to Renoir’s and many other similarcanvasses. What comes across from the painting with itssustained bright, warm tones is the colour and light of a sunnymorning, in the sound of a major chord. The composition isinteresting: the broken curve of the naked body freed from itscoverings divides the plane of the canvas into two practicallyequal portions, in which the cut-off triangle of white pillows atthe foot of the bed is counterbalanced by the rumpled pinkcoverlet that has slipped to the floor. The linear solutionsKravchenko used in the 1910s to render three-dimensionalnudes are replaced in Reclining Nude by a technique ofcounterposing contrasting planes that fracture the space tocreate a state of expressive tension. The artist’s paletteconsists of gradations of four main colours (white, pink, yellowand ochre). Modelling of the forms is laconic, with a generaliseddesign and a strictly calibrated rhythm. Here everything issurprisingly sculptural – the folds of the bedclothes and pillows,and even the compositionally superfluous parallelepipedfootstool on which the model’s legs are resting in their elegantwhite shoes and stockings. Soon after he completed RecliningNude , Kravchenko turned to the triptych Awakening for amural he was commissioned to paint in the early 1920s. Here,as in Reclining Nude , he found expression not only for hisexplorations in figurative art, but also for his constant reflectionson the problem – which preoccupied the artist over these years– of sleep, the continuity of life and dreams.Estimate: £300,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 36*§ VASSILIEFF, MARIE( 1884-1957) Petite fille au chat,signed. Oil on canvas, 81 by 65 cm. Authenticity certificatefrom the expert Claude Bernès. Exhibited: Exposition MarieVassilieff, poupées, sculpture, et peinture , chez Martine, Paris,15 December 1922–15 January 1923, No. 45. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Exposition Marie Vassilieff, poupées,sculpture, et peinture , Paris, 1923, p. 14, No. 45, listed. Thecelebrated Russian Parisian, Marie Vassilieff, is representedhere by a splendid early work, Petite fille au chat . Vassilieffwas in Paris from 1908, being one of the few artists who hademigrated before the Revolution, for cultural and aestheticreasons unrelated to politics and the imminent horrors of boththe February and October revolutions. Prior to 1922 when sheexhibited Petite fille au chat , Vassilieff had acquired a richexhibition history; while still in Russia she had shown her workalongside such masters as Jean Pougny, Nadezhda Udaltzova,Olga Rozanova and Lyubov Popova, and even exhibited withNatalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov in London in 1921.Marie Vassilieff of course owed her popularity to Henri Matisse,who took the Russian artist under his wing and followed hercreative development with great interest. Matisse wasespecially captivated by her originality and her attraction toarchaic forms couched in Cubist stylisation. The world-famous maître also introduced her to his distinguished colleaguesPicasso, Braque, Léger, Gris, Delaunay and many others. Atthe very end of the 1910s and beginning of the 1920s radicallynew tendencies manifested themselves in her work, which werelinked with her passion for the art of Central and South Africa.Vassilieff did not restrict her activity to painting and graphicsbut was also interested in dolls, creating a great number, cutfrom wood and paper or sewn from fabric or leather, to give tofriends and colleagues. This is clearly reflected in the change inher painting technique and the plasticity of her forms in thisperiod. Images of childhood are interwoven with a world of toysand dolls, defenceless in its touching and primitive elaboration. We know for certain that Petite fille au chat was shown withother works from her childhood cycle, at a 1922 exhibition

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organised by the Paris fashion designer Paul Poiret. Theexhibition was an avowed success, illustrating theachievements of a fundamentally “new― Vassilieff, constantlyon the look out for her individuality. The new genre scenes ofchildren and toys were less dissected by aggressive planes (aswere her rather mannered, imitative works of the 1910s) buthad a distinctive and stylised “sub-Cubisation―. We wouldlike to thank Claude Bernès for providing additional catalogueinformation. Estimate: £200,000.00 - £300,000.00

Lot: 37*§ ANNENKOV, GEORGES( 1889-1974) Maison rose ,signed.Oil and mixed media on canvas, 81.5 by 100 cm. Painted inthe 1920s. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity certificate from the experts N. Aleksandrova and T.Zelyukina. Exhibited: Sovremennoe frantsuzskoe iskusstvo ,The State Museum of New Western Art, The State TretyakovGallery, Moscow, 1928 (label on the reverse). Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Sovremennoe frantsuzskoe iskusstvo ,Moscow, 1928, p. 55, No. 131, listed with incorrectmeasurements. Maison rose is a marvellous work which isvery characteristic of Georges Annenkov’s early years inParis. As is the case with most of this artist’s landscapes ofthe late 1920s, it portrays a very real corner of Paris or thesuburbs of Paris. In the process of transferring his plein-air sketch to canvas however, Annenkov transformed a genrescene glimpsed in the street, with its staffage figure and aposter pillar, into the portrait of a single house – the pink house– which is lent a Classical air by its stone parapet and standsout as a localised patch of colour against the melancholy,monochrome grey-blue of a Paris day. Annenkov left SovietRussia in 1924, already an established artist, to present hisportrait of Trotsky at the opening of the Soviet pavilion at theVenice Biennale. But he did not return home, choosing insteadto become a “Russian Parisian―. The artist was to spend thegreater part of his life in France, working successfully for bothstage and screen, and painting a large number of still lifes,landscapes and portraits. It was here that he developed histrademark style which gained him celebrity in Parisian artisticcircles and which found expression in the splendid series ofviews of Paris, including the present lot. Even Annenkov’searliest Paris landscapes were two-dimensional, decorative anddivested of the dynamic that had characterised his Russianperiod. As a general rule they feature a muted palette, largepatches of colour accentuating individual areas of thecomposition and, at the same time, a graphic quality, withstrong contour lines which frequently do not coincide with thecolour blocks of the buildings or the cursorily painted tree-tops.At the turn of the decade however, the artist’s style becameeven freer and more fluid and his houses lost even the mostnominal sense of materiality, apparently floating in a sea ofcolour. At that time, their outlines acquired a life of their own,subject only to the necessity of constructing the compositionalskeleton. The motif of the pink house recurred throughoutAnnenkov’s work of the late 1920s – sometimes vividly,sometimes more softly picked out in colour against a landscapeof a more subdued palette. One notable example is a work ofthe same title from the collection of René Guerra, an eminentcollector of Russian émigré art.Estimate: £240,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 38§ EXTER, ALEXANDRA( 1882-1949) Dancers on a Beach,signed. Oil on canvas, 81 by 65 cm. Executed in the 1930s. Provenance: Estate of the artist. Anonymous sale;

Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Paintings, Drawingsand Sculpture , Sotheby’s New York, 19 October 1995, Lot 41.Important private collection, England. One of the most originalAmazons of the Russian avant-garde, Alexandra Exter played ahighly significant role in the early history of 20th-centuryprogressive art. Her home in Kiev became a meeting-place formany artists and literati where Exter would acquaint hercomrades-in-arms with the latest developments of the Parisavant-garde. She spent much time in France and beingpersonally acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Robert and SoniaDelaunay, Fernand Léger and many others, Exter spread newsof their work in Russia. Like other Russian pioneers, Exterbegan with Impressionism, but very quickly turned to Cubism.The name of Alexandra Exter is linked with Cubo-Futurism: aspecifically Russian variant of Futurism, which is reflected inmany of her genre works, still lifes and townscapes. Dancerson a Beach is one of these compositions in which the artistexperiments with colour and movement. Exter’s fluid,pulsating painting is characterised by its superb treatment ofcolour and distinctive chiaroscuro modelling. The light in herworks is inseparable from the colouring of the wholecomposition. Exter brings together a Cubist approach toFuturist energy to the dance, generating a lively dynamism. She was not only interested in the disintegration of a form intoits most basic elements: rather, she was trying to arrive at auniversalised harmony through her adherence to Cubo-Futurism. When she left Russia in 1924 her distinctive style,which owed much to the influence of theatre design, hadalready developed and she was an established painter andrespected set designer, with a reputation as a leader of theRussian avant-garde. She settled in Paris, where she continuedto work in the theatre world and taught. The painting presentedin the current catalogue belongs to Exter’s Paris period – atime when she gave herself up to the problems of decorativeart, designing for both the theatre and cinema. In this work wesense a perfect interconnection between the dynamic of thedance and the immaculate harmony of the colours.Estimate: £250,000.00 - £300,000.00

Lot: 39* VOLKOV, ALEKSANDR( 1886-1957) Kurultai. Girls at theKolkhoz Assembly ,signed, also further signed and inscribed inCyrillic on the reverse. Oil on canvas, 116.5 by 99.5 cm. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of thework has been confirmed by the artist’s family. Authenticitycertificate from the expert Yu. Rybakova. Literature: R.Taktash, Aleksandr Volkov. Mastera iskusstv Uzbekistana ,Tashkent, Gafur Gulyam Publishing House of Literature andArt, 1982, p. 59, illustrated in black and white. AmongAleksandr Volkov’s major works of the 1930s on the subject oflabour and the new way of life on collective farms, the heavilypopulated composition, The First Kurultai , particularly standsout. Conceived as a colossal, monumental canvas dedicated toa large kolkhoz assembly, or kurultai , the painting was theresult of three years hard work. Volkov laboured over thepainting from 1933 through to 1936, but this period coincidedwith the beginning of his persecution by the newspapers for“having lost his way in the thickets of formalism― and so thecanvas remained unfinished. Volkov later cut it up into severalseparate fragments, one of which is this large canvas ofwomen’s heads now known by the name Kurultai in its ownright (or Girls at the Kolkhoz Assembly ). It is this work – thelargest, most interesting and compositionally self-sufficient ofthe fragments – which MacDougall’s is now proud to offer atauction. Logically, the artist must have devised the compositionof Kurultai , whether to order or to the dictates of his heart, inthe context of his creative work in the 1930s. It is a crossroads

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where all the main paths the artist was exploring at that timecome together: the development of the glowing red colour, thetheme of labour and life on a kolkhoz and, lastly, that whichthe artist found so unusually exciting – the composite portrait ofthe new emancipated woman of the East. The female face,liberated for the first time from her yashmaks and “kerchiefs ofsilence―, had a special appeal to the artist. There hadpreviously existed in art only the conventional image of theoriental beauty created by poets and miniaturists – with anassortment of beauty spots, curls and tresses cascading overthe cheeks, arched eyebrows, and a tiny rosebud mouth, or theromantic and exotic image created by the European tradition.Volkov also paid tribute to this. But here, in his work of the mid-1930s, he is searching for the ideal image of a woman of thepeople, a good-worker and an equal participant in the new life.Five of the seven characters in the foreground are youngwomen whose smooth black hair, ruddy glow and lips ofcarmine red contrast with their broad, swarthy faces. They havea charming lack of artifice, full of an innocent commitment to theimportant kolkhoz assembly shining in their eyes. For all hisethnographic accuracy and faithful portraiture, the artist isaiming for the monumental style of a mural. This manifests itselfin the vivid decorative and universalised qualities and in thetypical fresco colour of the faces – which Volkov developedconsciously, trying to impart to the living, mobile forms thesolidity and permanence of statues cast in bronze. Thepainting, which has been essentially cut up and cropped byaccident, unexpectedly achieves rare cohesiveness andharmony, and there is a self-sufficiency to the common spaceas well as the many small spaces, masses and volumes. Theunity and integrity of the composition come from the fluentsweep of the artist’s view as it moves from surface to depth,from the measured rhythm of the forms of people in theforeground, middle ground and distance, but above all ofcourse from the consistent stream of colour. The work ispainted in predominantly red tones, superbly coordinated by theartist, ranging from the subdued crimson shades of thewoman’s dress to the flame-red of the placard and the goldenorange and luminous pink of the bunch of flowers. The image ofthis small bouquet, glowing in the hand of the little girl in theforeground, serves as the key to the entire composition: itsymbolises festivity and the uplifted emotional state of thepeople gathered together. The faces of those participating inthe kurultai are rendered with solemnity and significance. Allare united by their seriousness and rapt attention to a speechbeing delivered somewhere out of view. The slogan “Lenin-Stalin―, clearly legible in the background, is written in the Latinalphabet, which was the official Uzbek script until 1940. Volkovtook the new objectivity that was being explored in art the worldover in the late 1920s and early 1930s and alloyed it withcolours which were local to his native Uzbekistan, and also withthe political challenges of contemporary reality, to create theimage of Kurultai – no less significant as a piece of art thanas a piece of history.Estimate: £375,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 40* VOLKOV, ALEKSANDR( 1886-1957) The Corn is Rustling,signed and dated 1939. Oil on canvas, 101 by 125 cm. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of thework has been confirmed by the artist’s family. Authenticitycertificate from the expert Yu. Rybakova. Exhibited: Possibly A. Volkov , Exhibition Hall of the Artists’ Union of the UzbekSoviet Socialist Republic, Tashkent, 1941. Literature: R.Taktash, Aleksandr Volkov. Mastera iskusstv Uzbekistana ,Tashkent, Gafur Gulyam Publishing House of Literature andArt, 1982, p. 33, illustrated in black and white. The Corn is

Rustling is typical of Aleksandr Volkov’s creative output in thesecond half of the 1930s. Around this time he was goingthrough a phase of fascination with landscape and he worked agreat deal en plein air . No doubt painting from nature becamea kind of escape, an “internal emigration― for the artist, whohad parted company with the mainstream of Soviet art, hadbeen accused of formalism and was living in difficult conditionsbecause he was being hounded by the press. Confronted bythe need to think over what he had already done, to seek newsubject matter to broach and new means of expressing it,Volkov turned to painting from life and to genre landscapes –without dealing in the pathos of socialist constructioncampaigns. Volkov himself called his landscapes of this period“orchard lanes―. Day after day he would go out on thebyroads adjacent to his house and walk to the outskirts wherethe streets and enclosed properties came to an end and thefields and allotments began. Here he would paint his genrescenes of men and women working in the fields, old womennursing babes under a tree, goats grazing, pumpkins, sorghumand sweetcorn being weeded around and harvested. As distinctfrom his Cotton Harvest triptych or The Tomato Crop whichwere painted only a few years before and were standardevocations of the dream of happy labour and abundance,Volkov’s pre-war landscapes were less flamboyant and morelyrical. Volkov, like his colleagues M. Saryan and P.Kuznetsov, spent these years concentrating on the lyrical bentof his artistic nature and created a whole cycle of gentlecompositions in cheerful colours, free from political or socialcontent and totally dedicated to developing Post-Impressionistprinciples in painting. The Corn is Rustling may be placedamong Volkov’s most ambitious works in this category.Estimate: £250,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 41* FALK, ROBERT( 1886-1958) Still Life with Rowan Berriesand Fruit , numbered "89" and bearing a label inscribed inCyrillic and signed by A. Shchekin-Krotova, the artist's wife, onthe stretcher. Oil on canvas, 54 by 64 cm. Painted in 1945. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of thework has been confirmed by the expert I. Geraschenko. Literature: D. Sarabianov, Yu. Didenko, Zhivopis’ RobertaFal’ka. Polnyi katalog proizvedenii , Moscow, Elizium, 2006,p. 697, No. 1032, illustrated in black and white. With itsunderstated beauty and elegant simplicity, Still Life with RowanBerries and Fruit is painted with the quiet authority of a masterartist. This work dates from a time when both Falk’s artisticcareer and his personal life were in turbulence. After thedecade of self-imposed exile in Paris and war-time evacuationto Central Asia, the artist was at a remove from the officialartistic life of his homeland. The innovation and influence ofEuropean art, which had been so prevalent at the beginning ofhis career, had been smothered by Socialist Realism and thesurge of totalitarianism. No longer held in the same regard bythe authorities, the “Russian Cézanne― was at best viewedwith suspicion, and having suffered the loss of his beloved son,Valery, threw himself into his work and teaching. Still lifes hadalways been a mainstay of Falk’s oeuvre, but these laterworks are characterised by their thick, heavily impastoed paintlayer as the artist returned over and over again to the samecanvasses, endlessly reworking them. In the absence of anymajor official commissions he was by now mainly painting forhimself and many works of this period can be consideredintellectual exercises as well as cathartic. Returning to ideaswhich had preoccupied him since his youth, the influence ofboth Cézannism and Cubism is still present. Drama is createdby the contrast and interplay between the bright red berries andthe dense, murky space which they inhabit and the

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independence of each object from the collective whole isemphasised by the ambiguity of the space and the slightlyflattened perspective. However there is nothing cold andacademic about this work. The quiet, calm melancholia, whichhad always been Falk’s artistic calling card, is presenteverywhere: it is discernible in his palette, in the fruit which isbeginning to dry and shrivel and in the shadows, but not oncedoes it detract from the overall beauty of the work, in fact it is inthis disarming honesty of emotion that the beauty of Falk’soeuvre lies.Estimate: £220,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 42* SHTERENBERG, DAVID( 1881-1948) Pussy Willow in a Jar,signed. Oil on canvas, 80 by 61 cm. Provenance: Acquireddirectly from Fialka (Violetta) Shterenberg, the artist’sdaughter. Private collection, Europe. Literature: DavidPetrovich Shterenberg. 1881–1948. Zhivopis’, grafika.Katalog , Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1978, p. 32, listedunder works from 1945. David Shterenberg entered art historyas a painter of still lifes. His constant concerns were thematerial essence of life and the immeasurable variety of matter.The simplest of natural objects – flowers, fruit, any aspect of“still life― – were never just “studies― for Shterenberg. Hisstill lifes contain a deep-seated significance: there is always anelement of intrigue, action, mystery and they always bear theimprint of time. Pussy Willow in a Jar is clear testimony to this. Pussy Willow in a Jar was painted when the artist’s years ofstudy at the Académie Vitti (1907–1912) under Henri Martinand Kees van Dongen, his wild period in the Parisian artists’colony La Ruche and his enthusiasms for Cubism andCézanne were all in the distant past. However these lessons,assimilated by Shterenberg and synthesised into his own“modelled― style which is recognisable at every stage of hiscareer, are still discernable in Pussy Willow in a Jar . We feelhis keen interest in constructing a sense of volume on a flatsurface, for ordering and harmonising the world of objects. Heemphasises the depth of the composition, arranging the napkin,jar with pussy willow, fruit bowl and flower pot in one diagonalline so that the solidity of the materials gradually increases,from the foreground to the background. At the same time hedeliberately depicts the largest item in the composition – thebowl of pears that is the optical and pictorial centre of thepicture – in a highly geometrical and flattened manner. Replacing the “naturalistically haphazard― works of the1920s, as Shterenberg himself called them, came a moreconscious conception of the reproduction of reality. Now,returning to three-dimensional space, he places at the apex ofan angle an area of absolute stasis, a calmness, as if incontradistinction to Cubist and Expressionist approaches. Theartist strives for extreme simplification of his objective world but,when working on the most unassuming of objects he raises thisextreme simplicity to the point where it tips over intosophistication. He abandons the graphic, geometrical approachto concentrate on painterliness . The relaxed, tonal painting of Pussy Willow in a Jar is notable not for its particular technicalvirtuosity but for the emotions it embodies. The depiction of thelight of a spring day, the sense of a certain levity, theundefined, loose contours of the sprigs, as if dissolved in thehaze of the illuminated background – these form a surge ofspontaneity, absent from Shterenberg’s earlier “organised―works. This elegant still life was the creation of an artist alreadyfar-removed from the analytical dissection of nature of hisearlier years and embodies a desire, typical of his work of thisperiod, towards a soothing, classical clarity. It is this capacityfor preserving an immediate connection with the spirit of hisage, without joining any particular artistic or political camp,

which enabled him to continue to create works throughout hislife that never took on an abstracted, academic character. It isno accident that Shterenberg’s still lifes, along with his othersignificant works, have become classics of 20th century worldart.Estimate: £315,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 43* PIMENOV, YURI( 1903-1977) Paper Flowers and Snow,signed and dated 1945. Oil on canvas, 27 by 35.5 cm. Provenance: A gift from the artist to the family of F.Bogorodsky. Thence by descent. Acquired from the above.Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has beenconfirmed by Tatiana Pimenova, the artist’s daughter. YuriPimenov’s intimate, lyrical work Paper Flowers and Snow isone of his “Moscow motifs― – the artist’s most recognisableand best-loved images. Its genre defies definition. A city sketch,still life, landscape – in this marvellous, delicately-colouredwork, everything is indissolubly fused. Theatre Square. Heavysnowfall is turning everything into a white mirage. Up against aposter-covered wall is a flower-stall, with beautiful, bright paperflowers. Next to them we see a young sales-girl, the shawl tiedover her hat forming a soft oval round her head, and a little girlhurrying along the pavement. In the distance cars and atrolleybus pass by and pedestrians go about their business.This picture is a continuation of Pimenov’s theme of street-side flower sellers, which he first drew upon in a work of 1944. Paper Flowers and Snow , painted a year later, whenforthcoming victory was already on the horizon, was full of asincere optimism. The snow will pass, the sun will come out,spring will come and paper flowers will be replaced by realones. These little scenes from Moscow life provided theinspiration for Pimenov’s best paintings from the second halfof the 1930s until the early 1950s. Through the features of thecity, its main squares and thoroughfares, glimpsed as if bychance, tangentially, the life of the capital and living signs of thetimes emerge. As the years go by, the protagonists inPimenov’s works are more and more often depictedsurrounded by flowers. This is testament not only to theartist’s characteristic love of painting flowers, “the life ofthings― and the still life element constantly present in his urbanworks, but also to his touching attitude towards his protagonistswhose simple everyday occupations and employments form thelife of any town. A young man crossing Sverdlovsk Squarecarries a basket of chrysanthemums on his shoulder ( In theStreet , 1940), The Flower Seller (1944) stands with herbunches of cornflowers by the railings of the Dynamo stadium.Pimenov did not abandon his lyrical theme in his later work: in1958 transforming the meeting in By the Flower Kiosk into agreat poetic image of Moscow, and The Lonely Flower Seller ,painted in Venice in the same year, into his best memory of thecity.Estimate: £140,000.00 - £250,000.00

Lot: 44* PIMENOV, YURI( 1903-1977) We Are Building Socialism,signed with a monogram and dated 1931. Pencil, colouredpencil and gouache on paper, 48.5 by 73 cm. Provenance: The artist’s family, Moscow. Private collection, Europe.Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert O.Glebova. Exhibited: Yu. I. Pimenov , Leningrad, 1968, titled My stroim . Literature: A. Sidorov, Yuri Ivanovich Pimenov ,Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1986, p. 197, No. 739, listed. Yuri Pimenov’s posters are among the highest achievementsof 20th-century graphic design. Among his widely celebratedworks of the 1920s and 1930s on such topical subjects as work,

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the Revolution and sport, We Are Building Socialism – ofwhich two versions are known – merits special attention. Thefirst version was commissioned in 1927 for the tenthanniversary of the Revolution and executed in a Constructivistaesthetic. Using four colours, with the powerful figure of aworker in the foreground and a dynamic collage of differentelements – fonts, typefaces and various episodes from heroiceveryday life during the period of industrialisation – itscomposition is based on the contrasts in colour, rhythm andscale that were typical of 1920s agitprop graphics. However,although eye-catching as a whole, the design is fragmentedand over-complicated. Returning to the subject of buildingSocialism in 1931 with this poster design, Pimenov proposes atotally new composition which is far more dynamic andeconomical. In the four years separating the two attempts at thesame theme much had changed, not only in Pimenov’screative orientation but also in the country itself. If in 1927 it hadbeen necessary to consolidate the results of the first decade ofSoviet power, then now the state’s first five-year plan gavegrounds for the realisation of a whole series of economic,political and ideological actions that elevated industrialisation tothe status of a model for the era of the “Great Turning Point―. Pimenov’s execution of this new version was preceded – aswas usual for easel painters – by a “study period― duringwhich he assembled material. In 1930 he made a tour of theindustrial areas of the country, visiting the cement factory“Proletarian― and a model sovkhoz near Moscow. In achange from his previous poster style, Pimenov abandons thecollage form and strives, via a system he had devised of areasof flatness and volume, figurative metaphors and associations,to convey first and foremost the movement, dynamism andrhythm demanded by the aims of the new era. He places theworker in the foreground with his back turned to the viewer. Hisboldly and energetically drawn figure holding a pneumatic drillstands out in his figurative power and direct call to action. Thebackground consists of line drawings – constructed accordingto the laws of linear perspective, schematised but stillrecognisable – of electric power lines, railway lines and factorywork benches. In this version, the artist is evidently inclinedtowards a large-scale format and monumental abstraction ofform. Interestingly, despite all the evident merits of the design itstill did not go into mass production. This was probably theresult of harsh criticism of The Society of Easel-Painters’poster imagery and of Pimenov personally, which had grownnoticeably stronger in the press during the early 1930s. Today,now that the acuity of the political aspect has lost its pertinenceand ideological rigidity, the indisputable quality of Pimenov’sdesign for the 1931 We Are Building Socialism poster isobvious. The determined quest for expressivity, the skill increating easily-remembered images, the striving for innovationin subject-matter and in the very techniques for depicting reality– these attributes constitute the principal asset of a mass-produced graphic design.Estimate: £320,000.00 - £500,000.00

Lot: 45* PIMENOV, YURI( 1903-1977) Port ,signed with an initial anddated 1931. Pencil, ink, watercolour and gouache on paper,47.5 by 36 cm. Provenance: Collection of the artist’s family.Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has beenconfirmed by the expert O. Glebova. Literature: YuriIvanovich Pimenov , Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1986, p.197, No. 738, listed. Dating from 1931, Port is based onimpressions Yuri Pimenov brought back from a trip toNovorossiysk, which he had visited in 1929–1930. At that time,everything related to industry was central to Pimenov’s artisticinterests. In both his illustrations and paintings he was

gravitating towards an aesthetic fetishizing of iron structures,girders, cranes. Here, the building of a new Soviet port offeredhim splendid material. In Port , as in most of Pimenov’sworks of this period, we see the hand of a master who thinks interms of composition and perceives real-life subjects in aspecific, rhythmical structure. The high, distant viewpointenables the artist to encompass the vast expanse of the portarea: land, water and sky, and a red flag flapping. The high,slightly skewed line of the horizon, the deliberately reducedscale of the vehicles and the optically multiplied slant of all theverticals imbue the painting with a plethora of dynamic andspatial effects. The principal theme running through thiscomposition is movement. The quay edge dives downwards ina sharp diagonal, echoed by the dotted lines of railway wagonsrolling down to the bottom limit of the picture; the hulking greatships unhurriedly plough the harbour waters in variousdirections and even an enormous barge, moored at its berth,seems to throw its great mass towards the viewer. Pimenovbrilliantly transforms the then-topical advance of new industryinto a means of strengthening not only the emotional impact ofthe work but also its conceptual resonance. Few members ofthe Society of Easel Painters endowed dynamic motifs withsuch extreme expressivity which marked out Pimenov’s portscenes already by the late 1920s ( Hamburg. By a “RoteFront― Poster , 1928). Pimenov’s thematic repertoire stemsfrom similar work he did for periodicals, and the basiccharacteristics of his art in his Society of Easel Painters periodwere a combative and optimistic tone and consistent concernwith “electrified, mechanised Communism― (Mayakovsky).The increased interest this latter had aroused regarding thespecific expressive possibilities of graphic art spurred onPimenov to seek new, realistic approaches, which exceededthe bounds of the VKhUTEMAS syllabus. It is no coincidencethat, during this period, the artist showed a preference fordrawing with ink, pencil, watercolour and gouache, that is, morepainterly techniques than the woodcuts championed byFavorsky’s school.Estimate: £285,000.00 - £300,000.00

Lot: 46  DEINEKA, ALEKSANDR( 1899-1969) Still Life with Azaleaand Apples ,signed and dated 1937. Oil on canvas, 64.5 by74.5 cm. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert T.Levina. Deineka’s 1937 painting Still Life with Azalea andApples is a fine example of his work in the still life genre fromthe period when his artistic talent was blossoming. It waspainted soon after his return from an extended trip to the USA,France and Italy, and it retains that very keen, strong“impression of an assertive freshness of technique―, of whichthe renowned critic Abram Efros wrote in 1935. In the artist’sapproach to his entirely traditional nature morte – flowers, fruitand drapery – there is none of the unity of picturesque subjectmatter inherent in classical painting, which portrays everythingin a single textural key. With Deineka, it is as though he endowsevery object with its own personal texture and colour,emphasising the diversity of the matter of which the forms arecomposed – a diversity of organic matter and geometry.Natural shapes that are round – the flower-heads, the foliage,the apples – are moulded in strokes of thick, sculpturalimpasto. Treatment of the clay pot and bright yellow porcelaindish is more subtle, but solid enough. And lastly, the busychecked pattern of the fabric is painted deliberately sketchilyand the paint layer is fairly light (similar checked fabric willappear in the dress of the model in Deineka’s later work Young Construction Worker , painted in 1966). Painting craftedin this way shows the impact of Cubist collage, transformed to

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introduce a variety of textures to the painted surface. A distinctpure form of the style became especially evident in the work ofDeineka’s senior contemporary and close associate within theSociety of Easel Painters, David Shterenberg. While Deinekadoes not venture so far into laying bare techniques as does Shterenberg, there is a palpable interplay of contrastingmaterial structures in his Still Life with Azalea and Apples .Estimate: £250,000.00 - £300,000.00

Lot: 47* DEINEKA, ALEKSANDR( 1899-1969) Phlox in a Red Jug,signed and dated 1960; bearing the label of the Moscowsection of the Art Fund of the Russian Soviet FederativeSocialist Republic on the stretcher. Oil on canvas, 75.5 by 50cm. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity ofthe work has been confirmed by the expert Yu. Rybakova. Aleksandr Deineka – bard of progress, speed, flight, metal, ofthe endless spaces being conquered by mankind, of thespearhead labour force, of sport – was no stranger to thesubtler lyric of nature and human life. An interest in still lifeemerges in his work at the very beginning of the 1930s, evidentin the splendid cycle Dried Flowers . With the years, hisattention to nature in bloom and the lyrical current in hispainting only strengthens. Phlox in a Red Jug , a painting of1960, is striking confirmation of this. This eye-catching, festivestill life composition bears the hallmark of Deineka’s style,showing the artist’s overriding tendency to see, even inflowers, strict architectural form, clear logic and structuralcompleteness, an organised consistency of rhythm, and a welldefined colour profile. It is no accident that Deineka’sfavourite ornamental plants are phlox and gladioli, which have astable configuration and lend themselves to linearrepresentation. When the artist depicts the phlox, nurtured bythe warmth of the sun, in all the vigour and luxuriousness oftheir flowering, he is also working in a profound way on thespecifics of colour, studying the behaviour of red in differenttextures and contexts: the living matter of clusters of blossom,the glazed ceramic of a vase and the textile of backgrounddrapery. The resulting colour spectrum of the painting is built onportraying the complex influences of one shade or tint onanother. For Deineka still life was always a creative laboratory,the sphere of artistic freedom in which he could turn his backon the exaggerated generalisation and harsh focus demandedby his work on monumental paintings and decorative panels,and paint nature “at point-blank―, searching in her foridiosyncrasies and sculptural qualities that are never repeated.It was no chance remark of the painter’s when he said: “When painting walls... I recall my... landscapes, flowers andsketches. Painting my huge great works without them would belike painting them without my soul.―Estimate: £285,000.00 - £400,000.00

Lot: 48* KOMAR, VITALY and MELAMID, ALEXANDER( B.1943 andB. 1945) A Knock at the Door, from Nostalgic Socialist Realismseries , indistinctly signed, also further signed, titled and dated1982–83 on the reverse. Tempera and oil on canvas, 183 by119.5 cm. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by V.Komar. Exhibited: Business as Usual , Ronald Feldman FineArts, January–February 1984. Literature: C. Ratcliff, Komar& Melamid , New York, Abbeville Press, 1988, p. 141, pl. 131,illustrated. For Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid thebeginning of the 1980s was an unusually important time. It wasthen that this interesting artistic duo set about creating theirmost interesting series of works, entitled Nostalgic SocialistRealism . The canvasses in this series, which emulate the

technique of the best known academic painters of Stalin’stime, most notably Alexander Laktionov, are distinguished bytheir smooth glazed brushwork, attention to artificial lighting andspecial academic ‘finish’. The half-gloom of dwellings builtduring Stalin’s rule, with tablecloths, curtains and pseudo-Empire furniture lit in harsh patches by table lamps, confrontsthe viewer with that particular, solemnly threatening world of thetotalitarian system. The artists skilfully combined technicallyaccomplished execution, common to the art of socialist realism,with the conceptualist grotesque of images characteristic of popart, which was in turn transformed into Sots Art in this amusinginterpretation. A Knock at the Door was finished in the samememorable year that the artists’ paintings were acquired byNew York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum.It is one of the best works of the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series and a typical example of Sots Art. This work, concise interms of areas of colour, is outlandishly tragicomic. It is filledwith symbols of the Soviet era: the green lamp à la Lenin in theshape of a toadstool with its lampshade like a cap, and the half-gloom, as if reviving images of Ilyich working in the half-gloomof his study filled with books and, lastly, the book in its redbinding, worthy of accommodating the ideas of one of theleaders of the proletariat, which lies on the table covered by acloth of historic red. Another symbol of Stalinism is the fearwhich has driven the occupant of the room under the table.Strictly observing all the socialist rituals and surroundinghimself with symbols of the communist faith have not protectedhim from the sinister terror that has arrived with the midnightknock at the door. Komar and Melamid denied that this andother works were intended to be critical, pointing out that fear isan ecumenical reality: “Fear governs the Soviet Union in thesame way it does the United States―, they argued: “The KGBand Stalin are only symbols personifying an ageless socialphobia...― The artists define the character of A Knock at theDoor as sensitively nostalgic. This is a memorial-painting whichis steeped in the era of Stalin, but not the events which broughtthat era about to begin with.Estimate: £220,000.00 - £270,000.00

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