Sergei A. Grigoriev, "New Bicycle" 53½'' x 39'', 1955, Oil on Canvas Estimate $4,000- $5,000, Current Bid, $1,750 N. Nero

October Silent Auction 

     

As our October silent auction choice, we are pleased to present a quite large (53½'' x 39''), famous and much loved Soviet painting, "New Bicycle", by Sergei Alekseevich Grigoriev, who is one of the leading Ukrainian painters of the Soviet period. This painting is a charming piece that celebrates the Russian countryside with an almost universal theme of a young boy with a new bicycle.  Viewers of this painting always say how much joyful light is captured by the painter.  

 

Sergei A. Grigoriev was the awarded the title of 'People's Artist of the USSR' in 1974. This award was the most prestigious honor bestowed by the Soviet Union for exceptional artistic achievements. Its recipients include many of the most-acclaimed composers, dancers, singers, film and theatre directors and actors of the time. Collectively, for all of the categories, there were only 1,010 recipients of the award during the life time of the Soviet Union. It signified the greatest accomplishment and highest recognition for Soviet artists. 

  

Sergei A. Grigoriev was best known as a painter of everyday-life genre subjects late 1940's through the 1950's. His works are included in many museums including the Kiev Museum of Ukrainian Art and The Tretyakov Gallery Moscow. He taught at the Kharkov Art Institute, the Kiev Art Institute and was head of the creative studios of  The USSR Academy of Arts, Kiev. He became a Soviet academician, was awarded Stalin Prizes in 1950, 1955, and most importantly the title of 'People's Artist of the USSR'  in 1974. 

 

 

"Evening (Greece)". 25½'' x 35½'', 2011, Oil on Canvas, $3,200

"Snappy Day (Nikolskiy Cathedral, St.Petersburg)", 9¾'' x 15¾'', 2010, Oil on Board, $750

"Kotor Bay (Montenegro)", 15¾'' x 19¾'', 2012, Oil on Canvas, $800

"Morning in Agia-Paraskevy (Greece)", 11¾'' x 15¾'', 2011, Oil on Canvas, $800

"Winter in Nakhichevan (Nakhichevan-on-Don)", 7¾'' x 15¾'', 2011, Oil on Canvas, $800

"Evening", 13½'' x 20¾'', 2012, Oil on Canvas, $800

"Tauride Garden (St.Petersburg)", 19¾'' x 21¾'', 2014, Oil on Canvas, $2,900

" Night on Fontanka River (St..Petersburg)" 9¾'' x 11¾'', 2010, Oil on Canvas, $600

Victor K. Gaiduk, "Abstract Landscape", 20'' x 28'', 1970"s, Gouache on Cardboard, $990

Victor K. Gaiduk, "Landscape- Pond", 19¾'' x 27½'', 1970"s, Oil on Cardboard, $990

Victor K. Gaiduk, "Landscape- Evening Trees", 15¼'' x 23¼'', 1970's, Gouache on Cardboard, $1,100

Victor K. Gaiduk, "Landscape- Fall Trees", 16¼'' x 20¾'', Gouache on Cardboard, $1,100

Victor K. Gaiduk, "Landscape Trees", 15¼'' x 24'', 1970's, Gouache on Cardboard, $1,100

Victor K Gaiduk, "Landscape" 19¼'' x 27½'', 1970"s, Gouache on Cardboard, $900

Victor K. Gaiduk, "Landscape, Countryside Lake" 15¾'' x 23½'', 1970's, Oil on Cardboard, $990

Victor K. Gaiduk, "Landscape", 14¼'' x 24½'',1970's, Oil on Cardboard, $990

Victor Gaiduk, "Landscape" 17'' x 24'', (43 x 61 cm) 1970"s, Oil on Cardboard, $900

Victor Kirillovich Gaiduk, "Landscape", 16¼'' x 23½'', (41 x 60 cm) 1970"s, Oil on Cardboard, $990

Victor K. Gaiduk, "Landscape" 15¼'' x 24½'', (39 x 62 cm) 1970's, Oil on Cardboard $990

Victor Kirillovich Gaiduk, 1926-1992 

 

President of the Russian Union of Artists for many years, and one of the leading members of the post war Moscow school of Art, Sidorov was always passionate about the countryside and has an understanding of the beauty and magnificence of nature in his heart. Sidorov is a Master of  the "lyrical landscape", 

 

"Silence", 1971

"Near the Old Sheds". 1975

"Summer Garden", 1964

"With Mushrooms", 30¾'' x 34¾'', 1975, Oil on Canvas, $65,000

Sidorov in his studio, Moscow, 2009

 

Self Portrait, 1908

One of the major highlights of the UK-Russia Year of Culture, is the major retrospective of Kazimir Malevich at Tate Modern in London.  The new show looks at the work of the creator of the infamous Black Square, one of the most radical and significant figures in modern art and father of a new visual language called Suprematism.

 

The exhibition presents 150 works rarely seen in public. Its curator Iria Candela explains: "This exhibition sheds new light on Malevich's career in its entirety from early experiments to the cataclysmic invention of Suprematism." Following a chronological format, the show allows visitors to see Malevich's journey from religious imagery to abstraction.

 

In his early paintings, the artist was heavily influenced by folk art and Russian Orthodox icons. Subsequently, the work of the post-impressionists and modern art movements in Paris in the early 20th century also exerted significant influence on Malevich's art. The artist came to know the work of artistic giants such as Monet, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse, through his visits to the homes of Moscow-based collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov.

 

"Black Square", 1915

Malevich is known above all for his Black Square (1915), a black square surrounded by a margin of white-the most prominent of the abstract, geometric paintings he called Suprematist, first shown at the now famous "0.10" exhibition in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1915. 

 

Malevich himself saw it as an icon heralding "the beginning of a new culture", which he called suprematism. With Suprematism, Malevich hoped to create "a world in which man experiences totality with nature," though using forms "which have nothing in common with nature." He declared the Black Square to be the "zero of form," claiming that it eclipsed all previous art.  

  

When it was first shown as part of a group of 39 abstract paintings in a dramatic display in Moscow in December 1915, it was placed at the top of the wall - the artist's supreme work presiding over the rest of the pictures. Most importantly, it bridged a corner of the room, just as religious icon paintings would hang in the "holy corner" of Russian Orthodox homes. It was iconoclasm writ large: an act that would be immediately understood by its audience as a shocking replacement of the old order with the new. Malevich was intent on building a myth around this work, and it became a totem for the avant garde; a beacon for thinking the unthinkable for generations of artists. 

"Shroud of Christ" 1908

Black Square is inevitably the fulcrum around which Tate Modern's huge new exhibition pivots. Its origins lay in his designs for a futurist opera in 1913 called Victory Over the Sun, the libretto of which had used fractured sounds with no meaning - a language the artist called "zaum". His set and costumes responded in kind, with angular and jagged forms boldly thrust together.

 

It took him a while to transfer the spirit of these designs into paintings but by 1915 he'd done it. The original Black Square is too cracked and fragile to travel, so the Tate has borrowed a larger one he produced in 1923, one of several versions he made. 

 

A revolutionary spirit had long driven his work. He was born to Polish parents in Kiev in 1879 and settled in Moscow in 1906. Thus, he came of age as a painter just as the traditional feudal society and oppressive government of  Tsarist Russia were under increasing strain from an impoverished workforce and a liberal, educated middle class.

 

Malevich, like other avant-garde artists, welcomed the revolution, and suprematism soon became the language that promoted its ideals, especially through Malevich's followers, such as El Lissitzky. Malevich himself never made openly political works, though he took up several state positions in art schools. 

 

Artistically, Moscow was just the place for an artist intent on breaking with the old order, as wealthy collectors such as Sergei Shchukin had opened their great collections of French modern art to the public. Always, though, his art remained Russian in spirit - several 1912 works resemble the metallic humanoids of Fernand Léger, but Malevich wasn't interested in man as machine like the Frenchman. In a modern take on a long Russian tradition, he took for his subjects rural workers, such as those in The Scyther and The Woodcutter.

 

"The Woodcutter", 1912

 

"The Scyther (Mower)", 1912

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The exhibition is essentially a drama in three acts: the early years before "Black Square", the epiphany of abstraction, and then Malevich's later years and his attempts to reconcile suprematism with figuration. 

 

 

 

"Bather", 1911

 

Malevich's Fauve paintings of 1910-1911 remain startling. Bather, perhaps a direct response to Matisse's La Danse, can be taken as an image of Malevich himself. A naked figure, with large red hands and two right feet, also large and red, is about to fling himself into unknown waters; the only visible facial feature is an eye. A picture of a chiropodist is no less exciting-and somehow no less Fauve-despite being painted in grey and the very palest of greens and yellows. Even a black and white lithograph, The Floor Polishers, carries a similar charge. The energy of Malevich's work stems not only from color but also from his remarkable ability to evoke a sense of movement. This dynamism can be sensed in work from all his different periods, whether figurative or abstract. 

 

Knife Grinder (Principle of Glittering), 1912-1913

In 1919, as Malevich entered his white-on-white period, freeing himself even from color, he wrote, "I have conquered the lining of the colored sky, I have plucked the colors, put them into the bag that was formed, and tied it with a knot. Sail on! The white, free depths, eternity, is before you." Exhilarating though this may be, it marks a temporary victory for Malevich the poet-metaphysician over Malevich the artist. Indeed, for several years in the early 1920s he abandoned painting altogether, concentrating instead on theory, astronomy, his teaching, and his work on the small models he called "architectons" or "planits," his exploratory vision of a future Suprematist style of architecture. 

Centre Pompidou, Alpha 1923, one of Malevich's best known architectons

Suprematism initially put an end to any depictions of figures but in the late 1920's, after several years dedicated to teaching, Malevich revised his thoughts and used suprematism to try to reinvent figurative painting. This was a very different Soviet Union to that of the revolution: Stalin's regime despised avant-garde art and promoted realism in its stead. Decreeing that Socialist Realism was to be the only state-approved style of art - only paintings of the hard-working Soviet proletariat and communist heroes were to be permitted.

Like other members of the Russian avant-garde, Malevich met with ever-growing hostility from the Soviet authorities. The State Institute of Artistic Culture, of which he was director, was closed down in 1926 after being publicly labeled "a government-supported monastery." And in late 1930 Malevich spent two months in prison, accused of being a German spy. Had he not died of cancer in 1935, it is likely that he would soon have been re-arrested.

 

Many feel Malevich was chastened by the new state doctrine and conformed but he managed to reach a kind of compromise  -his works from the 1920's and 1930's are far from the mainstream of socialist realism. His portraits of the peasantry were imbued with the graphic style of Suprematism and included covert references to the brutal treatment of the peasant class by the Communist Party. His 1920's and 1930's work is far from the mainstream of socialist realism. 

  

Malevich managed to reach a kind of compromise -his portraits of the peasantry during the 1920's and 1930's were imbued with the graphic style of Suprematism and included covert references to the brutal treatment of the peasant class by the Communist Party.

Head of a Peasant, 1929

 

Malevich's 1929 "Head of a Peasant" is one such work: the blank, impassive face of a Russian peasant stares bleakly into the distance whilst behind him women and children toil in the fields and airplanes soar ominously overhead. The geometric division of his features represents the deconstruction of the Russian soul into mere components, part of a machine for the ruling class to exploit.

 

By the 1930's Malevich's iconic Suprematist style was gradually fading. The artist returned to a more realistic style of painting in keeping with the new official style of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union. . His later works, portraits of his family and friends are fairly strictly representational, although some hints of his Suprematist style still shine through . Perhaps the most stunning example of his later work is his 1933 Self Portrait, where he depicts himself as a Florentine painter of the Renaissance era. This painting could be interpreted several ways, but the underlying message suggests Malevich's bitter assessment of the Soviet authorities' control over Russia's art: were it not for the mandatory doctrine of Socialist Realism, Soviet artists would match the fantastic heights of the Renaissance masters. The painting could be interpreted as a defiant gesture in the face of defeat: while the portrait is in no way abstract, Malevich still signed it with his signature black square, suggesting that he never truly abandoned his Suprematist ideals. 

 

Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1933

Self Portrait, 1933

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Girl With a Red Pole" 1932-3, combines abstract passages with Renaissance portraiture

 

As Malevich's earlier work is remarkable for its energy, so these late realistic portraits are remarkable for their humanity. The delicate grey eyes of the artist's wife see clearly and are clearly seen. Unlike the staring, visionary eyes characteristic of the earlier work, these eyes are alert to the world of our everyday lives. 

 

A telling detail can be found in these works - a tiny image of Black Square either alongside or instead of a signature. Malevich clearly felt that it was his greatest achievement, and it later adorned the hearse at his funeral and his gravestone.

 

 

email:  info@McCartheyGallery.net