Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, WISCONSIN

RUSSIAN, 1886-1958
PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH A RED NECKTIE

PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH A RED NECKTIE

measurements
53 1/3 by 33 in.

alternate measurements
135.4 by 84 cm

signed in Cyrillic (on the reverse)

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Henry L. Carlsruh & Co., Inc., Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Contemporary Russian Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Private collection (acquired directly from the above)

EXHIBITED

Berlin, Galerie van Diemen & Co., Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, October-January 1922
Milwaukee, Contemporary Russian Art, no. 140, p. 2, illustrated
Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee, Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University

LITERATURE

Galerie van Diemen & Co., Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, Berlin, October-January 1922, no. ?, illustrated (titled Portrait)
Russkoe Iskusstvo, Saint Petersburg, 1923, no. 1, illustrated opp. p. 64

NOTE

The present portrait by Robert Falk is an incredible rediscovery. It was included in the historically important van Diemen gallery exhibition in Berlin in 1922 and was also published in the Journal on Russian art in 1923 (figs. 1& 2). ``I demand on my rights to be wholly myself,'' Robert Falk exclaimed, ``suffering is always subjective. I want to have the right to my own personal song." While Falk was a founding member of the avant-garde group Jack of Diamonds, his work always adhered to his personal unique vision. While artists such as Larionov and Malevich abandoned the Jack of Diamonds group for its increasing reliance on Western models, Falk persisted to become one of the group's leading figures.

It was in 1922, after the group's dissolution, that Falk, along with other leading Russian avant-garde painters always eager to introduce their modernist innovations beyond the scope of Russian borders, exhibited his work in Berlin at the van Diemen gallery. Portrait of a Man with a Red Necktie was included in the ground-breaking show appropriately entitled Die Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, one that was said to have drawn as many as 15,000 people. Lajos Kassak, an editor of the Hungarian avant-garde journal Ma said of the show, "In Berlin, one exhibition devours the other, with shapes winding and colours shrieking. And into this intricate, gaudy confusion the Russians have brought back the primitive source of colours and the Straight Line of Purity."

Falk was interested in furthering Russian Neo-Primitivism, experimenting with Fauvism, Cubism and Cézannism. For Falk, also known as the Russian Cézanne, the French master was the ultimate realist, an artist of the most fundamental truths, underrated by critics who prized objective realism. Portrait of A Man with a Red Necktie exemplifies the artist's interest in Cézannism. What becomes immediately apparent is the central role of color; it is a form just as much as the corporeal subject of the work. Through the vigorousness of his strokes, Falk communicates to us not only the inner life of the man but the vivid energy of his clothes, the interior he inhabits. Especially notable is the artist's command at conveying a three-dimensional mass--the riveting man who dominates the canvas possesses a tangible bulk, a flesh-and-blood presence.

About his own process, Falk told the writer Ilya Ehrenberg, "I think about many things before I sit down to work, I think about the person whom I will be painting, about the epoch, landscape, political events, poetry, stories my grandmother told me, the contents of yesterday's newspaper ." Ehrenberg concludes that if Impressionists painted the world as they saw it, then Falk painted the world the way he ruminated on it. Indeed, his portraits reveal an active mind at work.