Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar

New York, Grand Central Palace, The Russian Art Exhibition, 1924, no.209

C.Brinton and I.Grabar, The Russian Art Exhibition catalogue listed as no.209, A Summer Evening

The canvas has been striplined. There are four small patches to the reverse. UV light reveals three small areas of retouching in the top right quadrant and one in the top left; there are smaller spots of retouching and infilling elsewhere in the sky, principally in the upper corners and in places to the sky. There are a few spots of retouching to the landscape. Held in a gold painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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In the late summer and autumn of 1923, Grabar painted around 30 landscapes on the Moscow river in Krylatskoe, near Kuntseva, but A Summer Evening was one of the few which he chose to exhibit the following year in New York. Views of rural Moscow came to occupy a prominent place in Grabar's work of the early 1920s. As a key figure in the early Bolshevik art establishment, executive director of the Tretyakov Gallery and a professor of restoration at the Moscow State University, his responsibilities meant he was unable to leave the capital for any length of time except for the summer months - hence the seasonal nature of his canvases from this period.

A Summer Evening is a classic example of the changes in Grabar's technique that came about at this time. As Vladimir Kruglov writes in monograph on the artist, Grabar loses interest in the fleeting effects of pointillism: his palette grows markedly darker, his pigments denser and 'more material', and he begins to introduce many more planes into his compositions (V.Kruglov, Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar, Moscow: Zolotoi Vek, 2008, p.121). The low horizon in the present work is a characteristic device that he used in the early 1920s to generate a greater sense of depth, used to similar effect in The Valley of the Moscow River, Autumn Expanses, 1922 (fig.1), another work he chose to exhibit in New York in 1924.

Grabar was the driving force behind the exhibition which brought the work of 100 Russian artists to the US and attracted over 17,000 visitors. His introduction to the catalogue is riven with patriotic fervour, but the inflated prose does not detract from the endeavour, which was indeed impressive and a historically important moment of early Soviet cultural expansion. 'In the midst of great suffering, to the thunder of cannon, during the dark days of famine, cold and every sort of hardship connected with the mere business of keeping alive, Russian artists have not laid down their professional weapons, have not abandoned their brushes and chisels, but have continued to work unremittingly' (I.Grabar, introduction to The Russian Art Exhibition, 1924).