Tofik Javadov

Rafael Gulmammadli, Tofik Javadov, Baku 2013, pp. 73 & 133, illustrated in colour 

Tofik Javadov was one of the founding members of the Absheron Colourists group in the 1950s. Yet his aesthetic differed at the core from that of his peers, among whom was his older brother Javad MirJavadov and Rasim Babayev. Instead of developing a visual world of metaphors, symbolic meanings and phantasmic characters in a stand against Socialist Realism, Javadov adopted this realism, experimenting and manipulating it to create a distinct visual language. His firm and expressive neo-realism was a voice unlike any other in the contemporary Azerbaijani art scene and largely coincided with similar new-realist movements of the West in the 1950s and 1960s.

Depictions of industrial landscapes and particularly oil fields and its workers are among Javadov's best known subjects. Glorifications of industrial achievements ranked high on the Socialist agenda; nonetheless Javadov's work was often faced with criticism. His famous Oilworkers (Return from the Shift), for example, was banned from being exhibited even after the artist passed away in 1963 and was not publicly seen until 1987. Javadov spent hours observing oil workers at the newly constructed Oil Stones, which in 1948 became the first man built mid-sea industrial settlement off the bay in Baku. He used his experiments with colour, unconventional ground and bold brushstrokes to do away with the cliches of Socialist Realism and depict his subject matter in all its existential reality. As the present lot skilfully demonstrates, the workers in his paintings are not idealised demigods. Instead they express weariness and fatigue, combined with honesty and humanity of physical labour.

The artist's untimely passing meant that he only left around fifty works in oil behind. His own greatest critic, Javadov used to destroy the works he was not fully satisfied with himself. Thus, the present lot is a very rare example to come to the market. It exemplifies the artist's trademark dark outlines which add expressivity and severity to his portraits, as well as his love of intense colour, characteristic of the Absheron School. The black outlines come into Javadov's canvases from his graphic works where the artist attempted to break the line as little as possible. Interested in the inner worlds of the people surrounding him and the inherent philosophy of his local habitat, Javadov's emotive works masterfully reflect the strength and character of the time he lived in imbued with the artist's own spiritual explorations.