ALEXANDER ALEXANDROVICH OSMERKIN | TREES BY A POND

The family of the artist

Moscow, Mir Iskusstva, January 1922

Exhibition catalogue Mir Iskusstva, Moscow, 1922

Only a handful of avant-garde works by the youngest member of the Jack of Diamonds group survive in museum collections such as the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and the Nukus Museum of Art in Uzbekistan and their appearance at auction is even rarer.

Osmerkin joined the studio of Ilya Mashkov in 1912 when he first came to Moscow from Kiev and the influence of Cézanne and his Russian followers, namely Mashkov and Petr Konchalovsky, in the present lot is evident in the limited palette, simplified shapes, sharp lines and compositional clarity. In his works of the early 1920s Osmerkin also displays the same marked departure from the still lifes and portraits that made up his oeuvre in the late 1910s. Influenced by an exhibition of works by the Barbizon school held in Moscow in 1920 these artists enthusiastically left behind the bleakness of their Moscow studios in the first troubled years after the Revolution and returned to an exploration of landscape, particularly that of Kuntsevo and Abramtsevo outside Moscow and the formal parks and gardens outside Leningrad where Osmerkin spent the early 1920s. For a comparable example see the following lot, Konchalovsky’s view of oak trees dating from 1920.

Like many of the Jack of Diamonds artists Osmerkin exhibited with the reorganised Mir iskusstva society in 1917, becoming a member in 1920. In January of 1922 he exhibited at the society’s Moscow exhibition and a label from this exhibition survives on the stretcher of this painting. Also visible on the stretcher are the remnants of a second exhibition label which although no longer legible would likely relate to the succinctly named Vystavka kartin held in Moscow a year later where a number of the Jack of Diamonds artists exhibited and the catalogue records two paintings by Osmerkin of trees.