Yuri Pavlovich Annenkov

The landscape immediately calls to mind Louis Cheronnet’s book Extra-Muros (Sans-Pareil, 1929), which was dedicated to views of the Paris suburbs and illustrated by Annenkov. This is very much a suburban landscape, very like his work Fortifcations. The greeny, blue-grey palette conveys the poverty, the sadness, the isolation – this is a landscape stripped of human presence, that nothing, not even the little train that runs across the background, can enliven. It is an intensely psychological painting that conveys the artist’s spiritual state, faced with a difficult material situation and cut off from his roots, even if he had the consolation of sharing this experience with ‘les Montparnos’ (the tumultuous centre of Montparnasse life): Zadkine, Pougny, Charchoune, Serebriakova, Larionov, Goncharova and the painters of the École de Paris.

We are grateful to the expert Vladimir Hofmann, the artist's former student and author of his catalogue raisonné, for providing additional cataloguing information.