Boris Israilovich Anisfeld, 1879-1973

St. Petersburg, Mir Iskusstva, 1917
New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The Boris Anisfeld Exhibition (touring), 1918-1920, Cat. No.68
New York, Sheperd Gallery, Boris Anisfeld in St. Petersburg, 1901-1917, 1984, Cat. No.49 
Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario,  Boris Anisfeld - Fantast-Mystic: Twelve Russian Paintings from the Collection of Joey and Toby Tanenbaum, 1989, Cat. No. 12

C.Brinton, The Boris Anisfeld Exhibition, New York, 1918, Cat. No.68 (illustrated)

Winter in St. Petersburg belongs to a series of views of the city painted in 1917. From this series the painting closest to the offered lot is Melting Snow – St. Petersburg which probably depicts the same landscape from a slightly lower view point.

However Winter in St Petersburg is the only landscape in Anisfeld’s 1917 series being framed by a window. Anisfeld painted this view from the window of his studio in the family’s apartment at Geiserlovsky pereulok, No 6.

In the lower left there is a figure of a young girl kneeling on the floor as she gazes out of the large window. The girl is likely to be Anisfeld’s daughter Morella, who was about eight years old at the time. In contrast to the dark hues Anisfeld uses for the interior, the view through the window has the quiet luminosity of a cold winter’s day. The predominant hues of light blue are enlivened by touches of violet, pink, green and yellow. Anisfeld moves away from perceived reality and creates a complementary harmony of yellow and blue, and pink and green. The artist himself stressed his fondness for conceptual colour harmonies in 1918:

“I always work from colour schemes. At first, I worked entirely in the high keys, as those seemed to appeal to me more strongly. Later, I developed compositions in lower keys, striving always to preserve the brilliance and luminous quality. My themes vary just like music. “

While the luminosity of the icy landscape has an almost impressionistic quality, the transparent planes of Winter in St.Petersburg and its tension between surface and depth link the work more closely with analytic Cubism. One is especially reminded of the early, mildly cubistic paintings by Robert Delauney like his La Fenêtre sur la Ville (fig.1) and Fernand Léger’s Fumées sur les Toits from 1911(fig.2).

In Winter in St.Petersburg Anisfled has transformed a bleak Russian winter day into a luminous symphony of iridescent colour.