Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov, 1881-1964

Sotheby's London, Icons, Russian Pictures, Works of Art and Fabergé, 20 February 1985, lot 336
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Storrs, The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Russian Avant-garde Art from the Schreiber Collection, January-March, 1986
New Rochelle, Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, The Russian Experiment: Master Works and Contemporary Works, September-October, 1990

Alla Rosenfeld, The Russian Experiment: Master Works and Contemporary Works, New York, 1990, p. 9, illustrated

The following condition report has been supplied by: Hamish Dewar Ltd, Fine Art Conservation, 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street St James's, London SW1Y 6BU tel + 44 (0)20 7930 4004, fax + 44 (0)20 7930 4100, hamish@hamishdewar.co.uk www.hamishdewar.co.uk The artist's canvas has been laid on to board and this is ensuring an even and stable structural support. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows a number of rather crude and no doubt excessive retouchings. I am confident that, should these be removed, many would be found to be at least partially unnecessary,. These retouchings are predominantly around the framing edges and in the upper right of the background. There are other areas that do fluoresce unevenly, such as the dark outlines around the reclining nude, but this would appear to be the artist's materials rather than later retouching. The painting therefore appears to be in good and stable condition and the only work that could be considered would be the removal of present varnish layers and retouchings followed by more careful inpainting where required.
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Like that of many of his Russian and Western modernist contemporaries, Mikhail Larionov's work rejected academic art and was informed by a variety of primitive art forms. This painting reveals how radically Larionov broke with the premises of academic art during the early years of his artistic career. By the time Larionov painted Nude, he had already received some conventional art training, studying at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture beginning in 1898. However, he was not satisfied with continuing in the artistic methods and techniques of the academic establishment. Rather, he took up the challenge posed by new styles originating in Paris around that time, especially Fauvism. Larionov rejected the realistic conventions of figure painting, with its academic system of meticulously modeling the human form through subtle gradations of light and dark. In his abrupt departure from the centuries-old tradition of painting idealized figure compositions, Larionov created images of the nude that were aggressively anti-aesthetic and boldly emphasized the intrinsic properties of color, texture, and line (fig.1).

 

By the time Larionov created this work, he was well acquainted with aspects of Parisian modernist styles and subjects. The figurative distortion, simplicity of contour, and flattening of form in Reclining Nude were to a certain extent shaped by the examples of contemporary French art (fig.2). As enumerated by Nikolai Punin, the leading Russian art critic of the 1920s, influences on Larionov at the early period of his artistic career included the French Impressionist paintings reproduced in the journal Mir iskusstva, the showing of Impressionist works featured in the World of Art group's International Exhibition of 1899, and the exhibition of French art organized by the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St. Petersburg in 1900. Among other important influences on the development of Larionov's early painting style was the private collection of Sergei Shchukin, who in 1897 was the first to bring work by Monet to Russia. Nude also clearly shows the influence of Cézanne in its faceted planes and shallow, compressed, and ambiguous space. Still another influence, the early period of Picasso, is also apparent.     

 

During his first years as an artist, from 1898 to about 1903, Larionov produced mainly sketches and studies but very few full-scale oil paintings—a fact that makes Nude an exceptional work in Larionov's early career. With its radical departure from academic art, Nude is a transitional painting representing the artist's first investigation into the new stylistic principles that he explored more fully in his figure paintings of a later period.