Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov

Christie's New York, Impressionist and Modern Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 8 October 1992, lot 22

The canvas has been laid down on board. The paint surface is slightly dirty and there is a layer of discoloured varnish. Examination under UV light reveals some flecks of white fluorescing retouching in places, predominantly to 2 spots in the centre and the edges of the canvas. Held in a carved gold painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Although dated 1900 by the artist himself on the reverse, it was sometimes Larionov's practice to give a work created in his later career an earlier date, or indeed not to have dated a work executed at some distant point in his long and illustrious life and, examining it in his studio years later, to give it a seemingly arbitrary date out of keeping with the style of the piece itself. This seems to have been the case with Natur vivant, which is perhaps more accurately dateable to Larionov's post-Impressionist style in the middle or late years of the first decade of the twentieth century.

1900 was the year that Larionov met Natalya Goncharova, his fellow avant-garde painter who would become his lifelong partner, and it was thus a particularly important year for him in his emotional life. This is perhaps why he dated the work to that year and it is tempting to read the Eastern-looking side-by-side figures in the picture-within-a-picture as an echo of Larionov's and Goncharova's own future path together. The spray of spring blossom in the tall blue vase that dominates the still-life that Larionov has constructed in front of the appropriated image betrays the influence of the Japonisme that was such a key element in the works of post-Impressionist artists such as Van Gogh.