Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev

A gift from the artist to his doctor
Acquired from the above by Nikolai Lazarevich Bublichenko

S.G.Kaplanova, Novoe o Kuistodieve. M.:Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo 1979
Boris Kustodiev, St Petersburg: Zolotoi Vek, 1997, illustrated p.178
V.Kruglov, B.M.Kustodiev: An Album, St. Petersburg: Zolotoi vek, 2007, p.152

The board is slightly bowed. There are vertical surface cracks throughout and a scratch to the left side. There is a layer of discoloured varnish. It is slightly loose in the frame. UV light reveals no signs of retouching. Held in a simple gold painted frame. Unexamined out of frame,
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Boris Kustodiev was a poet of the Russian provinces. The favourite pupil of Ilya Repin, he combined his teacher's emphasis on genre painting with a visual aesthetic that tended towards the World of Art group. His flamboyantly colourful paintings of countryside revels and merchant wives have become iconic representations of provincial life in the late Imperial era. As a theatrical designer, this remained his forte, and his scenographic work is especially linked to the plays of Ostrovsky. Even more so than his paintings, Kustodiev's design sketches are permeated with the spirit of the lubok (a kind of folk woodcut print, often brightly coloured), often utilising a purposefully naïve drawing style and an exaggerated palette. While his pre-Revolutionary set designs (mostly for the Moscow Art Theatre) are very graphically pictorial— an illustrator's conception of the stage as image—in the 1920s, under the influence of avant-garde innovations, they take on a three-dimeniontal component. An example of this development was his work on Lydia Seifullina's Virineya, staged in 1926 at the Akademicheskii Dramaticheskii Teatr (formerly, and today again, the Alexandrinskii Teatr) in Leningrad. This décor sketch shows the interior of a hut that was literally constructed on the stage, rather than being simply painted as a décor and supplied with accessories. The play itself was a mediocre piece of political propaganda that represented the peasantry of a late Imperial Russian village as already leaning towards the Bolshevists. Its first production, in Moscow in 1925, was scoffed at by theatre professionals, but their opinion was trumped by the enthusiastic approval of the already powerful Stalin. The artist's designs helped give the Leningrad production credibility and depth in theatrical terms, rather than just political ones.

We are grateful to Anna Winestein, Scatcherd European Scholar at Oxford University, and Associate Director of the Ballets Russes 2009 Festival, for providing this note.