Michel Kikoïne

Original canvas. There is a layer of surface dirt and discoloured varnish and there is some light abrasion along the edges, possibly corresponding with rubbing against a previous frame. UV light reveals a few spots of retouching in places. Held in a painted moulded plaster frame with some losses. Unexamined out of frame.
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Michel Kikoine and Chaim Soutine met in their early teenage years at a drawing school in Minsk and became lifelong friends. When Kikoine was sixteen, he and Soutine continued their studies in Vilnius whilst working together as retouchers in a photographic studio. Their close friend and fellow Jewish artist, Pinchus Kremegne, soon became the victim of pogroms and fled to Paris in 1912; Kikoine followed a few months later and Soutine soon joined. Kikoine enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and met the luminaries of the avant-garde of Montparnasse, including his compatriots, Marc Chagall and Simon Segal. He had his first exhibition in Paris in 1919 after which he exhibited regularly at the Salon d'Automne.

Still Life with Flowers is believed to have been executed in the late 1910s or early 1920s and is a brilliant and revealing example of the mutual influences of Kikoine and Soutine on each other's work. Soutine's Bunch of Red Gladioli (1919) and Still Life with flowers (1920) also depict a vibrant subject against a pitch background, though in the offered work by Kikoine, it is the pull and surge of the warped stems and blossom which wrenches control of the composition that is so redolent of Soutine's work of this period – the urge which drags the forms up to the picture plane, a plasticity which impacts every element of the flowers and leaves as they flow one into another. Both artists demanded a maximum of intensity from every element of his medium – the brushstroke, the pigment, the colour. In Soutine's words "L'expression est dans la touche du pinceau" (cited in Pierre Courthioni, Soutine, Peintre du déchirant, Lausanne, 1972, p.148).