Komar and Melamid

Acquired directly from one of the artists in 2006
Contra Gallery, New York

New York, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 13 September - 11 October 1980

C.Ratcliff, Komar and Melamid, New York: Abbeville Press, 1988, p.120, illustrated

Original canvas. There is a layer of light surface dust and some minor surface scuffs to the lower portion of the work. There is light wear and associated paint-loss to the corners. Otherwise in good overall condition. UV light reveals a small area of retouching in the lower half below the left hand claw, some retouching to the upper left edge and a few small flecks of retouching in places elsewhere. Unframed.
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Komar and Melamid's Ancestral Portraits was one of the earliest series the pair completed in their New York studio, Apartment 30, soon after arriving in the United States in September 1978. A sequence of dinosaurs, Allosaurus, Protoceratops and Plateosaurus, parody the dynamic poses of Communist leaders and apparatchiks against backdrops of heavy drapery, providing a dry commentary on the obsolete, equally extinct myths of Stalinism. As Carter Ratcliff writes, few artists have rewritten the past in a mood of such desperate hilarity (C.Ratcliff, Komar and Melamid, 1988, p.120).

The dark palette, old-fashioned glazes and the classical plinth in the present work are a direct reference to the fossilised academic style of Socialist Realism from the pre-Khrushchev era. 'Darkness. That's what we got from the art available during the Stalin time. The paintings we saw were dark to begin with – traditional, pre-Impressionist canvases – and even darker because they were in such bad condition. Lighting in Moscow museums was very dim also' (Alexander Melamid, idem, p.27).

A brilliant satire on the glorification of the leader, the Ancestral Portrait series is a unique critique of the Soviet Union before its collapse, and marked the beginning of their important Socialist Realist canvases painted between 1980-1984.