Yuri Ivanovich Pimenov

Private Collection, Europe

Gouache and ink on paper. The surface is dirty. The sheet is mounted to a mat along its top edge. There are creased lines that suggest old repairs along all four edges. The sheet is slightly undulated. Small creases have occurred in places, eg along the lower edge, and there are a few spots of minor foxing. Minor craquelure is visible to areas of the gouache. The sheet is torn and lifting slightly at the upper right corner, where it was previously repaired. Held in a black-painted wooden frame and under glass. Unexamined out of frame.
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Because the government developed increasingly restrictive guidelines for Soviet artists, the late 1920s and early 1930s marked an intensely difficult period in Pimenov's career, yet his works remained idealistic and suffused with dynamic motion. Painted in 1929, Café represents one of the earliest examples of his many plein air experiments. The composition retains a whimsical air of artistic freedom, particularly in its reliance on refined gestural lines; they confirm Pimenov's absolute mastery as a draughtsman and link him to the greatest figurative painters of the early twentieth century. The image represents an artist, probably Pimenov himself, seated at an outdoor café while sketching his surroundings. The result is a phantasmagoria of silhouettes and gestures, an image rooted in synecdoche where individual parts come to represent their suggested whole. As N. Barabanova notes in her introduction to the 1972 monograph on the artist, "He experienced a genuine delight...and felt a keen sense of joy in the sunlit world around him, which he sought to reflect on canvas or on paper" (p. 10).