Marie Vassilieff

Original canvas. There is light layer of surface dirt. The canvas is slightly unevenly stretched in the top right and left hand corners. There is some light abrasion to the paint surface along the tacking edge. UV light reveals no apparent retouching. Held in a floating brown wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Marie Vassilieff arrived in Paris in 1907, and soon became a key figure in the group of avant-garde artists who pioneered the Cubist movement. Influenced by the work of her close friends Braque and Picasso, she sought in her own paintings to achieve a new reality through the deconstruction of form.  

The offered lot is an important and early work which illustrates the transition in the Vassiliev's oeuvre from Cézannism towards a more analytical cubism. A village dominated by a church spire emerges from a cluster of rectangular and circular forms at the centre of the canvas. Vassilieff combines the palette of browns, black and greys so favoured by the French cubists with more decorative colours which hint at her Russian roots, such as the pink and orange found in the roofs and path and the blue and green hues of the landscape. The artist also explores the role of light, which appears to have no natural source but radiates from the entire composition. We are presented with multiple view-points, yet the artist does not abandon figurative painting entirely, in a way that recalls Braque's  La Roche-Guyon, a work which asserts the fundamental autonomy of painting in relation to the perceived world (fig.1).