Boris Anisfeld

Private Collection, United States, circa 1950

Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, The Boris Anisfeld Exhibition, 1918, no. 60, travelling exhibition
Petrograd, Mir Iskusstva, 1917, no. 15a in the 2nd edition of the catalogue

C.Brinton, Exhibition Catalogue The Boris Anisfeld Exhibition, Brooklyn, 1918, no. 60, illustrated plate 3
E.Lingenauber and O.Sugrobova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld 1897-1973, catalogue raisonné, Düsseldorf, 2011, no. P375, illustrated

Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and the turnover and tacking edges have been strengthened with a thin strip-lining on what would certainly appear to be the original keyed wooden stretcher. This is ensuring an even and secure structural support. Paint surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer. The paint surface fluoresces unevenly under ultra-violet light due to the nature of the artist's materials but there would appear to be just small scattered retouchings. There are fine lines and spots of retouching around the fingers of the sitter's left hand and on his right arm. There are fine lines of inpainting in the dark background beneath his forearm and other scattered retouchings. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition and no further work is required.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

It was little wonder that so many artists were drawn to paint the magnificent Russian bass singer, wrote Maxim Gorky: 'Chaliapin's contemporaries all stressed the brilliance, the intense life he gave to his roles, and each pose or gesture cried out to be put on canvas' (M.Gorky, Chaliapin, 1968,  p.9). 'He was painted in costume and every conceivable attire; he was to remain their most fascinating subject, and not only because of his celebrity.' Boris Grigoriev's 1918 portrait is perhaps the best known (fig.1); painted two years after the present work, it is remarkable similar in terms of the flat and sculpted planes, and also tonally, with the combination of warm yellows and burnt sienna.

Nikolai Kharitonov's portrait of Chaliapin (fig.2), painted in the same year as the offered lot, depicts the singer from the same angle and lit from the right, with a similar enigmatic and alert expression. In Konstantin Korovin's 1911 Crimean portrait is a characteristic light-filled Impressionist depiction of a man at ease (fig 3); Valentin Serov painted him as a young man full of vigour in an almost nonchalant pose, the features radiating energy and determination; Golovin's 1912 full-length depiction sees him in the leading role of Boris Godunov, a production on which Anisfeld also worked in Paris. Ilya Repin's portrait is lost, but photographs of the work in progress show the singer relaxed in the artist's Kuokkala studio, where he loved to listen to Repin's stories. Conversely, Kustodiev's legendary 1921 winter portrait is a riot of colour and charade.  Chaliapin was also instrumental in developing the cult of his own image and produced a number of self portraits and sculpture busts (fig.4)

Anisfeld's only portrait of the singer has been known until now only from the black and white reproduction in Brinton's 1918 exhibition catalogue.  In reality it concurs exactly with Brinton's description of his art: 'Despite its seeming complexity, there is something direct,  instinctive, and elemental in the work of Boris Anisfeld.... Typically Russian in their mysticism and power of psychic evocation, there is a festal, carnivalesque quality'. Like Anisfeld's own self-portrait from the 1910s (fig.5), in the present work the subject stands to one side, the gaze direct, but the palette conjuring an air of mystery.

Anisfeld was an intimate part of the epoch of Russian ballet and Chaliapin's world. It was Diaghilev who had actively promoted Anisfeld as a young student by including several of his works in an exhibition he organised in St Petersburg in 1905. Diaghilev later included 20 of Anisfeld's works in his Paris exhibition, which generated sufficient approval for the young artist to be elected a sociétaire of the Salon, no mean feat for a foreign art student. From 1913 Anisfeld worked as a set and costume designer for leading Russian productions in Europe and America. Quite apart from his close personal association with the Ballets russes, Anisfeld repeatedly emphasised the musical dimension of his painting, saying: 'I am a musician as well as an artist.'  A fundamental principle of Mir iskusstva was the recognition that art works on the viewer through painterly means analogous to the effects of music. The present portrait of Chaliapin is a superb example of the new chromatic ideas and imaginative resources which he brought to the theatre and his paintings in equal measure.  Anisfeld's association between art and music was taken up by a distinguished American museum director, who called the paintings exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum 'a Russian gift to the art of painting as vital as the Russian gift of the Russian composers to music' (quoted in The Decorative Idealism of Boris Anisfeldt, Vincent Astor Gallery).

At the exhibition it was reported that 'the artist spends much time at the Museum with his pictures, and keeps a palette nearby. He loves to add a bit of color here and there or change an effect by a line or stroke of the brush' . The present work is thought to have been sold after the Buffalo leg of the travelling exhibition; a handwritten price list notes that it was among the most expensive at $3,500. 

Both men were giants in their field. Rachmaninov spoke of Chaliapin's 'limitless phenomenal talent, in whatever he cared to approach'. Stanislavsky always considered him the master of the spoken word and frequently let it be known that he took the singer as a model for his "method". Equally, in the 1920s Anisfeld was one of America's most famous artists and theatre designers. It is this meeting of two great artists on canvas that make the present pre-revolutionary work such an exciting rediscovery. Sketches and photographs of Chaliapin abound, but rarely do contemporary portraits of such quality appear outside museum collections.

We would like to thank Charles Chatfield-Taylor, the artist's grandson, Eckart Lingenauber and Olga Sugrobova-Roth for providing additional catalogue information.