Natan Isaevich Altman

The family of the artist, Moscow, 1930s
Tamara Mikhailovna, the sitter's mother 
Olga Berholtz, the sitter's widow 
Leonid Bezrukhov, the sitter's archivist, Moscow
Elysium Gallery, Moscow

London, Jean-Luc Baroni Gallery, Russian Drawings and Watercolours, 1 - 22 June 2011, no.55
Sotheby's Moscow, Russian Line, 5-30 March 2012

I.Samarine and J.Baroni, Russian Drawings and Watercolours, 2011, no.55, p.125, illustrated
Russian Works on Paper from the Collection of James Butterwick, Moscow: KitArt, 2011, p.13 
Russian Line, Moscow: KitArt, 2012, p.10

The sheet appears sound. It has slightly discoloured and there is a very minor area of wear to the sitter's mouth. Otherwise in overall good condition, clean and ready to hang. Held in a gold and black painted wooden frame behind glass. Unexamined out of frame.
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Ehrenburg's lines read:

Who is keeping an account of the spilled blood?
Faceless world, not I, not I;
Your kiss, Grand Inquisitor,
Is stamped on the Russian wastelands...

This rare portrait by the Jewish avant-garde artist Natan Altman depicts the proletarian communist poet Boris Kornilov (1907-1938), a victim of Stalin's purges of the late 1930s. It has been suggested that the smaller face behind Kornilov is the man who denounced him, and that the present work was painted from a photograph soon after the poet's death, as 'a small act of commemoration and resistance' (I.Samarine, Russian Drawings and Watercolours, 2011, p.124).

Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) first met Altman in 1922. It was Ehrenburg who coined the term 'thaw' to describe the early Khrushev period after Stalin's death, and it is likely that the lines on the reverse of the drawing, which are in Ehrenburg's own hand, were written during this period possibly for Olga Bergholtz, Kornilov's widow, whose portrait Altman produced in 1968.