Boris Izrailevich Anisfeld

Estate of the artist
Adler Gallery, New York

New York, The Brooklyn Museum, Boris Anisfeld Exhibition, 1918-1920, no.70
New York, The Adler Gallery, Paintings of Boris Anisfeld and a Selection of His Designs for Ballet and Opera, 1979-1980, no.66

C.Brinton, The Boris Anisfeld Exhibition, New York, 1918, no.70 illustrated in b/w
E.Lingenauber and O.Sugrobova-Roth, Boris Anisfeld Catalogue Raisonné, Dusseldorf: Edition Libertars, 2011, p.132, no.P220 illustrated

Executed in Russia shortly before his departure to the United States in 1917, Early Spring-Petrograd is one of the finest examples of Anisfeld's pre-emigration work. It belongs to the series of views of Petrograd painted from the winter of 1916 to the summer of 1917, alongside Winter in Petrograd, Spring- Petrograd and Melting Snow-Petrograd. It was first shown in the retrospective of Anisfeld’s work at the Brooklyn Museum in 1918. The exhibition received tremendous reviews and Anisfeld ‘may well have been one of the world's most written-about living artists' the year his exhibition toured the United States (R.Mesley, introduction to Fantast-Mystic, 1989). The reaction of critics was famously mixed and one reviewer commented, 'Mr Boris Anisfeld is a Russian and the Russians are extremists. His work is strange, exotic, barbaric, weird, incoherent, oriental, fantastic'. However, the lyrical nature of his landscape was not lost on American critics, who praised the artist for feeling ‘the nuances of colour as Poe felt the music of poets’ (L.Weinberg, 'The Art of Boris Anisfeld', The International Studio, November 1918). Early Spring-Petrograd remained in the artist’s studio until his death in 1973 and was exhibited in Anisfeld’s solo exhibition at the Adler Gallery in New York in 1979.