Russian Pictures
Russian Pictures
Street Scene in Winter
Auction Closed
December 1, 03:47 PM GMT
Estimate
400,000 - 600,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov
1881 - 1964
Street Scene in Winter
signed in Cyrillic l.r.
oil on canvas
Canvas: 51 by 89cm, 20 by 35in.
Framed: 75.5 by 114cm, 29¾ by 44¾in.
Larionov spent the summers of the early 1900s in Crimea or at his grandparents’ home in Tiraspol and the winters in Moscow where he painted scenes of life, often young women or prostitutes, directly observed in the streets. In these early street scenes, including the present one, the influence of Toulouse Lautrec and Degas is evident in the figures of the young women with their wide-brimmed hats. Larionov first visited Paris in 1906 with Bakst and Goncharova where he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne exhibition organised by Diaghilev but the work of the French ‘painters of modern life’ would have been familiar to him from an exhibition of French painting held by the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St Petersburg in 1900 as well as from private collections in Moscow.
Although the figures of the women in the window of the hairdressers in Street Scene in Winter are clearly influenced by French painting, the scene is instantly Russified with the addition of snow, the sleigh and the traditional Russian archetype of the coachman. Their treatment however is entirely typical of Neo-primitivism, the new distinctly Russian movement pioneered by Larionov and Goncharova that had its roots in Russian folk culture and rejected the European fine-art tradition taught in the art schools. The horizontal emphasis of the composition and the floating, frieze-like figures which have much in common with Goncharova’s Nuit d’hiver (lot 97) are influenced by the flattened forms of icon-painting and folk lubki. The incorporation of text into the pictorial space in the form of the sign for the hairdressers, is significant and most likely one of the earliest examples of this technique in his paintings. It prefigures the Provincial Dandy and Provincial Coquette and Walk in a Provincial Town as well as the celebrated Barber series from the end of that decade. Larionov was the first Russian artist of his generation to recognise the artistic virtues of traditional ‘naïve’ shop signs painted by unnamed sign painters that were so familiar to him from the provincial streets of the Tiraspol of his childhood. The significance of the sign is in the immortalising of a disappearing art form which, because of its technique being far less determined by training, professional norms and ideology successfully encapsulated the aims of Neo-primitivism.