Yuri Pavlovich Annenkov

The present painting forms part of Annenkov’s oeuvre from 1926-27 relating to his stays in Britanny, which includes both landscapes and portraits. Annenkov knew Brittany from a young age, as on his first trip to France as a student in 1912-13 he had stayed in Roscoff.

Annenkov’s Breton works are among the earliest he painted in France after his emigration from Russia in 1924. Abandoning the cubist-inspired and suprematist syntax which underpinned the dynamic of his Russian works, Annenkov turns to a figurative language which is laconic, allusive and minimalist, with the graphic treatment of the subject and its relationship to painting taking centre stage. This is the case here: the church provides the pretext for the lines, the outlines are broken, the colour plane transgresses them and is diluted, the subject floats in space, the substance is concentrated in specific places as if germinating, allowing a subtle dialogue between the subject and the abstract background. It is up to the viewer to bring them together.

The present work is typical of this approach where the meaning of the work relies on symbolic references which are intentionally limited, just like the range of color, apart from a few highlights. As Jacques Audiberti said so eloquently of Annenkov’s first Parisian paintings, ‘in Annenkov’s work everything is organized in space, free from any conditions. A painting by Annenkov is remarkable because of its large zones of silence, steppes without villages where nothing happens, nothing but the creation of density, shells of colour around drawn shapes’.

A portrait from Annenkov’s Breton works, Portrait of a Breton Woman, is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Annenkov had donated it to the French State in 1927 during the Defense of the Franc campaign in support of the French Franc which had lost 80% of its value at the time.

We are grateful to the expert Vladimir Hofmann, the artist’s former student and author of his catalogue raisonné, for providing this catalogue note.