Yuri Pavlovich Annenkov

In July 1924 Annenkov left Petrograd to take part in the Venice Biennale where he showed his best works, including the famous portrait of Alexander Tikhonov and a superb portrait of Trotsky more than 4 metres high (now lost).

In Russia Annenkov was the master of Synthesism, a fusion of Futurism and Neo-realism. Once in France, in the first years after he emigrated, he soon realised that the French taste was radically different and so adapted to find a new path. His pictorial world was therefore a return to ‘order’. Abandoning the teachings and provocations of the Futurists, Annenkov found his path in a new form of Synthesism that linked the figurative with the abstract. He defined his paintings as ‘semi-abstract’.

At the same time he adopted new subjects. In Russia he had been best known for his portraits, in France, he made a name for himself with the still lifes and landscapes which comprised the majority of his oeuvre in the years 1925-1930.

In his compositions the background of the painting is abstract and against this different motifs are superimposed often in simple lines in the style of Raoul Dufy. However, his paintings are distinctive for their surface texture. Little by little, towards the 1930s the paint surface acquires a thickness alternating with flat areas and his brushwork becomes quick and nervy, as if agitated. It is paint and its material variety that seems to be the real subject of these paintings which both convey an atmosphere while at the same time reflecting the psychological state of their creator.

In Paris Annenkov participated in numerous group exhibitions and the Galerie Bing on rue La Boétie, organised a large solo show in 1930 where he showed 30 paintings. The same year he was the subject of a book by Pierre Courthion, the only one to be published during his lifetime. Although the two works from the same collection offered here (lots 75 and 76) do not appear in the catalogue for the Bing exhibition nor in Courthion’s book they are entirely characteristic of Annenkov’s work at the time.

This still life with its three bowls of fruit, of oranges and bananas, placed on a sideboard whose outline we can make out, provides Annenkov with a clever contrast of colours: the white of the bowls, the bright colours of the fruits contrasting with the dark, sober, lugubrious chestnut brown of the sideboard. The composition hinges on the off-balanced angle of the sideboard. The extremely free and nervous brushwork reinforces the contrasts in the palette.

We are grateful to the expert Vladimir Hofmann, the artist's former student and author of his catalogue raisonné, for providing additional cataloguing information.