VLADIMIR WEISBERG | Portrait of Vishnyakova

St Petersburg, The State Russian Museum; Moscow, The State Tretyakov Gallery; Frankfurt am Main, Städel et al., Nonkonformisty: vtoroy russkiy avangard 1955-1988, 1996-1997, illustrated on p.249 of the catalogue
Verona, Palazzo Forti, L'arte vietata in URSS 1955-1988, 7 March - 4 June 2000
Ashdod, Art Museum Ashdod, Persecuted Art & Artists under Totalitarian Regimes in Europe During the 20th Century, 22 June - 21 September 2003, illustrated on p.158 and listed on p.285 of the catalogue
Bern, Kunstmuseum Bern, Avantgarde im Untergrund. Russische Nonkonformisten aus der Sammlung Bar-Gera, 3 February - 24 April 2005, illustrated on p.78 and listed on p.141 of the catalogue

Vladimir Grigorievich Weisberg. Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Moscow: Gendalf, 1994, p.116, no.284 listed

Original canvas. There is a light layer of surface dust and dirt. Horizontal cracks are visible throughout the paint layer but are deepest in the body of the sitter. There are a few light scratches and surface abrasions, such as in the lower right of the composition. The underdrawing is visible through the paint layer in the lower right quadrant. Inspection under UV light reveals no obvivous signs of retouching. Held in a simple wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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The model for Weisberg’s Portrait of Vishnyakova was most likely the wife of Vladimir Vishnyakov, a Mayakovka poet and journalist, who posed for the artist two years earlier in 1961 in Double Portrait of R.Arutyunyan and V.Vishnyakov.

The painting belongs to the series from the 1960s in which Weisberg experimented with sizes and formats, often choosing large, narrow, elongated canvases (the portraits of Aida, 1962, and Ira Illarionova, 1964) but also canvases of more balanced proportions (the portraits of Olya Severtseva, 1960, and the present lot). Notably, he used similar sizes and formats for some of his still lifes from this period. Extremely belittled heads, stretched or enlarged bodies, exaggeratedly generalised silhouettes, asymmetry and slight deformation, lack of detail in both the representation of figures and the space around them, all these features characterise his portraits of this series. We associate these characteristics with Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti, whose work Weisberg had seen at the Youth and Student Festival exhibition in 1957 and at the French National Exhibition in Moscow in 1961. The model is obviously of little concern to artist. He treats a portrait as a still life of fabric whose main purpose is to turn the chaos and randomness of folds into a structure with a clear logic. Unlike his portraits of the 1950s, the unity of figures and space during this period is achieved through the dematerialisation of volume. In Portrait of Vishnyakova Weisberg mostly depicts air, uniting the figure and the background as in plein air painting, where everything is transfused with the effects of light and air. His main purpose became the exploration of his limited palette’s possibilities and delicate colour correlations, as a means of creating an ultra-sensuous, non-illusionistic space that aspires to infinity.

We are grateful to Dr Elena Khlopina for providing this catalogue note.