Nikolai Fechin

Pogzeba Art Studios, Denver, Colorado
George Montgomery, Palm Springs, California, 1977
Palm Springs Art Museum, 2005

Seattle, Frye Art Museum, George Montgomery, May-June 1978
Oklahoma City, National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, Fechin Retrospective, September-November 1991

 

Oil on original canvas. The surface is covered with a layer of varnish. The painting is in overall excellent condition. Some very minor areas of craquelure in the lower right and lower left corners have been professionally stabilized, and pigment fluoresces under UV. In otherwise original, fine condition, with some very minor craquelure. Held in a wood frame with plaster molding. Unexamined out of frame.
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The present work comes to auction directly from the Palm Springs Art Museum, located in the desert community of Palm Springs, California, and was previously in the collection of the Hollywood actor, collector and artist George Montgomery. A striking example of Nikolai Fechin’s talent as a colourist, this masterpiece demonstrates an exquisite command of palette and shading and an adept understanding of form. It is undoubtedly the most impressive nude by Fechin to come to auction.

The Palm Springs Art Museum houses an outstanding collection of groundbreaking modern and contemporary art, as well as traditional art of the Americas. Since its inception in 1938 as an institution specializing in Native American artifacts and natural sciences, the Museum has evolved into one of the most innovative and engaging contemporary and traditional American art institutions of the southern California community, working with leading contemporary artists, creating educational experiences, and presenting multi-disciplinary events. Works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Donald Judd, Alexander Calder, Thomas Moran, Charles Russell and Frederic Remington are displayed in the Museum’s modern and striking 125,000-square-foot complex designed by renowned California architect E. Stewart Williams.

A number of the Museum’s top Western American works come from the collection of George Montgomery, and were bequeathed to the Museum in 2005 by the George Montgomery Foundation of the Arts. Montgomery was an important fixture in the Palm Springs Community and especially at the Museum, where he regularly greeted visitors to the collection of Western American art. The sale of Fechin’s Nude will honor George Montgomery’s intentions while allowing the Palm Springs Art Museum to acquire works in George Montgomery’s name significant in keeping with its mission and the focus of its collection.

Mongomery was the youngest of fifteen children, born in Montana to Ukrainian parents. He began his celebrity career as a boxing champion at the University of Montana before moving to Los Angeles and working as a stuntman in 1935. Several years later he signed a contract with 20^th Century Fox and proceeded to star in various Western films. Montgomery’s big break came in 1942, when he was cast as the heartthrob lead alongside Ginger Rogers in the film Roxie Hart (fig.3). As his career developed, Montgomery and his wife, the singer Dinah Shore, spent time between their homes in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, and he became an important figure in the southern California community. Like Nikolai Fechin, Montgomery was a talented craftsman and carpenter. He built houses and beautifully carved furniture for friends and family, and created bronze sculptures featuring Western cowboy scenes. Montgomery’s personal art collection was carefully curated, and focused on paintings by American Western artists, including masterworks by Thomas Moran and Frederic Remington. In 2005, five years after Montgomery’s death, the majority of his outstanding collection was bequeathed to the Palm Springs Art Museum in California, the beloved institution where Montgomery had spent much of his time. Today, George Montgomery’s collection makes up a large and important part of the Museum’s Western Art collection, and his legacy and patronage remains a key part of the Palm Springs artistic community.

The present work was most likely executed in the mid to late 1930s after Fechin moved from New York to Taos, New Mexico. Fechin had emigrated from Russia in 1923, with the help of American patrons like William S. Stimmel and Jack Hunter, and arrived in New York City with his wife and daughter, escaping the turmoil and civil unrest brought on by the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I. The situation in Russia had turned dire by the time the American Relief Administration arrived in Fechin’s hometown of Kazan in 1921. The artist spoke with ARA representatives about opportunities in America, the first step to his eventual emigration from Russia, and he knew leaving his native country was the right decision. “There is peace and freedom in their country [America]. One can work, paint whatever one likes. There is no tragedy, no hopeless chaos to tear their nerves apart—my roots are here but I am losing all initiative for work, my will for life and hope are gone…” (Eya Fechin Branham, “Notes”, Albuquerque, 1969, p.3).

Fechin spent five years in New York and became even more well-known across the country, painting portraits of artist friends and exhibiting throughout Boston, Chicago, New York and California. The unrelenting stress of the city took a toll on the artist, however, and he developed tuberculosis in 1927. Doctors advised him to leave New York for a dryer climate, and his friend, the English artist John Young-Hunter, recommended Taos.  He arrived in 1927, and immediately fell in love with the landscape and the small village. Fechin’s daughter Eya recalled, “…the Taos mountains reminded him of the beauty he had seen in Siberia. He painted with fervor…He was in love with the land” (Mary Balcomb, Nicolai Fechin, 1975, p. xii).

Female nudes make up a small but significant portion of Fechin’s oeuvre, and this group of works provides a microcosm of the varying stylistic techniques he used throughout his career. Fechin’s earliest nudes, painted in the 1910s, evoke the Russian realist tendencies promoted by his teacher Ilya Repin and the St. Petersburg Academy: tight lines and exacting brushstrokes create a body that is light and yet carefully pre-meditated (figs.1 and 2). Though the classical elements of these early works can easily be seen, Fechin’s experimentation with a looser brushstroke and bolder lines and colours is imminent; the influence of the Russian artist Philip Maliavin’s common use of strategically placed brilliantly coloured fabrics is apparent in the background of many of Fechin’s nude oils as early as 1910.  By 1914, Fechin’s brushstrokes became even looser and his lines bolder, influenced heavily by the French Impressionists, though he never progressed into a fully abstracted figure, for he was “…too enchanted with the natural beauty of the human figure to abstract it so fully” (Balcomb, p.70). By the early 1920s, his models were larger than life, frequently pushing the boundaries of the canvas itself, emerging from a vibrant, spontaneous background.

In the present lot, Fechin’s brushstroke is bold and loose, creating a form that is both dynamic and emotive. A patchwork fabric is draped both behind the model and at her feet, creating a background that is void of any specific qualities, but accented with bright colors to draw attention to the model herself. Light pigments are layered over darker ones to create a skin tone that is illuminated and alive.

We would like to thank Galina Tuluzakova, author of the 2007 monograph on the artist, for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.