Vasily Dmitrievich Ermilov

Sotheby’s London, Twentieth Century Russian and East European Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 1900 - 1930, 4 July 1974, lot 87
Sotheby’s London, Russian Twentieth Century and Avant-Garde Art, 2 April 1987, lot 664
Collection of A. Alfred Taubman
Sotheby's New York, Modern & Contemporary Art. The Collection of A. Alfred Taubman, 5 November 2015, lot 156

Norwich, The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Radical Russia, 14 October 2017 - 11 February 2018

The sheet is undulating and there is creasing throughout. There is a repaired tear running from the upper edge above the text to the lower right edge. An incision in the upper right running parallel to the top edge has been repaired. The areas around the aforementioned tear and incision have been retouched. There are small tears to the centre of the right edge and some minor tears and creases to the edges elsewhere. Handling marks are visible along the edges. There are scattered pinholes inherent to the artist's technique as well as a few pinholes elsewhere. There is very fine craquelure with minor associated paint loss to the brown pigment above the female statue. The sheet has recently been cleaned. It is hinged in multiple places along the edges. Held in a black wooden frame behind glass. Unexamined out of frame.
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Once known as the father of the Ukrainian avant-garde and the Ukrainian Picasso, Vasily Ermilov was almost written out of the history books. In 1949 he was accused of formalism and hounded out of both the Union of Artists and his teaching post at the Kharkov Institute of Art that he himself had helped to found in 1922. It was not until Khrushchev's Thaw that Ermilov was let back in from the cold. The majority of his work had been lost without being reproduced and in 1971 a fire swept through his flat and studio destroying much of the little that remained.

In 1934, before his fall from grace with the Soviet authorities, Ermilov was commissioned to redesign the interiors of the former House of the Assembly of Nobility in Kharkov which, with the transfer of the capital to Kiev, was to be converted into the Soviet Union’s first Palace for Pioneers and Octobrists. The Pioneer Palaces were community centres for children, with sports halls, classrooms, cafeterias and, as in the present design, recreation rooms. The scale of the project was vast: 233 rooms and a library with over 50,000 books.Tragically, the building was razed to the ground in 1943 and all that remains are Ermilov’s drawings. Among Ermilov's most imaginative and accomplished projects, the designs for the Kharkov Palace of Pioneers adopt a fresh, playful approach, combining elements of Neo-Classicism, which reference the building's Empire style architecture, with folk motifs borrowed from Ukrainian embroidery. The vibrant colour scheme was no doubt chosen to appeal to children.