Petr Petrovich Konchalovsky, 1876-1956

The Collection of the Artist
Thence by descent

V.Nikolsky, Petr Petrovich Konchalovsky, Moscow, 1936, p.141, titled Trees in Kuntsevo
K.Frolova (Ed.), Konchalovsky: The Artistic Legacy, Moscow, 1964, p.103

The canvas has been strip-lined. The picture is clean and ready to hang. Examination under UV light reveals scattered retouching in places. The white fibres are remnants of the facing and the slight milky white sheen under UV light is probably residue of facing adhesive. Some of the original differentiation of the paint surface has been preserved. Held in a stained wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Petr Konchalovsky was an incredibly prolific painter. He was raised in a family of artists and writers in Slaviansk, Ukraine, and together they moved to Moscow when he was an adolescent. His Moscow home was frequented by members of the local art scene, including Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, and Vasily Surikov, who would later become his father-in-law. Konchalovsky went on to study painting in Paris and St. Petersburg, where he responded uniquely to various methods of Western European modernism, including Post-impressionism and Fauvism. He was soon recognized as a founding member of the pivotal Knave of Diamonds group, though he later backed away from the limelight of the Russian avant-garde and criticised the crudity of Fauvism.

 

After the 1917 Revolution, Konchalovsky became a professor at SvoMas (Free Arts Studios), and his naturalistic landscapes of the late 1910s and early 1920s continued to reference the Post-impressionist style of Paul Cézanne. As visible in his depiction of Trees in Kuntsevo, he simplified his forms, creating a relative colour scheme that captured the essence of the natural world at a specific moment in time. In the artist's own words: I really wanted to create a 'live' landscape, in which the trees do not simply stick out, as often seen in contemporary art, but grow out of soil so that the viewer can sense their roots...