Alexander Yakovlevich Golovin

Artists of the USSR over the last 15 years, 1932, Cat. No. 340

E.Gollerbach, A.Ya.Golovin: Zhizn' I tvorchestvo, Leningrad: Akademiya khudozhestv, 1928, illustrated p.69

Golovin. Vstrechi I vpechatleniya, Leningrad and Moscow : Iskusstvo, 1940

Original canvas. The paint surface is slightly dirty. Examination under uv reveals retouching around the sitter's head and spots of retouching throughout. Held in a moulded plaster frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The offered lot belongs to a series of portraits of the artist's close circle of contemporaries painted after the turbulent years of Revolution, one of which (Portrait of E.A.Kuper also from 1919) hangs in the State Russian Museum. Marking the zenith of Golovin's development as a portrait painter, these intimate works, unified by their restrained composition and colour scheme are essentially character studies. Setting his subjects against a blank, barely finished background, Golovin concentrates his viewer's gaze entirely on the face of the sitter. These are portraits of men caught in the uncertainty of a changing world.

Fridrikh Krimmer (1888-1963) was one of the leading lights of the Russian intelligentsia. A financier and keen art collector, he owned works by Boris Kustodiev, Sergei Sudeikin and Marc Chagall and was a close friend of Golovin.