Konstantin Fedorovich Yuon

Private Collection, New York from 1924

New York, Grand Central Palace, Russian Art Exhibition, 1924, no. 256

Yu. Osmolovsky, Konstantin Fedorovich Yuon, Moscow: Sovetsky khudozhnik, 1982, listed p.229
N.Tretyakov, Yuon, Moscow, 1957, listed p.110

Original canvas. There is a line of rather crude restoration visible to the naked eye which runs alongside the left hand edge of the work towards the bottom left hand corner. UV light confirms this restoration and reveals further spots of retouching in places. Held in a stained wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Executed in 1922.

The Troitse-Sergeeva Lavra or Trinity Monastery of St Sergius at Sergeev Posad has been a centre of pilgrimage since its foundation in the mid 14th century and is arguably the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church. For Konstantin Yuon, it was the inspiration for a series of paintings of medieval sites which began with the 1903 work Towards the Troitse, held in the State Tretyakov Gallery and he returned there all through his life. As he writes in Ob Iskusstve, "Everything I could dream of, all my imagination could seize on was to be found there. The combinations of colour, such a saturated range - it expresses native Russian aesthetic awareness with extraordinary brilliance... Visits to other cities didn't interrupt my frequent returns to this native jewel, an inexhaustibly rich source of decorative material for paintings on historical and everyday subjects"
(Konstantin Yuon ob iskusstve, Moskva: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1959, vol.2, p.218)

During the early 1920s, Sergeev Posad became a refuge for several members of the intelligentsia even though the monastery had been closed by the Soviet government. Of the seventy or so pictures Yuon painted at the monastery a significant number date from this period, including a series of lithographs and one of his most famous oil paintings, Dome and Swallows (1921) which shares the same unusual aerial viewpoint as the offered work (fig.1).

 

Yuon's interest in architectural motifs is well documented. In a list of the eight "favourite and most important elements" in his work, he famously put architecture in first place, "for its precision, contrasts, accuracy and constructivity". His was a very distinctive approach to architecture, quite unlike that of Appolinary Vasnetsov, who meticulously documented the buildings of 17th century Moscow; nor did it imitate the pseudo-philosophical attitude of Roerich, who invested ancient sites with his own abstract ideas, nor did it contain the studied details of Konstantin Makovsky's genre scenes.

 

Instead, Yuon's ancient monuments are independent, unstylised, often painted with the bright palette of the Impressionists which made such an impact on Yuon, and most importantly, they are always placed in a contemporary context. In his own words, "It is as though I live and paint in two epochs, capturing both the past and the present".  Yuon's sense of history is palpable, but he merges it into a wider milieu of bustling crowds and countryside, hence his attraction to populated areas such as squares, docks and monasteries, and his frequent adoption of very high or low viewpoints which allowed him to create a generalised vision of Russia and its people, unchanging and ageless.