Vera Rockline

Paris, Galerie Jean Battais, May-June 1975, no.5

Original canvas. The paint surface is slightly dirty and there is a layer of discoloured varnish. There are flecks of paint loss in places and a few irregularities to the canvas surface. UV light reveals no signs of retouching. Held in a partially gold painted frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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'I like Vera Rockline's art. I pity people who do not like it. What can one say to those who have not yet understood it?' wrote the leading Paris couturier, Paul Poiret, in the preface to her 1925 solo exhibition at the Galerie Vildrac in Paris.  While studying in Paris, she exhibited her work at the Salon d'Automne and earned the praise of the art historian and critic, Waldemar Georges, who considered her paintings truly 'authentic'. As a young woman Rockline had studied under Ilya Mashkov and Alexandra Exter, but left Moscow in 1919 for Georgia, before finally settling in Paris in 1921.

Rockline's work featured in a major group exhibition in 2002, Elles de Montparnasse, at the Musée de Montparnasse in Paris, alongside paintings by Tamara de Lempicka, Marie Laurencin, Chana Orloff, Sonia Delaunay and Natalia Gontcharova. The exhibition celebrated the role of Montparnasse's female artists as practising painters in their own right, whose role was not confined to that of models and muses for their more celebrated male counterparts. Rockline's delicate and nuanced palette, reminiscent of Cézanne, and her unique approach to Cubism are beautifully demonstrated in this unsettled landscape.