Vasily Ivanovich Shukhaev

Collection Sviatoslav Richter, Moscow
Thence by descent to the previous owner 

Vasily Ivanovich Shukhaev. Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Marking 90 years Since his Birth, Moscow, 1977

I.Myamlin, Vasily Ivanovich Shukhaev, Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1972, p.148
S.Erpashova,Vasily Ivanovich Shukhaev. Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Marking 90 years Since his Birth, exhibition catalogue, Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1977, (illustrated)

Original canvas. There are fine lines of craquelure throughout. UV light reveals an opaque layer of varnish and small spots of retouching along the edges and elsewhere. Unframed.
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This beautifully rendered still life was painted just two years after Vasily Shukhaev's travels in Italy and Spain with close friend and fellow art student, Alexander Yakovlev. An extremely rare example of the artist's early oeuvre, it is one of only a few comparable works known to exist in private and public Russian collections.

Strikingly Realistic, the composition perfectly epitomises the artistic method espoused by Dmitry Kardovsky, Shukhaev's teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, who favoured faithful representation over formal experimentation.

Having experienced first hand some of the greatest Old Master paintings collections in Western Europe, Shukhaev  returned to teach at the Academy full of enthusiasm for Kardovsky's approach. As the artist wrote to his former teacher in 1917: "I beg you to believe me when I say that your truth has become mine. I follow your method and work by your principles"

That very year Shukhaev, together with Yakovlev, Kardovsky and Nikolai Radlov formed The St. Luke Guild of Painters in honour of the guilds which had existed in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Contrary to the trend towards abstraction which was developing in Moscow avant-garde circles, the group's aims were twofold: firstly the resurrection of absolute artistic values in the tradition of the Old Masters and secondly the instruction and preparation of other artists towards the mastery of artistic literacy.

At the base of the group's vision was the concept of a new artistic language, which stressed the fundamental role of excellent draughtsmanship in recreating a three-dimensional form within space. This required a true understanding of the structure of an object or of the human form, and the ability to 'carve it out' of two dimension.

The assortment of everyday objects which make up this still life owes much to the tradition of modest Spanish bodegón, exemplified by Francisco Zurbaran (1598-1664) and Luis Meléndez (1716-1780), whose works Shukhaev would have seen in the Prado Museum in Madrid during his travels in 1915 (fig.1). Shukhaev picks out the objects with great precision against the dark background, as if under a spotlight, and transforms this lowly collection of what is essentially rubbish into an altogether more grandiose composition. Like Meléndez, Shukhaev sought to represent an object in the unquestionable manner in which it exists.

However, Shukhaev adds a distinctly contemporary nuance to the work in his choice of the newspaper, Echo, a Bolshevist publication promoting socialist ideals. The composition thus becomes not just a utopian reinterpretation of the Old Masters, but rather an attempt to view the present with a historical perspective.

The virtuoso classical pianist, Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) was a passionate collector of twentieth century art, and in particular modern Russian masters as Petr Konchalovsky, Natalya Goncharova and Robert Falk.
Richter had admired Shukhaev's work since their first meeting in Paris in the early 1920s; indeed the two were to become close friends in the late 1940s after Shukhaev returned from a ten-year exile in Magadan. Richter acquired a number of Shukhaev's compositions, including a portrait, which Shukhaev had painted of Richter in 1951, and regularly exhibited them in his apartment from 1960-1980s. Many works from Richter's collection are currently held in the Museum of Private Collections – the Department of Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.