Oscar Rabin

Christine Sperber (founder of Mimi Ferzt Gallery), New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2003

London, Grosvenor Gallery, Oscar Rabin, 1965
New York, Mimi Ferzt Gallery

John Spurling, Oscar Rabine: Forty Years On, A&C-Projects, Peter Nahum and Leicester Galleries, exhibition catalogue, December 2004
Oscar Rabin, The State Russian Museum and Palace Editions, in collaboration with A&C-Projects, St. Petersburg, 2007
Oscar Rabin, Valentina Kropivnitskaia, Aleksandr Rabin: Zhivopis' i grafika iz chastnykh sobranii, Exhibition catalogue, The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, March-May 2007

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This beautiful painting is in healthy condition. It has not been removed from its original stretcher. The paint layer appears not to have been cleaned and is quite heavily painted. Some of the paint has become slightly unstable and there are a couple of losses in the lower center, in the center right and on the left side. There is also a series of losses in a gray line of paint in the buildings on the left side. There are areas of the canvas which are not fully covered with paint, yet these are intentional and original and should not be taken for losses. A small amount of restoration will improve and secure this picture for the future.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Oscar Rabin played a central role as both an initiator and a driving force behind Moscow's unofficial art movement. Born in Moscow, he studied at the Academy of Arts in Riga, Latvia, and later at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, from which he was expelled because of his unorthodox views. Although he started out as a more or less conventional painter in the realist manner working from nature, he soon became dissatisfied with the falsity of Soviet official art. Pivotal to Rabin's artistic development was his appreciation of children's art, in particular his realization that its clarity of vision and great expressiveness afforded him the tools to express himself in a vivid manner. Children's art influenced Rabin's angular distortions of forms and has served as a psychological and formal model throughout his career.

Instead of portraying officially-sanctioned images of Soviet prosperity, Rabin chose to depict the mundane and the everyday, as exemplified in the present lots. Deemed "unofficial," the artist was not permitted to exhibit with the official Union of Artists, nor did he receive the government support available to official Socialist Realist artists. In the mid-1950s, he held a variety of jobs that had no connection to art, including working as a loader of heavy construction materials from railway trucks; he painted only in his spare time.

In the late 1950s Rabin, with his teacher, Evgenii Kropivnitsky, established the Lianozovo group, an artistic community in a Moscow suburb that shared common ideas on art and held private exhibitions. In 1974, Rabin was one of the organizers of the infamous open-air show that came to be known as the "Bulldozer Exhibition"—so called because the Soviet authorities sent bulldozers and trucks to destroy the artworks on display.

Rabin's first solo exhibition took place in London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1965, although the artist was not permitted to attend the opening. The article "Dorogaia chechevichnaia pokhlebka" (Expensive Lentil Soup), which severely criticized Rabin for his "anti-Soviet" paintings, was published in the journal Sovetskaia kul'tura (Soviet Culture). Always unpopular with the authorities, Rabin was arrested several times, and finally exiled from Russia in 1978. Although he left Russia with his wife, fellow artist Valentina Kropivnitskaia, and their son as tourists, they were never allowed to return; after the family had been living in Paris for about six months, the Soviet consulate there called them in to inform them that they had been stripped of their Soviet citizenship.

Called the "Solzhenitsyn of Painting," Rabin depicted commonplace objects, depressing cityscapes, and religious symbols. He explored subjects like Soviet newspapers, bottles of vodka, and herring as a way of both deconstructing and invigorating moribund artistic traditions.

In the late 1960s, Rabin created a series of works depicting run-down cityscapes and the most sordid aspects of Soviet life, all represented in a grotesque manner. The series commented on both the harshness of everyday Soviet and the middle-class concepts of beauty and happiness. In Rabin's words:

In a certain sense my works would be my diary if I were a writer. In them, I transmit my impressions of life, but, of course, colored by my mood, that is to say in a very subjective way.... It is simply that so-called social moments are interpreted by me in the same subjective way; they influence my mood and state of mind and, naturally, are also reflected to some extent in my pictures.

While Rabin's subject matter always remained unmistakably Russian and Soviet, an important inspiration came from Western modernism. Rabin adopted Western modernist styles and forms, modifying them within his native context; in the process he created a body of work that ironically questions and parodies high art, either through the deliberate confrontation of the two aesthetic systems (Western and Soviet) within the same artwork or through the direct substitution of "high" with "low."

At the same time, Soviet mass culture of the 1960s offered a new vocabulary of image and perception that immediately distinguishes Rabin from mere imitators of Western modernism. In all his stylistic diversions, the artist never abandoned representational imagery. For Rabin, the characters, phenomena, and sensations of the Soviet urban environment provided cause for contemplation of the human condition.