David Shterenberg

Original canvas. The picture is clean and ready to hang. UV light reveals no apparent retouching. Held in an oval gold painted wooden frame with plaster mouldings. Unexamined out of frame.
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The present still-life is a classic example of the artist's favourite genre. A central figure of the early 20^th century Russian avant-garde, from the onset Shterenberg avoided the temptation of abstraction and assumed his own path, with the object standing at the centre of his pictorial and philosophic studies. Shterenberg's fascination with still-life, the genre of predilection among Cubists, and his interest in the essential nature of each separate object stemmed from the years he spent in Paris (1907-1917) at the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Vitti, where he studied with Kees van Dongen, exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon d'Automne, and met the prominent members of the Parisian avant-garde, such as Matisse, Soutine, Apollinaire and Lipchitz.

 

The offered work undoubtedly belongs to the artist's mature period, which coincided with the general 'retour à l'ordre' (the return to order) in the European art movements, when Picasso turned to Neo-Classicism and other artists investigated various forms of realism. Shterenberg minimizes here the Cubist tendencies of his early work in which monochrome objects were placed against the flattened background of a familiar setting; in the offered painting the artist removes all anecdotal references to outside reality. The glowing yellow surface of the plate occupies the entire canvas, and projected at an unusual angle - a lesson learned from Cézanne and Cubists – defines the painting's oval shape. The three fish (a leitmotif in Shterenberg's still-lifes) are depicted as three-dimensional objects. Unusual in the artist's oeuvre, the oval shape of the painting and elaborate palette evoke the aesthetics of the Baroque, a style identified by the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin as 'movement imported into mass.'

Shterenberg returned to Soviet Russia and in 1918 assumed the position of the Director of IZO (the Department of Fine Arts created under the Narkompros). He co-signed with Lunacharsky the declaration announcing the creation of Svomas, the Petrograd Free Studios, and later worked there alongside Tatlin, Malevich, Pougny, Altman, and Petrov-Vodkin at the Petrograd Free Studios and stood at the heart of numerous initiatives intended to make art an integral element of post-revolutionary society.