Yuri Ivanovich Pimenov

Fine Art Salon for Export
Gekkoso Gallery, Tokyo

Original canvas. There are lines of craquelure to the left and right of the sitter's torso and a layer of light surface dirt. Held in a gold painted wooden frame and under plexiglass.
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Tatiana Samoilova (b.1934) had already made her name as a film star when she was cast as the heroine of Alexander Zarkhi's 1967 landmark film, Anna Karenina. Samoilova had impressed Soviet audiences and taken Europe by storm as the lead actress in The Cranes are Flying (1958), which won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year and earned her pressing invitations to go to Hollywood. The French Liberation commentator approvingly contrasted her purity and authenticity against the Western female icon, Brigitte Bardot, and East German fans presented her with a watch inscribed 'Finally we see on the Soviet screen a face, not a mask.' (J.Woll, The Cranes are Flying, London: I. B. Tauris, 2003, p.77)  

In Anna Karenina, Samoilova 'superbly plays the main role, and in stressing Anna's spiritual rather than physical charms and disappointments, again demonstrates enormous range without compare' (J. Vinson International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Actors and Actresses. Vol. 3. Chicago and London: St. James P, 1986, p.555). Curiously, her ex-husband Vasily Lanovoy was cast as Vronsky.

Yuri Pimenov was an equally celebrated figure by the mid-1960s: his autobiography was published in 1964 and the following year he was the subject of a documentary released by Mosnauchfilm, Poeziya obyknovennogo – khudozhnik Yu.Pimenov. Pimenov designed sets and costumes for the theatre throughout his life, but with the exception of a few designs for film posters, his work relating to his lifelong interest in film is very rare despite the fact that he taught at the Institute of Cinematography from 1945 to 1972. This vivid portrait from his series Actors and Their Characters is a superb overlap of the two mediums that most interested him. For a comparable portrait of Samoilova in the role of Anna Karenina, see N.Barabanova, Yury Pimenov, Leningrad, Aurora Art Publishers, 1972, pl.50.