Petr Petrovich Konchalovsky

The artist's family
Private Collection, Europe (acquired directly from the above circa 1995)

A.D. Chegodaev, Konchalovsky: Catalogue Raisonné, Moscow, 1964, p. 104

This painting is in lovely condition. The canvas is unlined and well stretched onto a healthy stretcher. The paint layer has probably never been varnished and although it seems to be clean, it may never have actually been cleaned. There are areas of thinness which are intentional, but none of these areas where the white ground color is visible should be associated with abrasion or any instability to the paint layer. The painting could be hung as is. 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 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."

Pines may be considered a powerful and vibrant masterpiece from one of Konchalovsky's most sought-after periods. In terms of its synthesis of color, texture and form, the work is a superb representation of the aims of the Jack of Diamonds group, which the painter helped to found in 1909. Making use of the achievements of Cézanne and sometimes Matisse, these artists brought back volume and color to the forms they represented. As art historian Dmitry Sarabyanov remarks, "From this springs their interest in still life, which assumed an important role in their work, and took on a significance it had not held hitherto in the history of Russian art...The components of the Jack of Diamonds style were various: their striving for a logical system was combined with spontaneity and impetuosity. The art of these so-called Moscow Cézannists vacillates between the clamor of a city street on the one hand, and strict rationality on the other" (Russian Painters of the Early Twentieth Century, Aurora Art, 1973, p. 141).

Konchalovksy owed much of his artistic success not only to his study of Western European modernist styles, but also to the revolutionary artistic ferment surging through Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed the connections between Russian and French art were particularly strong at the time. Russian artists often traveled to France, sometimes studying there or exhibiting in Parisian salons. Meanwhile the innovative publications and salons of art enthusiast Nikolai Ryabushinsky—not to mention the locally exhibited collections of Moscow merchants Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin—exposed the Russian public to contemporary Western European art movements and helped pave the way for the avant-garde.

The artist's father was a well-regarded translator who invited many contemporary painters into their home, and it was there that young Konchalovsky developed a love and passion for French art and culture. Vasily Surikov played a particularly prominent role in his early education, though it was not until his second year of studying in France that he came to understand the importance of working directly from nature, en plein air, which proved paramount to achieving his artistic goals. His methods were further fortified by his travels throughout Spain in 1910: "I was amazed by the brightness of colors" Konchalovsky recalled, "the yellow sand, the blue sky and emerald shadows on the sand. After, when I was painting the bull fights, I felt so afraid to use colors in their full power—I felt that no one would believe their astonishing saturation" (V.V. Nikolsky, Petr Petrovich Konchalovsky, 1936, p. 52). This period corresponds with his embrace of Fauvism, and his subsequent paintings radiated with vivid, contrasting colors, dynamic brushwork and expressive depth, free from the constraints of the Academy. The Fauves chose to apply their canvases with pure pigment straight from the tube, thereby reproducing their unmixed palettes for all to see, and though Konchalovsky's paintings were perhaps more nuanced, parallels manifest themselves in his forceful color combinations and "primitive" outlines of form.

While Konchalovsky was influenced by Western European painters throughout his career, he never slavishly followed them. He filtered their ideas and techniques through his own unique vision and consciously emphasized the significance of national identity in his oeuvre. In his diary he remembered: "Vallotton [the French painter] very resolutely recognized the national 'Slavic' nature of my painting which was considered to be purely French in Moscow at the time. It was, of course, impossible that it could be otherwise. Of course, I could be 'French' from a Moscow point of view. I was understandable to most Frenchmen because I worked with French methods of painting, but I would always be a Slav for them, even a 'barbarian' as far as color was concerned, as the French critics used to write of me" (Ibid., p. 59).

Konchalovksy spent the summer of 1920 working at the artist's colony of Abramtsevo, a country estate outside Moscow where artists and writers sought to revive a pure, national style through a focus on traditional folk art. The offered lot was surely the result of his time there and the plein air studies of the Russian landscape he conducted. While in his earlier works an expressive image might have domineered over an overall conception, the background no more than a contrast for a subject, in his important canvases of this period it is striking how all the elements serve the strategic harmony of the whole. This contrast is visible here in the astoundingly nuanced shades of the artist's otherwise unruly palette—in the browns of the sculpted branches, the greens of the foliage and the blues of the background sky. Pines is truly a courageous and seminal work, demonstrating the raw vitality Konchalovsky could achieve through manipulation of color and bold brushstrokes.