Alexander Konstantinovich Bogomazov

Yaroslava Alexandrovna Ivanitskaya, the artist's daughter

Original canvas, which is slightly loose and unevenly stretched. The paint surface is dirty and covered with a layer of slightly yellowed varnish. The canvas is slightly buckled in the lower left corner. There is minor paint loss around the edges and a pin hole is visible in the upper right corner. There are very minor spots of craquelure. UV light reveals no apparent retouchings. Held in a wood frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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A leading member of the Ukrainian avant-garde, Alexander Bogomazov explained that in his work he sought 'to liberate painterly elements from the fetters...blocking and obscuring the painterly meaning of the picture.' His paintings reflected the direction of early-20th century Russian art towards bold experimentation and the negation of traditional academic art.

Landscape with Trees was painted in 1911, a time when Bogomazov's style was still heavily influenced by the works of Victor Borisov-Musatov, a major practitioner of Symbolism in Russian art. The Symbolists regarded nature as unstable, illusory, and merely a collection of external appearances. The present lot is an excellent example of the gradual development of Bogomazov's style from Symbolism to Futurism. The nature imagery here undergoes a radical simplification, seen in the emergence of geometrical forms in the landscape as well as the subtle interplay of abstract colour modulations. Bogomazov's commitment to modernist formal experimentation led him to concentrate on harmonious arrangements of line and colour. This work, which almost verges on abstraction, conveys the immaterial essence of colour, its inner energy and luminosity.