Vasily Ivanovich Vikulov

Acquired from the son of the artist by the present owner

The canvas has been lined. There are frame abrasions along all four edges. There is a stretcher bar mark along the top edge. There are surface scratches in places. Inspection under UV light reveals a large area of retouching in the top left corner, along the top edge, to the bottom left corner, to the figures in the foreground, to the centre of the bottom edge as well as scattered retouching throughout. Held in a black wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Following the October Revolution of 1917, religious holidays were curtailed as part of the state policy of gosateizm or state atheism. By the late 1920s the state-run League of Militant Atheists managed to eradicate what was left of Christmas, declaring trees and presents papal and anti-Soviet customs. 'The Christmas tree is a fetish', wrote the anti-religious newspaper The Atheist at the Workbench in 1928, 'having thrown away our icons, we now hide God behind the Christmas tree'. However, as early as 1935 the Christmas tree was resurrected at the initiative of Pavel Postyshev, one of Stalin’s closest confidants. In an open letter published in Pravda on 28 December 1935, he proposed to supplant this relic of the 'pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie' with a secular New Year tree which would grace the public squares, schools, orphanages, clubs, cinemas, and theatres of the Soviet Union. The secular version of the tree was to be crowned with a red star rather than the octagonal Bethlehem star and the figures of angels were to give way to baubles with enamelled images of Lenin and Stalin.

In the present lot Vikulov captures the celebratory mood of one of Leningrad's first public celebrations of New Year in the late 1930s, with the re-branded New Year Trees encircling an ice ring with joyful merrymakers and banners of Soviet leaders hanging from the General Staff Building on Palace Square, then known as Uritsky Square after the Bolshevik revolutionary. Another, smaller work (gouache, watercolour and pastel on board, 70 by 89cm) on the same theme dated 1939 is in the collection of the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg.