Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin

Between April and June 1907, Petrov-Vodkin set off on an eight-week journey through Algeria and Tunisia. On the evening of May 1st, he arrived in Biskra, about 150 miles south east of Algiers, writing ‘I send you the African sun from this truly beautiful place... Biskra is an oasis, surrounded by sand... The Arabs are very engaging... How beautifully they talk to each other, it is as though they were singing!’

Captivated by the lights and colours of the continent, Petrov-Vodkin responded by producing a series of drawings, watercolours, and oil studies. As Yuri Rusakov notes in his monograph on the artist, his oil sketches from this period are characterised by olive greens, yellows, ochre greys and browns. These colours can be found in Portrait of an African Boy, generating a sense of warmth that emanates from the canvas as they mimic the heat radiating from the African sun. The child, standing in front of a backdrop of Berber patterned fabric, looks inquisitively. He seems surprised and not yet open to this encounter between himself and the artist, as his right hand clings onto his left arm, shielding his body.

On his return to Paris, Petrov-Vodkin wrote in a letter, ‘I will not tire of thanking Africa for all that this beautiful place, with its desert, its palm trees and its black-skinned people has given me’ (K.Petrov-Vodkin. Pis’ma. Stat’i. Vystupleniya. Dokumenty, Moscow, 1991, p.108). Soon after, the artist showed his African paintings at the Salon 1908-1909 exhibition organised by Sergei Makovsky. In his review, Alexander Benois praised Petrov-Vodkin’s talent and commented on his African cycle: ‘This series has too hastily been compared with Gaugin’s Tahiti; in fact a completely different temperament has been found here, and the resemblance to Gaugin is only superficial and shows perhaps only in the brown skin of the depicted figures and the tropical vegetation’ (A.Benois, ‘Khudozhestvennye pis’ma. Eshche o salone’, Rech’, 11 January 1909).

A number of works from his trip can be found in the collections of the State Russian Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery.

We are grateful to Natalia Adaskina for providing additional catalogue information.