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PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

STILL LIFE WITH FLOWERS

STILL LIFE WITH FLOWERS

137.5 by 100.5cm., 54 by 39 1/2 in.

Signed in Cyrillic t.l. and also in Latin on reverse and inscribed N9

oil on canvas

EXHIBITED

International Exhibition of Trends in Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 7^th November - 7^th December, 1913

NOTE

Ilya Mashkov was a founding member of the Bubnovy Valet or "Jack of Diamonds" group of which the offered lot is an exemplary work. These artists exhibited together between 1910 and 1916, their style based on a kind of primitivism which Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova had first discovered and quickly evolved. Hatched between these two pioneering artists was a new art with a strong national flavour. It found its ultimate expression in Larionov's soldier paintings and Goncharova's Russian peasant women.

A preoccupation with Russian subjects, although predominant among this peer group, was not their sole agenda. Bubnovy Valet exhibitions were international in scope and vision, and included works by other Western European modernist painters, such as Le Fauconnier, Gabriele Munter, Fernand Leger, Franz Marc and August Macke. There were clear stylistic parallels, but also social connections. Gabriele Munter (1877-1962) was the partner of Russian painter Vasili Kandinsky, and at this time they were living together in their aptly named "Russian House" in Murnau. The proximity in style and colour between Munter's flower paintings of the period, and those of Mashkov is striking (see fig 1).

The exhibition walls were covered with still-lives and flower paintings and almost all the Bubnovy Valet artists in the period from 1910-1913 produced and exhibited them. There was a spirit of collaboration but also a race to shock the public with each new exhibition. Ilya Mashkov worked most closely with his contemporary Petr Konchalovsky and in the first 1910 exhibition showed his Self Portrait with Petr Konchalovsky, which depicts both artists as weightlifters. Behind their heads hang what appear to be two oval portraits, but which are anthropoid flower paintings (see fig 2).

Still Life with Flowers remains undated by the artist, but was most likely painted in 1912. An old label from a Bubnovy Valet exhibition is applied to the reverse of the stretcher, although it is not clear which exhibition the work was included in. By 1913 the painting was already on exhibition in Holland. Further supporting this dating is its close relationship to a similar still-life, Gladioli painted by Petr Konchalovsky in 1912 (see fig 3). This also depicts a cluster of gigantic flowers in ceramic pots against a yellow background. Both works are classic examples of primitivism, with their thick black outlines, heightened colour schemes and simplification of forms.