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Dimensions: 94 by 81 cm., 37 by 32in.

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Provenance: Shabshai Collection
Donated by Maria Shabshai to the Uri and Rami Nechushtan Museum, Kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov Hameuhad, 1965
Acquired from the above by the present owner

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Notes: Robert Falk is widely recognised as one of the most interesting artists of his generation. He studied at the private studios of Konstantin Yuon and Ilya Mashkov and then in 1905 entered the Moscow School of Painting, Art and Architecture, where he was strongly influenced by Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin. He was among the founding members of the Jack of Diamonds in the 1910s, a Moscow avant-garde group with Paul Cézanne as their inspiration, though as this painting demonstrates, he was equally affected by the Fauves and the Expressionists. As he wrote in his autobiography 'I liked bright, contrasting colours, unified pronounced shapes... by distortion of form I tried to accentuate emotional eloquence' (cited by A.E.Shchekin-Krotova, Moi Falk, HGS, Moscow, 2005, p.26). The offered lot is typical of Falk's early oeuvre, not only in terms of energy and style, but also the subject: he painted several forest landscapes during this period and this is one of the most impressive variations on this theme. The layers of contrasting colour, composed of parallel brushstrokes and sharp impasto, convey tension and dynamism which is certainly beautiful - yet also alarming. The disturbing blaze glowing in the background is redolent of Russia's turbulent post-revolutionary era, indeed of the confusion and disillusionment felt throughout Europe, which Falk voices without resorting to narrative. The artist Maria Shabshai (1890-1983) was a founder and director of the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris from 1948 to 1974. In the 1927 she emigrated to France with her husband, Alexander Kagan-Shabshai, the brother of the famous Moscow collector, Iakob Kagan-Shabshai, a twentieth century Pavel Tretyakov. Falk had known Maria and Alexander in Moscow and when he arrived in Paris in 1928 it was they who helped him to settle in. "I rely on the help of friends here" wrote Falk in a letter "especially the Shabshais" (R.Falk Besedy ob iskusstve. Pis'ma. Vospominaniya o khudozhnike, Moscow, 1981, p.79). Another of Falk's pictures from the Shabshai collection, 'Trees' (1917), was presented to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem in 1950. We are grateful to Yulia Didenko, the author of Falk's catalogue raisonné, for providing additional cataloguing information, and to Lecia Voiskoun, curator of The Maria and Michael Zetlin Russian Art Museum, Ramat-Gan, Israel, for writing this note.