Albarrán Cabrera
Abram Shterenberg (1894-1978)
Portrait of Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1924
Vintage gelatin silver print mounted on paper
Signed and dated on mount recto
Image: 9 1/8 x 6 5/8 in. (23.2 x 16.8 cm)
Mount: 14 x 9 3/8 in. (35.6 x 23.8 cm)
“Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. etc. overboard the Ship of Modernity” — this was the famous pronouncement of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1913, a year between the two major Russian Revolutions. Mayakovsky, among the 20th century’s most-celebrated poets, was a playwright, graphic artist, and editor of the art journal Left Front of Arts (LEF).
Primarily working in the field of portraiture, Abram Shterenberg figured prominently in Moscow’s 1920s Constructivist circles. As a member of LEF and later, the avant-garde collective October, Shterenberg would photograph the likes of Mayakovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg and the French novelist Henri Barbusse. He took the first-known formal portrait of Mayakovsky in 1923 that Aleksander Rodchenko would use for the iconic series About This (1923). In this 1924 portrait, Shterenberg re-photographed Mayakovsky with a fresh aesthetic approach — using a soft light to emphasize the sculptural contours of the poet’s face.
Georgy Petrussov (1903-1971)
Caricature Portrait of Photographer Boris Kudoyarov, 1934
Vintage gelatin silver print
Title and signature in Cyrillic in pencil on verso
9 x 6 in. (22.9 x 15.2 cm)
Within the milieu of dynamic experimental artists working in the Soviet 20s and 30s was the avant-garde photographer Georgy Petrussov. While Petrussov is distinguished for his scenes of industry and technology, he demonstrates a bright sense of humor and a lively spirit of innovation through his caricatures of the prominent Soviet photographers like Aleksandr Rodchenko, Boris Kudoyarov and Dmitry Debabov. Petrussov submitted these photographs for the seminal 1935 exhibition, Masters of Soviet Photography in Moscow.
Petrussov constructed the Debabov caricature — in which the gigantesque artist is humorously juxtaposed against the landscape’s low shrubbery — by cutting and pasting various negatives. His method for creating the Kudoyarov caricature was more experimental. Petrussov produced the distorted bulge in Kudoyarov’s jaw by carefully bending the photographic paper while exposing the photograph. The bend in the paper is also visible along the lighter points on the bottom of the photograph.
Arkady Shaikhet (1898-1959)
Express, 1939
Vintage gelatin silver print
Signed, titled, dated and stamped on verso
4 15/16 x 6 3/4 in. (12.5 x 17.1 cm)
Express has become an iconic symbol for the dynamism and innovation of the Soviet 1930s. Steam and cloudy skies envelop the train’s dark skeleton. Speeding down the tracks, the train resembles a zeppelin preparing to launch. The train was named the “Red Arrow” and ran between Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). A triumph of Soviet industrial technology, only two Red Arrow trains were ever built. Along with the Soviet metro and developments in aviation, the engine captured in Express is emblematic of 1930s Soviet industrial design.
Unidentified artist
Cubist Head, c. 1919-1920
Sculpted by David Yakerson (1896-1947)
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 1/8 in. (24.1 x 18.1 cm)
Photographed are the now-destroyed cubist sculptures by Russian Suprematist artist David Yakerson. Yakerson created his sculptures at the Vitebsk People’s Art School that he joined in 1919 at the personal invitation of Marc Chagall. While overlooked in the history of the Soviet avant-garde, Yakerson has recently regained prominence, and his artworks have been exhibited at the State Russian Museum (2018); Centre Pompidou (2018); Jewish Museum (2018); as well as a solo exhibition at the Pushkin Museum of Art (2000).
Yakerson’s cubist sculptures reflect the rapid and exciting artistic developments of the late-1910s Soviet Russian avant-garde — a period situated between Picasso’s analytical cubist artworks, and Russian Constructivism’s ascent in the early 1920s. Yakerson’s sculptures draw from an international cubist inquiry about the nature of forms in space — and Suprematism, an avant-garde movement indigenous to Russia. Founded by Kazimir Malevich whose radical Black Square (1915) shocked the art world, Suprematism pushed abstraction to its furthest limits in its effort to express the complete dematerialization of objects in space. The artist maintains a degree of figuration in Cubist Head assembling his subject from a combination of simplified cones, pyramids and prisms. In his disdain for Classical beauty and form, Yakerson rejected academic materials such as marble to create his sculpture. Instead, he used a hard clay that he carved into directly.
(See: Shatskikh, A; K Mikhnevich. 2000. David Iakerson: Skul’ptura. Rabota na bumage. Moscow: Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.)
Unidentified artist
Cubist Bust, c. 1919-1920
Sculpted by David Yakerson (1896-1947)
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 1/8 in. (24.1 x 18.1 cm)
Photographed are the now-destroyed cubist sculptures by Russian Suprematist artist David Yakerson. Yakerson created his sculptures at the Vitebsk People’s Art School that he joined in 1919 at the personal invitation of Marc Chagall. While overlooked in the history of the Soviet avant-garde, Yakerson has recently regained prominence, and his artworks have been exhibited at the State Russian Museum (2018); Centre Pompidou (2018); Jewish Museum (2018); as well as a solo exhibition at the Pushkin Museum of Art (2000).
Yakerson’s cubist sculptures reflect the rapid and exciting artistic developments of the late-1910s Soviet Russian avant-garde — a period situated between Picasso’s analytical cubist artworks, and Russian Constructivism’s ascent in the early 1920s. Yakerson’s sculptures draw from an international cubist inquiry about the nature of forms in space — and Suprematism, an avant-garde movement indigenous to Russia. Founded by Kazimir Malevich whose radical Black Square (1915) shocked the art world, Suprematism pushed abstraction to its furthest limits in its effort to express the complete dematerialization of objects in space. The artist maintains a degree of figuration in Cubist Head assembling his subject from a combination of simplified cones, pyramids and prisms. In his disdain for Classical beauty and form, Yakerson rejected academic materials such as marble to create his sculpture. Instead, he used a hard clay that he carved into directly.
(See: Shatskikh, A; K Mikhnevich. 2000. David Iakerson: Skul’ptura. Rabota na bumage. Moscow: Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.)
Petr Stepanovic Galadzhev (1900-1971)
Collage with Girls, Athletes, and Clowns, c. 1924
Vintage collage with Indian ink on brown paper
12 3/4 x 8 3/4 in. (32.4 x 22.2 cm)
Alexander Grinberg (1885-1979)
Nude, 1920s
Vintage gelatin silver print
On verso in pencil in Cyrillic: Inna
4 1/8 x 6 1/2 in. (10.5 x 16.5 cm)
Nude, recalling Francisco Goya’s La Maja Desnuda, translates a painterly sensitivity to light and form into the medium of photography. Grinberg softens form and illuminates his subjects with a delicate play of light and dark. Grinberg’s nude, however, is more reticent than Goya’s and the model turns her face from the camera as if unconcerned with the photographer’s presence.
Grinberg was a leading figure in Russian pictorial photography who risked his life to exhibit his pictorial artworks. In the mid 1930s, Stalinist cultural policy dictated any eroticism in artistic forms as a remnant bourgeois idleness. Nevertheless, Grinberg organized one more exhibition of his artwork in 1935. He was sentenced to the gulag labor camps for his controversial artworks soon after, and was pardoned in 1939.
Elizaveta Ignatovich (1903-1983)
Family of Kolkhoz Farmer, mid 1930s
Vintage gelatin silver print
Signed and titled by artist on verso
16 x 11 in. (40.6 x 27.9 cm)
Elizaveta Ignatovich (1903-1983) was a prominent Russian artist, whose work has been overlooked due to rarity of her photographs. Between 1929 - 1932, Elizaveta participated alongside her husband, Boris Ignatovich, and photographers like Aleksander Rodchenko, Elizar Langman, Abram Shterenberg, in the avant-garde art collective known as October.
The present photograph is created in a pictorial style and is a wonderful example of Socialist Realist art. It promotes a cheerful vision of the daily lives of Soviet farmers, showing a tight-knit family: while the mother and daughter work at the sewing machine, the father appears engrossed in his reading. Ignatovich accentuates the staged — and almost theatrical — impression of the scene, by framing it with parted curtains.
Evgeny Khaldey (1917-1997)
Memory of Spartakiada, 1933
Photocollage
6 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (16.5 x 19.1 cm)
Inscribed in black lettering before a lively young volleyball player are the words “Memory of Spartakiada.” The Spartakiada was an international sporting event organized in the Soviet Union as a response to the Olympics. The last Spartakiada was held in 1937, and in 1952, the Soviet Union joined the Olympics.
Arkady Shaikhet (1898-1959)
Motor Boat and Eight Oarsmen, 1939
Gelatin silver print
19 1/4 x 11 in. (48.9 x 27.9 cm)
Georgy Petrussov (1903-1971)
View from Maxim Gorky Airplane, Kharkov
1930, printed c. 1950s-1960s
Gelatin silver print
8 1/8 x 5 1/2 in. (20.6 x 14.0 cm)
Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962)
Untitled (Meat, Fish), 1988
Series "Nomenclature of Signs" (1986-1991)
Unique mounted photomontage with gelatin silver print
8 1/8 x 9 1/8 in. (20.6 x 23.2 cm)
Signed, titled and dated in pencil on verso
The series “Nomenclature of Signs” is a biting critique of the Soviet class of powerful bureaucrats known as the nomenklatura. Titarenko especially criticizes Soviet visual propaganda such as posters, signs, slogans. In his view, the nomenklatura imposed propaganda upon the Soviet psyche, and deprived the Soviet person of their individuality and authenticity. Titarenko mocks this dehumanizing propaganda in his collages and photomontages by depicting the Soviet subject as an assemblage of prosaic signs and symbols. Inspired by the traditions of dada and futurism, Titarenko poetically destroys and recreates meaning from these signs in his collages by combining torn-up portraits, fragments from Leonid Brezhnev’s speeches, and scraps of red linen. With irreverence and biting humor, he expresses the need for deeper portrayals of human experience and its assortment of misfortunes, struggles and joys.
Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962)
Untitled (KBG 425), 1988
Series "Nomenclature of Signs" (1986-1991)
Mounted collage with tissue, newspapers and gelatin silver print
8 1/8 x 9 1/8 in. (20.6 x 23.2 cm)
Signed, titled and dated in pencil on verso
The series “Nomenclature of Signs” is a biting critique of the Soviet class of powerful bureaucrats known as the nomenklatura. Titarenko especially criticizes Soviet visual propaganda such as posters, signs, slogans. In his view, the nomenklatura imposed propaganda upon the Soviet psyche, and deprived the Soviet person of their individuality and authenticity. Titarenko mocks this dehumanizing propaganda in his collages and photomontages by depicting the Soviet subject as an assemblage of prosaic signs and symbols. Inspired by the traditions of dada and futurism, Titarenko poetically destroys and recreates meaning from these signs in his collages by combining torn-up portraits, fragments from Leonid Brezhnev’s speeches, and scraps of red linen. With irreverence and biting humor, he expresses the need for deeper portrayals of human experience and its assortment of misfortunes, struggles and joys.
Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962)
Vasileostrovskaya Metro Station (Variant Crowd 2), St. Petersburg, 1992
Series "City of Shadows"
Edition 9 of 10
Toned gelatin silver print
Image: 16 x 16 1/4 in. (40.6 x 41.2 cm)
Paper: 18 1/2 x 21 1/4 in. (47 x 54 cm)
Vasileostrovskaya Metro Station (Variant Crowd 2) was Titarenko’s instinctive response to an atmosphere of deterioration and despair unfolding in 1990s Saint Petersburg, the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. Through the method of long exposure, Titarenko transformed the swarm of Russian people pushing their way through a metro station, into a ghost-like haze. Reflecting a decade later, Titarenko wrote that “all these people conditioned by propagandistic models of representation, a palpable ensemble of smiling faces, were becoming wandering shadows.”
Variant Crowd 2 is a variation of Titarenko’s magnum opus, Vasileostrovskaya Metro Station. In his crowd photographs, Titarenko unleashed the expressive potentials of long-exposure, demonstrating his mastery of the artistic method. Through darkroom toning and bleaching, he highlights specific elements in the scene. Particularly stirring are the pair of shoes — a frozen calm amid a procession of shadows. Titarenko invented these technique to truthfully reveals feelings of anxiety in Saint Petersburg at the time. Evocative as both an artistic achievement and a historical document, artworks from the Vasileostrovskaya Metro Station series can be found in such collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MAST, Bologna; and the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk.
Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962)
Crowd on Sredniy Prospect (Crowd 3), St. Petersburg, 1992
Series "City of Shadows"
Edition 8 of 10
Toned gelatin silver print
Image: 17 3/8 x 15 3/4 in. (44.3 x 40 cm)
Paper: 22 1/4 x 19 5/8 (56.5 x 50 cm)