Lot 126: Alisa Poret , Russian 1902-1984 The Glebov Family, 1929 pencil, colored pencil and watercolor on paper

signed in Cyrillic and dated 1929 ; also inscribed and titled in Cyrillic (on the reverse) pencil, colored pencil and watercolor on paper

measurements 12 1/2 by 18 in. alternate measurements 32 by 46 cm

Klara Tsezarevna Elagina (a friend of the artist)
Thence by descent

Between 1917 and 1918, Alisa Poret studied at the School of Drawing of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St. Petersburg, continuing her studies under the noted artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin at the Academy of Fine Arts (1923-25). In 1926 Poret began her studies with Pavel Filonov, whose creative method, "Analytical Art," which he formulated in 1912, had a great impact on Poret's oeuvre. By 1927, when Filonov's group MAI (Masters of Analytical Art) was officially established, Filonov had over forty students, including Poret. At this time, Filonov's students turned to children's book illustration, which enabled them to earn money and, at the same time, to use the illustrations as a showcase for demonstrating the tenets of Analytical Art. Between 1929 and 1931 Poret illustrated children's books for the Detgiz publishing house. In 1932, Poret, along with other of Filonov's students, contributed illustrations for the Finnish epic Kalevala (Academia, 1933).

In all of her works of the late 1920s and 1930s, including the two present lots, Poret adhered to the principles of Analytical Art. According to this method, any work must begin with a persistent and careful elaboration of each individual detail. Analytical Art sought to draw the visible and invisible phenomena of nature into the realm of artistic practice; the subject of a work was to grow and develop atom by atom as logically and as organically as the process of growth in nature. Filonov developed the notion of the "seeing eye" and the "knowing eye," the latter of which captured concealed processes that were to be rendered by the artist in a non-representational mode. Therefore, in Filonov's works, as in these works by his student Poret, figurative representation is intertwined with non-representational elements.

The Filonov School was completely erased from Soviet art history and criticism amid the ruthless campaign against "formalist tendencies" in Soviet art waged between the late 1930s and the 1950s. As early as 1927, the critic E.F.Gollerbakh called the work of the school "a socio-political grotesque with a bias toward pathological anatomy," while in 1930 another critic, V. N. Gross, described an exhibition of the group's work as "the public appearance of the class enemy." Gross claimed that in their artworks, Filonov's students presented "a distorted view of life" and "a sneer at [Soviet] reality." Starting in 1932, Filonov's students were asked to renounce their teacher and were summoned by the secret police for interrogations. Until 1964, when the historian M.A. Boiko devoted several paragraphs to Filonov's school in his book on the history of Leningrad, there was no single publication on the work of this association.