Lot 684: - Maxim Kantor , b.1957 Portrait of Pope John-Paul II oil on canvas

signed in Cyrillic l.r.; further signed in Latin and titled 'Johann Pavel II' in Latin on reverse oil on canvas

225.2 by 145.4cm., 88 3/4 by 57 1/4 in.

Roderick Conway Morris, Russian Painters New Empire, International Herald Tribune, 20 March 2005, illustrated
New Empire catalogue, Rasch Verlag, 2005

Through a series of delicate negotiations Kantor was able to secure Vatican permission to sketch Pope John-Paul II. In the words of the International Herald Tribune review, the resulting work shows the Pontiff covering his face, "seemingly appalled". On his knee is a crumpled newspaper bearing the headline The Revelations of St John, reporting impending apocalypse. A perceived crisis of Christian ethics and the twilight of European humanism are central themes of Kantor's debut novel The Drawing Textbook. "I believe that the collapse of Christianity was the most important event of the twentieth century, because during that time the church not only retreated but was defeated. This has left a void. For this reason the West is in deep crisis. And I think the main threat today is not terrorism but lack of ideas and ideals, and this is leading a once wonderful civilization to disaster." The subject inevitably begs comparison with the work of Francis Bacon, who in turn was engaging with Velazquez's famous Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Vittorio Hösle, philosophy professor at Notre Dame University, compares the work of the two twentieth century artists: "Kantor's view is more affirmative even through or because he depicts the frailty of the actual office bearer in a way unknown in the Renaissance. It is not saying too much that through Kantor's art speaks a new, intellectually cunning, yet existentially not less engaged understanding of Christianity. In Pax Kantoris, Denis Lejeune comments on several elements in Kantor's recent pieces which suggest that the painter has extended his field of study beyond purely post-Communist Russian subjects. 'Monumental canvases, such as Structure of Democracy and Portrait of Pope, set out to produce an open and totalizing comment on society... His symbolic works no longer seem to restrict themselves to Russia but articulate a more general assessment. An ambiguity therefore arises: that of the parallel implied between Russian society and the world in general.'