Lot 80: VIKTOR ELPIDIFOROVICH BORISOV-MUSATOV, 1870-1905

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, BELGIUM

THE LAST DAY

image size: 43 by 56.5cm., 17 by 22¼in.

signed in Cyrillic l.r; titled in Cyrillic an inscribed N.6 on a label attached to the reverse of the board

pastel on paper mounted on cardboard

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist in 1903 by Vladimir Eduardovich Napravnik
Thence by decent

NOTE

The Last Day (1903) is an extremely rare example of the work of the Russian symbolist artist Borisov-Musatov, painted in what is considered his best period. It was the art and personality of Paul Gauguin that shaped his direction in Paris in the 1890s while he studied in the studio of French academic painter Fernand Cormon. In particular he assimilated Gauguin's innovations in arranging a composition, inspired by Japanese art, but more than this also a desire to retreat from contemporary bourgeoisie life. Although a symbolist, his oeuvre is free from myth or religious sentiment which permeated the art of the French symbolists, Puvis de Chavannes and Maurice Denis.

In a cycle of four watercolours representing the four seasons, he described "Autumn" as the melancholy and silence of parting and The Last Day is imbued with a similar mood. His artistic mission was a struggle between realism and poetry: put simply, how to create poetry in a picture yet preserve an essence of realism, with its accompanying value of authenticity. The duality is clear: his paintings are a retreat from modernity, an escape to an imaginary world, but they struck a chord with fin-de-siecle sensibility and expressed the sentiments of the Silver Age. Phantoms also of 1903, on a similar theme as the offered lot, was praised highly by the contemporary symbolist poets Valery Bryusov and Andrey Bely.

Nostalgia exudes from his pictures, but his rendition of a bygone age differs from that of his World of Art contemporaries Konstantin Somov and Alexander Benois who depicted 18^th century life with slavish historical precision. Borisov-Musatov was no illustrator and his preference for tempera, pastel and watercolour betrays a preoccupation with the act of creating a picture, a slow deliberation of execution and the artist as spiritual medium echoing pre-renaissance artistic practice. Like Mikhail Vrubel, he captures a heightened sense of reality, and one unmistakably Russian in spite of the foreign influences he had encountered in Paris.

From 1898 to 1903, Borisov-Musatov lived in his native town of Saratov, frequenting old country estates in the province. There he found a refuge from the rapid industrialisation of the city in pre-revolutionary Russia, and this milieu became a central theme to his whole oeuvre. Into these estates with their white stucco classical mansion houses, ponds and overgrown pathways, he paints women. His women are distant, mute, spectral figures who languish and promenade unhurried.

Despite his short life -- he died suddenely in 1905 at the age of 35 - and the fact he worked in relative isolation from Moscow and St Petersburg, his influence was considerable on a whole generation of Russian artists: Pavel Kuznetsov, Utkin, Sarayan and Petrov-Vodkin all assimilated his compositional devices and evocation of a dreamlike world. The 1906 Mir Iskusstva exhibition devoted an entire room to his paintings, and in the following two years major retrospectives were held in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The Last Day was acquired by the son of the Russian conductor and composer Eduard Napravnik in 1903 and has remained ever since in the family's collection. A work in pastel, its colours are still gloriously vibrant, the overall condition excellent and it represents a rare find.