Lot Essay
Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin is widely regarded as one of the most distinguished artists of the first half of the 20th century whose oeuvre is marked with the interlacing of traditional values of both European and Russian schools of art. Being a versatile artist, Fechin was, first and foremost, an outstanding master of portraiture. As a result of forced emigration in 1923, the artist's legacy equally belongs to Russia and the United States of America. A number of significant works were created in America and yet his 'Russian period', especially those last years spent at the Imperial Academy of Art (1901-1909) and the 'Kazan period' (1910-1923) are rightfully considered to be the most significant periods of the artist's career.
The art of Nicolai Fechin belongs to the modernist style, with its openly expressed duality of the real and the perceived in which the artist's vision of nature plays on the available resources, fusing into one single organic whole elements of diverse stylistic systems (from Academism and Realism to Impressionism and Expressionism), the absolutism of Beauty (the understanding of which has become extraordinarily complicated) and exceptional technical mastery.
Fechin's return to his native Kazan to teach at the Kazan Art School in 1910, launched his 'Kazan period', during which his maturity as an artist was revealed in genre scenes as well as in portraits. The vast majority of portraits from that time are characterized by their sketch-like quality. In his portraiture, Fechin tried to preserve the freshness and spontaneity of an impression by his deliberate use of fluid strokes and seemingly unfinished appearance of his works. Such a technique was aimed at recreating a time when everyday life seems joyful, the senses are prevailing and everything is full of vitality and beauty. The artist's standpoint at that period is best revealed in his depictions of women. For Fechin, amiable and intelligent women embody all the best and most graceful of what life has to offer. Women are tranquil and cheerful creatures made of flesh and blood, not fragile ethereal beings. Even their poses and gestures do not interfere with the feeling of their vibrant youth. In his depictions, he was not looking for psychological depth, but rather their inner essence was essential in his choice of models, most of whom during that period were students of the Kazan Art School. A frequent desire to reveal the nature of the individual in greater detail, and at the same time to solve a variety of plastic problems, led to several representations of the same model (portraits of A. N. Belkovich, N. M. Sapozhnikova, E. F. Oshustovich, T. A. Popova). Within the framework of his artistic concept, Fechin's works are exceptionally various. In each work the artist sets a new compositional, coloristic or textural dilemma and then resolves it masterfully.
Natalia Alexandrovna Podbelskaya (?-1921; a student of the Kazan Art School, circa 1910-1916) was a sitter for four of Fechin's paintings. The artist completed two plein-air studies of her (in the collections of the Bashkir Art Museum named after M. V. Nesterov and the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg) and a 1912 portrait called Lady in Pink considered by many to be a masterpiece.
Portrait of Mademoiselle Podbelskaya (1912) is the fourth known work featuring the young model. It brilliantly exemplifies all the signature features of Fechin's body of work, employing a wide range of techniques, combining smooth painting with rapid brush strokes and heavy impasto. He often used a palette knife with wet paint to unify colours and create texture. This technique enabled him to create a contrast between such elaborate elements as a face or a hand and the spontaneous interplay of a charcoal under-drawing, with coloured areas and rhymes and textures of garments in the background. As a result, the portrait is devoid of static rigidity and the dynamic ripple of the paint layer conveys the flow of a vital energy and the impulsive emotional state. This effect is compounded by the diagonal structure of the portrait's composition. The seemingly random groups of lines and splashes of colour are strictly organized; there is a precisely defined internal structure behind the chaos of colour and all the anatomical and spatial relationships are accurately maintained. The three-dimensional figure and flat background do not contradict each other as pictorial and decorative elements co-exist with ease. Ranging from ochre-grey to deep black, the painting's overall palette reveals exquisite restraint with accents of bright red, pink, and blue. The sitter's dress features a particularly complex array of colour combinations. Technically, the execution of Mademoiselle Podbelskaya's portrait refers back to earlier portraits of N. M. Sapozhnikova (fig. 2) and is amongst other examples of the artist's masterpieces such as Young woman (1912, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington) and a portrait of Mademoiselle Zhirmont, (1917, private collection, USA).
In 1913 the portrait was exhibited at the XI Internationale Kunstausstellung in Munich. The portrait was apparently acquired by a private collector from the exhibition and to this date its existence was only known from publications of the 1920s and 1930s. This portrait of Mademoiselle Podbelskaya, is not only a rather distinctive work by Fechin, but also an outstanding piece of art of museum quality. It bears testimony to the bright and exceptional artistic talent of Fechin, who naturally combined his academic skills with the cutting-edge ideas of the early 20th century. It demonstrates spontaneity of emotion, exploding into rapid, energetic, and free art with a rigid internal logic of composition, superlative draftsmanship with subtleties and colourist constructions. This work is one of the striking examples of Art Nouveau portraiture and one of Fechin's undeniable masterpieces.
We are grateful to Dr Galina Tuluzakova for providing this catalogue entry.
The art of Nicolai Fechin belongs to the modernist style, with its openly expressed duality of the real and the perceived in which the artist's vision of nature plays on the available resources, fusing into one single organic whole elements of diverse stylistic systems (from Academism and Realism to Impressionism and Expressionism), the absolutism of Beauty (the understanding of which has become extraordinarily complicated) and exceptional technical mastery.
Fechin's return to his native Kazan to teach at the Kazan Art School in 1910, launched his 'Kazan period', during which his maturity as an artist was revealed in genre scenes as well as in portraits. The vast majority of portraits from that time are characterized by their sketch-like quality. In his portraiture, Fechin tried to preserve the freshness and spontaneity of an impression by his deliberate use of fluid strokes and seemingly unfinished appearance of his works. Such a technique was aimed at recreating a time when everyday life seems joyful, the senses are prevailing and everything is full of vitality and beauty. The artist's standpoint at that period is best revealed in his depictions of women. For Fechin, amiable and intelligent women embody all the best and most graceful of what life has to offer. Women are tranquil and cheerful creatures made of flesh and blood, not fragile ethereal beings. Even their poses and gestures do not interfere with the feeling of their vibrant youth. In his depictions, he was not looking for psychological depth, but rather their inner essence was essential in his choice of models, most of whom during that period were students of the Kazan Art School. A frequent desire to reveal the nature of the individual in greater detail, and at the same time to solve a variety of plastic problems, led to several representations of the same model (portraits of A. N. Belkovich, N. M. Sapozhnikova, E. F. Oshustovich, T. A. Popova). Within the framework of his artistic concept, Fechin's works are exceptionally various. In each work the artist sets a new compositional, coloristic or textural dilemma and then resolves it masterfully.
Natalia Alexandrovna Podbelskaya (?-1921; a student of the Kazan Art School, circa 1910-1916) was a sitter for four of Fechin's paintings. The artist completed two plein-air studies of her (in the collections of the Bashkir Art Museum named after M. V. Nesterov and the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg) and a 1912 portrait called Lady in Pink considered by many to be a masterpiece.
Portrait of Mademoiselle Podbelskaya (1912) is the fourth known work featuring the young model. It brilliantly exemplifies all the signature features of Fechin's body of work, employing a wide range of techniques, combining smooth painting with rapid brush strokes and heavy impasto. He often used a palette knife with wet paint to unify colours and create texture. This technique enabled him to create a contrast between such elaborate elements as a face or a hand and the spontaneous interplay of a charcoal under-drawing, with coloured areas and rhymes and textures of garments in the background. As a result, the portrait is devoid of static rigidity and the dynamic ripple of the paint layer conveys the flow of a vital energy and the impulsive emotional state. This effect is compounded by the diagonal structure of the portrait's composition. The seemingly random groups of lines and splashes of colour are strictly organized; there is a precisely defined internal structure behind the chaos of colour and all the anatomical and spatial relationships are accurately maintained. The three-dimensional figure and flat background do not contradict each other as pictorial and decorative elements co-exist with ease. Ranging from ochre-grey to deep black, the painting's overall palette reveals exquisite restraint with accents of bright red, pink, and blue. The sitter's dress features a particularly complex array of colour combinations. Technically, the execution of Mademoiselle Podbelskaya's portrait refers back to earlier portraits of N. M. Sapozhnikova (fig. 2) and is amongst other examples of the artist's masterpieces such as Young woman (1912, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington) and a portrait of Mademoiselle Zhirmont, (1917, private collection, USA).
In 1913 the portrait was exhibited at the XI Internationale Kunstausstellung in Munich. The portrait was apparently acquired by a private collector from the exhibition and to this date its existence was only known from publications of the 1920s and 1930s. This portrait of Mademoiselle Podbelskaya, is not only a rather distinctive work by Fechin, but also an outstanding piece of art of museum quality. It bears testimony to the bright and exceptional artistic talent of Fechin, who naturally combined his academic skills with the cutting-edge ideas of the early 20th century. It demonstrates spontaneity of emotion, exploding into rapid, energetic, and free art with a rigid internal logic of composition, superlative draftsmanship with subtleties and colourist constructions. This work is one of the striking examples of Art Nouveau portraiture and one of Fechin's undeniable masterpieces.
We are grateful to Dr Galina Tuluzakova for providing this catalogue entry.