Georgii Bogdanovich YAKULOV (1884-1928) Elégante aux courses, 1920 Huile sur panneau de bois, signée et datée en bas à gauche Contresigné au dos 114 x 70,5 cm Provenance : Collection particulière, Suisse
YAKULOV, GEORGY 1884-1928 Woman in Yellow Coat signed, also inscribed in Cyrillic 'B. Sadovaya/10/K.38', and numbered '390' on an old label on the reverse Oil on canvas, 68 by 50.5 cm. In the work of Georgy Yakulov the female portraits of the early1920s occupy a special place. By this time, captivated by the romance of the revolutionary era and enthusiasm for artistic reformation, the artist was enjoying the rewards of his international fame.His studio at 10 Sadovaya Street in the former apartment block ofthe industrialist Ilya Pigit, where Yakulov moved after theRevolution, became a landmark for Bohemian Moscow. On thedoor of apartment 38, on the seventh floor, one could read:"Comrade thieves! Do not break into my apartment, please, asthere is nothing of value here. You will only break your neck fornothing, if the master of the house comes out to meet you". Thesoirées here were attended by Vsevolod Meyerhold, AleksandrTairov, Andrei Beliy, Alisa Koonen, Vasily Kachalov, FedorSologub, Sergei Prokofiev and Anatoly Lunacharsky. Famous RedArmy commanders such as Semyon Budyonny, Kliment Voroshilovand Georgy Zhukov also came to sit for their portraits. Among the many guests at Yakulov's studio was the French senator de Monzie, who wrote a few lines in his memoirs about hisvisit: "Midnight. I promised to dine with the artist Yakulov towhom I was introduced. I was curious to see how an artist lives ina time of revolution. Yakulov is an admirer of the new regime, helives at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street in apartment 38, in a realMontparnasse-style caravanserai. The studio is also his lodgings,his bed is set up on a mezzanine, and a table and little divan underneath make a parlour for guests... He is dark haired and lookshalf Asiatic, he is not affected by any influences, unless you countthe bright colours of his wandering roads and the bas-reliefs ofByzantine art. Yakulov tries to show human psychology in rhythmand lines. Like others, he is an artist of movement, but of movement that is feverish and wild. Yakulov took from the revolution ataste for epic compositions, for generalizations on a world scale". Yakulov's fame as a theatrical artist grew with each day. Leadingdirectors and innovative producers starting out on their careersvied with each other to engage him for their productions. It was astanding joke in Moscow's theatrical circles that as long as therewere sets by Yakulov, there would be plays. The literary cafésformed by Yakulov were renowned throughout the city: the Stableof Pegasus, which became the haven of the Imagists, where theself-styled "jewellers of gesture and lapidaries of the word" (fromImagist's Declaration, 1919) held noisy parties, and thePittoresque, renamed the Red Cock after the Revolution. His salons were conceived as the "World railway station" of art where"army orders for the artistic masters of the new epoch" would beannounced to the beat of a drum, where debates were held,shows were staged and poets such as Aleksandr Blok, VladimirMayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin recited their verses. This literary and artistic milieu was also the source of most ofYakulov's portraits, including the female portrait presented forauction, which was executed in the artist's famous studio, as indicated by the painter's inscription on the stretcher. Among thewomen who sat as models for Yakulov and commissioned paint-ings from him in the 1920s were the artist's wife Natalia Shif, theprototype of Bulgakov's heroine in Zoika's Apartment; the brilliantactress of Tairov's experimental Chamber Theatre, Alisa Koonen;the opera singer Yevgenia Lvova, who lived nearby in apartment20, no longer young, but a statuesque, even grand figure; themother of the poet Vadim Shershenevich and part-time editorand publisher of the Imagists' publishing house Mezzanine ofPoetry, and according to rumour, even the famous barefootdancer Isadora Duncan, who visited Yakulov's studio on severaloccasions and first became acquainted with Sergei Yesenin whenvisiting the artist in the autumn of 1921. Unfortunately, like the portrait presented here for auction, mostof Yakulov's surviving portraits, such as Portrait of a Girl, Portrait ofa Woman with an Umbrella, or Portrait of a Woman at a Small Table,cannot be reliably linked to any well-known figures. This is notonly because in the driven, turbulent artistic life of the 1920s,events and encounters merged in a cycle of constantly changingfaces, or the ensuing political reaction to this which spared neither the artist's wife, nor most of his friends, but above all, due tothe manner of Yakulov's artistic improvisation. Yakulov had an innate proclivity for romantic fantasy, an attraction to the exotic and a decorative sense of colour which mergedorganically in his portraits with a certain liberal symbolic treatment of the image. The history of the painting of Koonen's por-trait is noteworthy in this respect. When the actress saw the finished work, she was surprised: "But my hair is not that colour",she said to the artist. "You are an artist and you can have hair ofany colour. In this case, I saw you generally in gold and browncolours and I gave you chestnut hair", Yakulov replied. It is hardly surprising that the artist's wife Natalia Shif is also difficult to recognise in her portrait, despite the colourful memoirsabout her left by Tatiana Lappa, who lived in the same apartment block in the early 1920s with her husband MikhailBulgakov: "She was not beautiful, but her figure was superb.Red-haired and covered in freckles. When she was walking or arrived somewhere in a car, there was always a crowd of men following her. She wore no underclothes... she would put her dressor coat straight on her naked body, and wore a huge hat. Andshe always wore lots of very expensive perfume. As soon shewoke in the morning she would call out: "George, go get mesome vodka!", then she would pour a glass and the day would begin. Well, they were always having some sort of wild parties, withrather suspect people, so they were under surveillance. They observed them from the other side of the street. Then she disappeared somewhere..." Another neighbour, the writer A. Levshin,described Yakulov's wife as "a strange woman, with a flamboyantstyle and dress. There is something in her of the heroines inToulouse-Lautrec's portraits. She has superb golden hair, a figureof rare beauty, and an asymmetrical face with an aquiline nose,generally far from pleasing. An unbeautiful beauty. People hadvery different views about her. Some were delighted by her elegance and breadth. Others were shocked by the liberal morals inher home. Yakulov's studio had a scandalous reputation. If therumours are to be believed, it was frequented not only by the bohemian set, but quite suspect individuals, of which there weremany in the period of the New Economic Policy..."
