Lot 269: Aleksander Isaakovich Rusakov , 1898-1952 still life with green bottle oil on canvas

oil on canvas

51 by 43cm., 20 by 17in.

London, Roy Miles Gallery, Russian Paintings, December 1988

M.Guerman, Alexander Rusakov, Sovietsky Khudozhnik, 1989, Cat.No.60
Roy Miles Gallery, Russian Art - Summer Exhibition, London 1988
Russian Art 1920s-30s, Moscow, Kit Art Publishing, p.28

The family of the artist, St. Petersburg
Roy Miles Gallery, London

This work was executed in 1923-4 and is painted with a composition with a violin on the reverse. As Mikhail Guerman writes in his monograph on the artist "many of the items [in Rusakov's still lifes] are placed with well-thought sincerity that reflects the vision of the artist, thinking in a compositional sense and choosing the objects in their organic functional closeness and those contrasts of colour and texture in which are hidden the harmonic contradictions - ' the field of pressure', without which no real still life can succeed." Rusakov Studied under Karev and Osip Braz at the Academy of Arts in Leningrad where he remained during the Second World War and painted highly acclaimed blockade landscapes. His first solo exhibition was held five years after his death in 1957. The work of Alexander Rusakov is in all the major museums of Russian with the State Russian Museum and Tretyakov Gallery owning over 30 pieces. The Circle of Artists, of which the artist was a founder member, has just been the subject of a major retrospective at the State Russian Museum and work by the artist is currently featured in the Time to Collect exhibition at the same location.