Lot 167: Alexander Yakovlevich Golovin , 1863-1930 portrait of Fridrikh Eduardovich Krimmer, 1919 tempera on canvas

tempera on canvas

84.5 by 71cm., 33¼ by 28in.

Artists of the USSR over the last 15 years, 1932, Cat. No. 340

E.Gollerbach, A.Ya.Golovin: Zhizn' I tvorchestvo, Leningrad: Akademiya khudozhestv, 1928, illustrated p.69

The offered lot belongs to a series of portraits of the artist's close circle of contemporaries painted after the turbulent years of Revolution, one of which (Portrait of E.A.Kuper also from 1919) hangs in the State Russian Museum. Marking the zenith of Golovin's development as a portrait painter, these intimate works, unified by their restrained composition and colour scheme are essentially character studies. Setting his subjects against a blank, barely finished background, Golovin concentrates his viewer's gaze entirely on the face of the sitter. These are portraits of men caught in the uncertainty of a changing world. Fridrikh Krimmer (1888-1963) was one of the leading lights of the Russian intelligentsia. A financier and keen art collector, he owned works by Boris Kustodiev, Sergei Sudeikin and Marc Chagall and was a close friend of Golovin.