Beschreibung:

Nudes Bathing
Provenance: The artist’s estate. Acquired from the above by Vose Galleries, Boston, 1948. Reacquired from the above by the artist’s estate, 1956. Collection of Roger Prigent. Anonymous sale; Modern and Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture , Sotheby’s New York, 28 February 1992, Lot 120. Anonymous sale; Russian Art , Sotheby’s New York, 17 April 2007, Lot 335. Private collection, UK. Exhibited: Alexandre Iacovleff Memorial Exhibition , Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, January–February 1954. Alexander Yakovlev’s painting Nudes Bathing is a kind of summation of his work over many years on the theme of the nude. The largest of all Yakovlev’s 1929 Parisian works on this subject, it combines the artist’s new researches into colour with his development of his beloved image of the Russian bath-house and expressive Neoclassical form. At the same time, alongside the artist’s obvious interest in the 17th-century Old Masters, the influence of Cézanne’s Baigneuses is clearly discernable. The painting preserves a legacy from the art of former times: a sense of allegory about the female forms, each of them incorporated in a circle and simultaneously turned side-on towards the viewer, a difference of scale in the portrayal of primary and secondary subject matter, a localisation of colour, a smoothness in the manner of execution, glazes, and a brown academic background. The severe, almost monochrome, use of colour nonetheless brings out as vividly as possible the sensuous, young, statuesque figures of the women, at different heights, in motion and forming a circle. The treatment of the nudes, their corporality and bevelled structural quality strongly recall Cézanne. Yakovlev rejected much unnecessary detail. He brought the figures of the young women closer to the viewer and in a larger scale than normal. The image of women bathing is elevated by the artist to a profoundly universal statement: it has become a personification of the eternal, timeless ideal of health, femininity and the beauty of the youthful naked body. Despite the presence of objects typically found in a bath-house – the tub of water, stone benches, ladles and thin towels for the bathers to rub down with – the space is purely notional, stripped of any vernacular features. Only the arched doorway and steps in the background, which lend the composition the effect of breaking through into a brightly lit space behind the picture, is redolent of Italian painting. It was no chance remark when Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva gave this description of Yakovlev’s work at the time: “His multi-faceted art, embracing all the developments in modern art, was nevertheless classical in the best sense of the word... His draughtsmanship was exact, powerful and simplified. All his creative work produced an impression of profound truth, sincerity and seriousness”. In fact, among the masters of Neoclassicism in the 1920s Yakovlev’s name stood in the front rank. His work exemplified this 20th-century artistic movement in an innovative form, which came not only from the artist’s deep affinity with the classics, but also from certain entirely new endeavours in art, particularly Cubism and Neoprimitivism, with their techniques of deformation. The influence was also felt of his formal education from the Academy of Arts. Even in his student days Yakovlev was attracted by the impudent idea of showcasing the mastery of the Old Masters. In 1913 the artist finished two paintings for his degree, The Bath-house and Bathing , in which he gave free expression to his delight in the Old Masters, and especially Rubens. This came through in everything: choice of subject, interpretation of the naked body, compositional structure and heightened attention to drawing. Yakovlev came out of the Academy ardently convinced of the need to continue with what he had begun – his study of the art of the past. For him his acquaintanceship with the European painting tradition became significantly instructive, especially in Italy