Beschreibung:

The Game of Billiards. Aristarkh Lentulov and Petr Konchalovsky
Provenance: Collection of the artist’s family. Important private collection, Europe. Exhibited: 1-aia vystavka proizvedenii Petra Petrovicha Konchalovskogo, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, April 1922. Unknown Konchalovsky, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, 30 March–2 June 2002. Les Peintres Russes du“Valet de Carreau”. Entre Cézanne et L’Avant-Garde, Salle d’expositions de la Principauté de Monaco, Monaco, 11 March–12 April 2004. “Bubnovyi Valet” v russkom avangarde, State Russian Museum, 9 July–15 November 2004; State Tretyakov Gallery, 1 February–15 May 2005. Persona. Image. Time. Human Representation in Art: from Modernism to the Present-Day, Cultural Foundation Ekaterina, Moscow, 18 September–13 December 2009. Literature: V. Nikolskii, Petr Petrovich Konchalovsky, Moscow, Vsekokhudozhnik, 1936, p. 9, listed as Billiard. Konchalovsky. Khudozhestvennoe nasledie, Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1964, p. 102, listed as “zhi 252”. Exhibition catalogue, N. Avtonomova, A. Lukanova (eds), Unknown Konchalovsky, Moscow, Axiom Graphic, 2002, p. 238, No. 39, illustrated; p. 287, listed under the year 1918; p. 291, listed under the year 1918. Exhibition catalogue, A. Sarabianov, Z. Tregulova (eds), Les Peintres Russes du Valet de Carreau. Entre Cézanne et L’Avant- Garde, St Petersburg, Palace Editions Europe, 2004, pp. 142 and 143, illustrated and listed; p. 150, No. 26, listed. Exhibition catalogue, E. Petrova, L. Iovleva, A. Morozov (eds), “Bubnovyi Valet” v russkom avangarde, St Petersburg, Palace Editions, 2004, pp. 312 and 313, illustrated and listed. V. Turchin, Petr Konchalovsky, Moscow, Belyi Good, 2008, p. 133, illustrated and listed. Exhibition catalogue, Persona. Image. Time. Human Representation in Art: from Modernism to the Present-Day, Moscow, Cultural Foundation Ekaterina, 2009, p. 27, illustrated. Petr Konchalovsky’s 1918 The Game of Billiards. Aristarkh Lentulov and Petr Konchalovsky is an iconic work from one of the most important European collections of Russian art. The picture, a double portrait of Aristarkh Lentulov and Konchalovsky himself, the leading artists of the 20th century, ushers in a new stage in the painter’s work. After the recent World War I, which had cooled the ardour of the avant-garde artistic pursuits of the masters in the Jack of Diamonds group, the end of 1910s saw the beginnings of a new creative and emotional uplift. It was a period in which, as Gleb Pospelov put it, “... among all the recent members of the Jack of Diamonds circle, the social ferment that had come into being outside the walls of their workshops seems to have spurred them on and made them work with unbridled enthusiasm. The actual pace of their “artistic output” was increasing, as well as the actual speed of the work, making one recall the canvasses of the beginning of the decade... the elevated mood was shaped by the urge towards a natural kind of existence that had until then seemed to be suppressed and then, in the post-revolutionary age, to be uninhibited for the first time” (G. Pospelov, Jack of Diamonds, Moscow, Pinakoteka, 2008, p. 216). The painting is a sort of reflection on and a new interpretation of an idea that came sensationally to the fore at the first exhibition of the young Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow in the winter of 1910–1911. At that time, Ilya Mashkov’s enormous satirical picture Self-Portrait and Portrait of Petr Konchalovsky (1910, State Russian Museum) came to be a kind of manifesto for Jack of Diamonds painting as a whole. The half-naked, farcical wrestlers with their weights, frozen as though in a poster while performing the lyrical romance Bombita, were issuing their artistic challenge both to the academic tradition and to symbolist art. Several volumes, one of which featured the name Cézanne on its spine, could be seen standing on the piano in one corner, giving a keynote expression to their creative credo. Eight years later, Konchalovsky again depicted himself and his Jack of Diamonds pal as