Robert Falk

Robert Rafailovich Falk (Russian: Роберт Рафаилович Фальк, October 15, 1886 – October 1, 1958) was a Russian and Soviet avant-garde painter.
Falk was born in Moscow in 1886. In 1903 to 1904 he studied art in the studios of Konstantin Yuon and Ilya Mashkov, in 1905 to 1909 he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture with Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov.
In 1910, Falk was one of the founders and the most active participant of the artistic group Jack of Diamonds. Along with Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, Ilya Mashkov, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Alexander Kuprin, Aristarkh Lentulov, Vasily Rozhdestvensky with whom he became friends at the Moscow School of Painting, he was one of the Jack of Diamonds (in Russian: Бубновый валет) creators and major representatives. This group of artists, one of the first currents of the Russian avant-garde, rejected academicism and realism of the 19th century and was influenced, at the beginning, by the work of Paul Cézanne, whom it defended, and by Post-Impressionism.
The group considered Paul Cézanne the only painter worth following, and the rest of visual art to be too trivial and bourgeois. The distinctive feature of Falk's paintings of the time was sculpturing of the form using many layers of different paints.
In 1918-1928, Falk taught at VKhUTEMAS (State Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops). In 1928 Falk went on a supposedly short trip to France and refused to return; he worked in Paris until 1938.
In 1928, Robert Falk was sent to Paris by the USSR People's Commissariat of Education, which was also in charge of all cultural issues, "to study the classical heritage in painting."
The "Paris decade" (1928-1937) brought the artist new impressions, a new state of mind, a new style and technique. Many art historians believe that this period became the pinnacle of Robert's work: "It was here that his brush acquired a special instability, airiness, lightness." In Paris, Falk found a new style of painting, unstable and airy. The paintings seem to be filled with the French spring air and floral scents.
In Paris, Falk Falk began practically as a young artist whom no one knows, but he definitely liked it. He led an almost student existence, although at that time he was already over forty years old. He found an inexpensive studio, saved on everything, gave private lessons in drawing and music (he was an excellent pianist, performing Schubert and Schumann).
In Paris, Falk created more than three hundred urban landscapes and landscapes of the Bois de Boulogne and the city's environs, Longjumeau, Neuilly-sur-Marne, Neuilly-sur-Seine. He painted small cafes on narrow streets, the Seine embankments, bridges over the Seine, canals with barges. The artist gave a very expressive description of Paris: "This is not a city, but a whole country, each quarter is a separate city."
In his early work, Falk experienced a strong passion for Cezanne. In Paris, he again became a Cezannist. Falk went to the places where his favorite artist had been - to Mount Sainte-Victoire. "Cézanne's precision haunted me," he wrote about this trip. But Falk does not repeat Cezanne, but seeks his own techniques.
He worked as a designer of the Soviet pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne de 1937. During his visit to the pavillon espagnol de l'Exposition In the Paris universelle, Falk met with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, who were hanging "Guernica". After this, Falk visited Picasso in his apartment on Rue des Grands Augustins, and also met Paul Rosenberg there, and later his brother Léonce Rosenberg. However, these few meetings did not go beyond that, and there was no further interaction - just as Falk's meetings with Louis Vauxcelles, the artists Moïse Kisling, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Marie Laurencin, and the poets and philosophers André Salmon, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, and Paul Eluard did not lead to the emergence of a real friendship and interaction. Falk never really managed to fit into the French artistic world.
Life in Paris gradually began to change: the economic crisis, the proximity of war, the threat of the spread of fascism. "I expected a lot from Paris and received a lot from it, I became stronger as an artist. But it became increasingly difficult to work, a feeling of decline and catastrophe set in." Despite professional success and the comfort of Parisian life, the artist was tormented by nostalgia. Falk returned to Moscow in 1937. Many of his French friends did not understand this act. He himself was also well aware that he could be arrested. But the artist faced a vital task that overcame any fear: he dreamed of bringing his paintings to Russia and seeing them in Russian museums.
After 1938, until his death in 1958 he worked in Moscow, most of the time in isolation. His works of that time were in neo-impressionist style with characteristic white-on-white colors (not unlike the later paintings of his teacher Valentin Serov).
During the Khrushchev Thaw Falk became popular among young painters and many considered him to be the main bridge between the traditions of the Russian and French Moderne of the beginning of 20th century and Russian avant-garde and the Russian avant-garde of the 1960s.
There are numerous paintings by Falk in the New Tretyakov Art Museum in Moscow.
Robert Falk was influenced by Rembrandt in his use of color and light. Falk considered Rembrandt to be the most significant influence on his own work, even more than that of Cézanne.