?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
ALEXANDER VESNIN Phaedre, Kamerni Theatre.
Gouache, watercolor, brown and black chalk with pencil on wove paper, 1922. 310 x 210 mm; 12 1/4x8 1/4inches. Signed and dated in gouache, lower right recto.
Throughout the 1920s and 30s Alexander Vesnin, along with his brothers Leonid and Victor, proved to be one of the foremost leaders of Constructivist architecture in Soviet Russia, while also establishing himself as a prominent painter and stage designer. From 1921-24 Vesnin taught painting at the Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops), Moscow, as well as a basic color construction course with Lyubov Popova. During this period he created stage designs and produced sets and costumes for various productions by A. Y. Tairov at the Kamernyy Theatre, Moscow, including Racine's Phèdre in 1922 and, the following year, G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday. The colorful sets and costumes for Phèdre reflected his growing interest in intersecting volumes and lines encountered in his paintings of this period and his Constructivist ideas, gleaned from the newly founded Inkhuk (Institute of Artistic Culture), Moscow, a forum for the discussion of avant-garde theories of art, that Alexander Rodchenko also attended.
In the present lot, most probably a study for a poster for Phèdre, Vesnin brilliantly expresses and underscores his emphasis on the importance of studying the basic plastic elements and their interplay: material, color, plane, line and texture—all of which he learned while training as an architect in structural engineering and practical construction management.
