Vickery

In her latest auction round-up for Vickery Art, Aleksandra Todorovic explores two extraordinary paintings that demonstrate why the Russian avant-garde was not a footnote to European modernism, but one of its driving forces: Kazimir Malevich’s Head of a Peasant (1911), from the Joe Lewis Collection, and Mikhail Larionov’s Head of a Soldier(1910), offered from a distinguished private Swiss collection.

Although separated by provenance, both paintings share a common artistic moment. Exhibited in the legendary Donkey’s Tail exhibition in Moscow in 1912, they reveal how the Russian avant-garde helped redefine the possibilities of modern art in the years before the First World War. Rather than occupying the margins of European culture, Malevich and Larionov stood among its great innovators.

While many Western artists looked to Africa and the classical world for inspiration, Russian modernists turned to icons, folk traditions and peasant life, forging a new visual language rooted in their own cultural inheritance. Engaging with Cubism, Fauvism and Expressionism as equals rather than imitators, they transformed portraiture into something more universal: archetypes of identity, labour and modern existence itself.

Alongside works by Klimt, Modigliani, Picasso, Magritte, Bacon and Freud, these extraordinary paintings remind us that the history of modern portraiture—and of European modernism and post-modernism more broadly—cannot be understood without the contribution of the Russian avant-garde.

Read Aleksandra Todorovic’s full auction review on the Vickery Art website.

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