Vladimir Igorevich Yakovlev (Russian, 1934-1998)Still life with a turned flower signed in Cyrillic (lower left)oil on hardboard52.2 x 63cm (20 9/16 x 24 13/16in). Footnotes: Provenance Collection of Professor Mikhail M. FotievCollection of Alexander Kronik (acquired from the above) Exhibited Moscow, Multimedia Art Museum, Sometimes a dream is like sight... In the memory of Vladimir Yakovlev, December 2014 - January 2015 Literature A. Kronik et al., My Circle: Nonconformist artists in the collection of Alexander Kronik, Moscow, 2010, illustrated p. 283, no. 562 Exh. cat. Sometimes a dream is like sight... In the memory of Vladimir Yakovlev, Moscow, 2014, illustrated p. 115 'There must be the energy of life within a painting. It must give a feeling of organisation to one's life, work, a call to order and purity. In colour, there should be tenderness, it should convey the dynamics of life, not its emptiness, give something fresh, true, and convey it with a single brush stroke... I was told: your flower is falling. But the life of a flower is within its fall. If not, the flower is dead. Falling is life...,' - Vladimir Yakovlev. A fragile flower falling is a strikingly resonant metaphor for Vladimir Yakovlev's life and work. Partially blind and lacking a formal artistic education, Yakovlev exhibited exceptional artistic talent and yet from 1984 was confined to Soviet psychiatric hospitals where he endured the harshest of conditions. Paradoxically, it was the loss of his sight and the constant isolation in psychiatric institutions which enabled him to develop a firm grasp of the intangible and a clear vision of the harmony of life, untrammelled by the cruel reality of his own existence. Like many non - conformist artists of his time, Vladimir Yakovlev was destined to exist outside the Soviet official ideological system. In the 1970s his work received recognition abroad when it was featured in important exhibitions of the collections of Alexander Gleser and Jacob and Kenda Bar Gera. Nevertheless, in his native country Yakovlev's paintings, which were rooted in expressionism, were confined to the private realm of 'apartment exhibitions' and to the collections of only the most courageous of connoisseurs, such as Alexander Kronik. Spanning the period from 1960 to 2000, the aesthetic and scholarly significance of Alexander Kronik's collection of Soviet Non-conformist Art cannot be over-estimated. Assembled over several decades with a deep understanding of the zeitgeist, the collection builds a portrait of a generation of Russian artists, including Anatoly Zverev, Oskar Rabin, Ilya Kabakov, Vladimir Nemukhin, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Dmitry Plavinsky, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Vasily Sitnikov, among others. The legacy of Vladimir Yakovlev forms an important part of this outstanding collection, with its prime examples of his 'iconic' still lifes, portraits, paintings of birds, cats, and flowers - all capturing a deeply personal story between the artist and the collector. Kronik and Yakovlev met in 1987, when Alexander, together with the famous memoirist Natalia Shmelkova, visited the artist at a Moscow psychiatric hospital. In Alexander's recollection, 'the atmosphere of the mournful ward where Yakovlev spent most of his time [...] could not leave one indifferent... Volodya, unlike his neighbors, was absolutely adequate and very charming. He was a very kind man in general... Years spent by a nearly blind artist in mental institutions did not make his art gloomy and chaotic. On the contrary, his subjects are light and integral, and his paintings are filled with metaphysical beauty and positive energy.' This episode, eloquently described in Kronik's essay published in My Circle, Moscow, 2010, marked the start of a close friendship between the artist and the collector which lasted until Yakovlev's death in 1998. Following the artist's death, Alexander Kronik co-founded The Vladimir Yakovlev Foundation which in 2014, together with the Moscow Multimedia Art Museum, held a large-scale exhibition dedicated to Vladimir Yakovlev: Sometimes a dream is like sight... To the present day, Alexander Kronik holds the most extensive collection of works and archival documents that constitutes an integral part of the scholarship surrounding Yakovlev's oeuvre. The offered four pictures (lots 53-55A) belong to an important body of work created by Yakovlev in the 1990s in the short periods spent away from the mental institutions. These rare 'holidays' were made possible with the support of another fundamental figure in the life of the artist, Mikhail Fotiev. Professor of physics and mathematics, art collector, and author of several articles about Yakovlev, Fotiev made every effort to bring public attention to the Yakovlev's condition and often invited the artist to stay and work in the comfort of professor's home. Executed in a highly expressive manner, the present four works are spectacular examples of Yakovlev's artistry and visual language. The deliberate spontaneity of the canvases Still life with a turned flower and Female portrait with apples in a vase, highlighted by muted tones, rapid large brush strokes and reduction of form, evoke the notion of anxiety and loneliness which are reflective of the artist's experiences. In contrast, the gouaches Woman with blue eyes and Still life with three red flowers are executed in a subtle pastel palette and suggest fragility and calmness. Yakovlev's favourite tools of expression: deformation, the flattening of form, the expansiveness of colour, and experimentation with focal points and perspective – all are used to present the artworks as highly emotive harmonic structures. Figurativism aside, Yakovlev's portraits and paintings of flowers, often created solely from memory, are not designed to render realistic properties of the subjects; rather they are presented as symbols, metaphysical representations which reveal the ephemeral essence of a human being and nature itself. In many ways autobiographical, these portraits of humanity and nature are key to understanding Yakovlev's opaque inner world – a world which, in the artist's words, was above all defined by beauty: 'I can convey everything in my painting: movement, love, shouting. Through colour, I try to convey the cry of unharvested wheat. But it is difficult to convey human thought. My painting is not abstract, not realistic, it is decorative. I love beauty.' in M. Fotiev, 'Among us lives an abandoned genius: about the life and fate of the artist Vladimir Yakovlev', in Izvestia, Moscow, 1992, June 5. For further information about Alexander Kronik's collection and the publication My Circle, Moscow, 2010, please visit http://www.svoykrug.com/ Коллекция советского нонконформистского искусства Александра Кроника берет начало в 1980-х годах и на сегодняшний день представляет собой одно из редчайши
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