DAVID SHTERENBERG (RUSSIAN 1881-1948)

DAVID SHTERENBERG (RUSSIAN 1881-1948)
Still Life with Wine Bottle, Glass and Fruit,
oil on canvas
70 x 60.9 cm (27 9/16 x 24 in.)
signed lower right

PROVENANCE
Collection of Carol Robinson (probably acquired directly from the artist circa 1925)
Private collection by descent from the above
James D. Julia Auctions, Fairfield, Maine, August 25-27, 2004, lot 116
Acquired at the above by the present owner

EXPERTISE
Accompanied by an authenticity certificate from the Tretyakov Gallery signed by Yulia Rybakova, 2012. (Copy available upon request)

LITERATURE
G. D. Gloss, Music and the Moderns: The Life and Work of Carol Robinson (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1993), p. 89, 257

LOT NOTES
The present work comes from the collection of renowned American pianist and teacher Carol Robinson. She was an avid participant of the Parisian avant-garde scene, and counted among her milieu many artists and authors, such as Fernand L�ger, Cocteau, Hemingway, Tchelitchew, Grosz and Terechkovitch. As documented in Robinson's biography, her impressive art collection comprised many works by such illustrious acquaintances, most gifted by the artists themselves. Robinson and Shterenberg met at a Parisian salon likely in 1925 or 1927, at which point this work (referred to in the biography as Still Life) entered Robinson's collection, where it would remain for several decades.
By the 1920s, Shterenberg, who had lived in Paris for over a decade in 1906-1917, returned to Moscow in the pursuit of possibilities offered by the new communist state. These opportunities � to direct, for example, major international exhibitions of Soviet art and to display his own works � brought Shterenberg back to Paris at various points in the 1920s (Mikhail P. Lazarev, David Shterenberg, Painter and Era: the Artist's Path, (Moscow: Galaktika, 1992), pp. 174-200). He would continue his association with the Parisian avant-garde, including its primary actors, such as Picasso, Modigliani, Chagall and Kees van Dongen. Despite his involvement with proponents of Cubism and Fauvism, Shternberg did not follow any particular school or faction, preferring instead a syncretic approach.
The present work is part of Shterenberg's most important and well-known genre: the still life. His fascination with materiality and the artist's role as its mediator made still lives the ideal vehicle through which to realize objects' essence. Here, the sharply tilted tabletop is populated by an empty wine bottle, delicate etched glass, brilliantly red strawberries, pear and apple in a basket and, finally, an oblong melon ��all precariously teetering on the surface, yet modelled with all the gravity of real weighty objects. The painting surface � here striated and resembling wood grain, there scraped, revealing the plain weave of the canvas � is, too, both strikingly formalistic and suggestive of a somatic connection to the objects. Shternberg's powerful composition and perspective, coupled with his deft, detailed handling of the paint, create a layered vision that rewards attentive inspection.