JEAN POUGNY IVAN ALBERTOVITCH PUGNI, dit (Kuokkala... Lot 50

JEAN POUGNY IVAN ALBERTOVITCH PUGNI, dit (Kuokkala [Empire russe, Grand-duché de Finlande], 1892 - Paris, 1956) LETTERING COMPOSITION About 1919 Oil on canvas Signed lower right in Cyrillic 60 x 50 cm Old restorations (mainly in the background) due to the transport Russia - France Technical condition report of 2021 on request Certificate of Mr. Jean Chauvelin dated August 3, 2020 which confirms the certificate of Mr. Berninger dated December 16, 1999, misplaced. Provenance - Former Richard Rouah collection, Nice; - Former Herman Berninger collection, Zürich, author of the catalogue raisonné; - Collection Paris. Bibliography - Herman Berninger and Jean-Albert Sartier, Jean Pougny (1892-1856), Catalogue of the work 1 Les Années d'avant-garde, Russie - Berlin, 1910-1923, Éditions Ernst Wasmuth Tübingen, Zürich, 1972 Lettrist composition, circa 1919, which belongs to the Suprematist movement 1918-1919. It is one of the few surviving works by the artist from this period. This painting belonged to Mr Herman Berninger, friend of the painter and author of the catalogue raisonné. He had acquired it in 1999 from the Richard Rouah collection in Nice. Rouah, Nice. In the spring of 1912, Pougny returned to Russia in St. Petersburg after having participated in the avant-garde milieu of Paris and having been particularly interested in Fauvism and Cubism. On his arrival in Russia, there were quarrels within the avant-garde united in the Youth Union. Pougny's studio became the rallying point for a whole group of young and spirited artists during this troubled period. It was there that the painter took the initiative for an exhibition that was to become a landmark in the history of modern Russian art. This exhibition took place at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts March 3, 1915. The enigmatic title was Malévich's and caused surprise and scandal, as it was the "letter" of a circular tramway that went around Moscow. The exhibitors were eleven. They were: Kliun, Malevich, Popova, Pugny, Tatlin, Exter... Pougny's paintings were halfway between Cubism and Dada The artist advocates the decomposition of the object and its recomposition according to essentially plastic laws, he joined here the concerns of Braque, Picasso, Léger and Juan Gris. He thus showed the extent to which he remained attached to the École de Paris while defending very personal notes in which humour was never excluded. The Tramway V exhibition was a scandalous success. In December 1915 - January 1916, Pougny organized the second exhibition of the group entitled O.10 (Fig. 1). It was on this occasion that Pougny and Malévich distributed the famous Manifesto of Suprematism (a word coined by Malévich). On the declared ruins of Futurism they founded Suprematism (Fig. 2). This new movement advocated the victory of creative reason over utilitarian forms - or 2X2 is anything but 4! Pougny would later analyse this heroic period of Suprematism: "...We arrive at the theory of abstraction, of flat painting in two dimensions and not three..." Today, we take the measure of the historical importance of this movement which, beyond aesthetic theories, introduced the liberation of the object, of pure form and of all traditional and figurative tutelage. There is a drive towards a new conception of the painting, a new plastic invention, new materials and new meanings of the work of art. From all of this, a modern aesthetic would emerge that would allow us to break the artistic deadlock that the academic world was stifling. Pougny always shared the revolutionary ideas of his time, he was a committed artist who participated in the propaganda by painting panels of 10 to 12 meters long and 6 meters high hung in the streets. However, Pougny never stopped working for himself. He went from a project for the Supreme Soviet to a constructivist still life. His forms are more and more liberated from the cubist texture while keeping the same concern of the organization of the surface and the space. On January 1, 1919, Pougny and his wife met Chagall who convinced them to come Chagall who convinced them to come to his city of Vitebsk to teach at the Academy he had just created. Pougny, during this period draws the city with an inexhaustible verve. He dissociates the elements of the motif, reco