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The Soul is Full of Colour

The web-only auction dedicated to paintings of Soviet Realism running until 12 July 2022 – from private collections established in the second half of the 20th century – offers a varied and fascinating kaleidoscope of 20th-century Russian figuration that lives and feeds on the creativity and imagination of countless artistic personalities, who appear anything but constrained within the narrow confines of Soviet communist propaganda.

In Adalbbert Mikhailovich Erdely’s intense 1951 Portrait of a Child in a Chair (lot 62, estimate Euro 1,500 – 2. 000 euro), the fauve influences of Derain, Bonnard, Dufy and Matisse that he had met in Paris during his journey and stay between 1929 and 1931, which had taken him first to Prague and then to Rome, can be perceived, the same climate that we breathe in the Still Life of 1924 by Vera Maksimchuk (lot 177, estimate 2,000 – 3,000 euro), which explodes with vivid colours.

The reality of these artists is intimate and far from the clamour of the revolutionary communist utopia that radicalised the relationship with modernity through a tabula rasa with history: their poetic world is full of colour, beauty, and passion for life, which compared to the palingenesis of the avant-garde, appear a bulwark of sensual certainties.