Leaving Home

February 2010 Datebook

Island Noir

Bringing it to the Bay Area

Tribal Gathering

Living Large

Beyond a Snapshot

My Brilliant Career: Kiki Smith

Keep Cool

On the Fringe

The Bruce High Quality Foundation

Just Rewards

Movers & Shakers

Point of View: Dominic Molon

Not So Loopy

In the Air: Whitney Biennial

Also This Month

Serge Charchoune Henri le Fauconnier Jean Metzinger Doyle Dazzles Matisse Record Eclipsed at Christie’s

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Ever since opening in a two-story, 5,400-square-foot space in Geneva’s old town, in 2007, Galerie Artvera’s has been attracting attention with its museum-quality exhibitions. Its latest is no exception, offering a rare opportunity to reassess the work of one of the least familiar of Russia’s émigré artists, the abstract painter Serge Charchoune (1888-1975). On view through the spring, the show charts the painter’s career from his youthful flirtation with Dadaism to the geometric abstraction that became his hallmark. Gallery manager Sofia Komarova tapped three private collections of Charchoune’s work, including that of Paris dealer Benoît Sapiro, to assemble the 76 canvases on display, most of which are for sale, ranging in price from SF80,000 to SF600,000 ($58,000-771,000).

Charchoune (pronounced shar-SHOON) favored a subdued palate enlivened by vigorous rhythms and textured brushwork, as evidenced in the 1926 Still Life with Pear No. 1. After World War II, his paintings became larger and brighter, some evoking locales such as Venice, while others, like Musicalist Composition No. 3 (1957), were inspired by the compositions of Beethoven or Berlioz.

The artist lived mostly in France and is relatively unknown elsewhere, with just one U.S. gallery show, for example, staged in 1930 by Alexander Iolas in New York. He has, however, been gaining recognition in Russia as one of its native masters. Born in Buguruslan, a small town 1,000 miles of east of Moscow, Charchoune spent only one year in the capital, where he studied with the painter Ilya Mashkov before being drafted into the army in 1910. He deserted and ended up in Paris, becoming a pupil of the Cubists Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. Charchoune works, like The Tree (1928), bring to mind Metzinger’s layering of flat colors and angular forms.

The artist never returned to his homeland, remaining active in Paris for more than 50 years. The apex of his career was a 1971 retrospective at the Museé d’Art Moderne in Paris. The first most Russians heard of him was in 2006, when major shows of his paintings were mounted at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. Since then Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery has opened a room devoted to his work.

Artvera’s has produced a meaty, 176-page catalogue for the Charchoune show, which coincides with the publication of volume three (out of a projected five) of Pierre Guénégan’s monumental catalogue raisonné of the artist.

"Leaving Home" originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2010 Table of Contents.