Robert Falk

Robert Falk (Moscow, 1886 - 1958) was a Russian and Soviet avant-garde painter. His career spans the shift from Post-Impressionism to the early Russian avant-garde, and his work stands out for combining French influences with a strongly personal manner.

He studied in the studios of Konstantin Yuon and Ilya Mashkov in 1903 and 1904, and from 1905 to 1909 at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, under Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov. In 1910 he was one of the founders and the most active member of the Jack of Diamonds group, which rejected the academicism and realism of the nineteenth century and took Paul Cézanne as its model. His paintings of this period are marked by a sculptural handling of form built up through many layers of paint. From 1918 to 1928 he taught at VKhUTEMAS, the State Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops.

In 1928 he was sent to Paris by the Soviet People's Commissariat for Education to study classical painting. During the decade he spent in France, until 1937, he produced more than three hundred urban landscapes and views of the Bois de Boulogne and the city's surroundings, with a looser, airier brushwork. He met Picasso during the Exposition Universelle, although these contacts did not develop into lasting friendships. He returned to Moscow in 1937, despite the uncertainty this involved, and spent the rest of his life there, largely in isolation, painting in a neo-Impressionist manner.

During the Khrushchev Thaw he was popular among young painters, who saw him as a bridge between Russian and French modernist traditions and the avant-garde of the 1960s. Many of his works are held in the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. His pupils included Hieorhij Niski. According to the sources, Rembrandt was a decisive influence on his use of colour and light, even more than Cézanne.