THE TSUKANOV ART COLLECTION

 
 

Anisfeld Boris

 ‘My artistic vision always begins with a colour which the drama and music evoke within me. This is particularly the case with music: as I begin work on the stage design for a new production, I don't so much use the story of the play as follow the musical score’.

1878 - 1973

Boris Anisfeld was an impressionist painter whose name remained in obscurity for many years in Russia. That the artist was discovered so late is for the most part because he spent most of his life and created most of his work in America. The turbulent artistic life at the turn of the twentieth century helped Anisfeld to quickly establish himself as a painter, graphic artist as well as a set-designer for many theatrical productions. His paintings explore various themes, including mythological and biblical stories, sometimes coming close to the work of the symbolists. He experiments with portraits, landscape and still-life. The artist became renowned for his pictorial figures from fantastical dreams and féeries; his style of painting was expressive and endeavoured to achieve an emotional intensity through his palette of colours and a distinct and irreal transfer of colour. It was, however, the theatre which became his most organic form of self-expression. Anisfeld was known as the 'alchemist of colour' because of the breadth and magic of the colours he used in his sets.


‘The allure of fantasy away from the real world’ can be keenly felt in those objects which the artist instils with life. Boris Anisfeld transforms this life by passing it through a 'crucible of colours', so to speak. He creates subtle contrasts of colour, astonishing for their boldness and strength, and which immediately transcend the sharp distinction between life as it is in reality and as it is depicted by the creative eye’. Vsevolod Voinov
 
The artist's work can be found in the following museums and collections:
Lady with fruits
The Russian Museum