THE TSUKANOV ART COLLECTION

Vladimir Igorevich Yakovlev was a Moscow artist who in life acquired the reputation of a ‘Soviet fool’, a ‘mad genius’, an undoubtedly talented and original artist. The grandson of the famous landscape painter, Mikhail Yakovlev, one of the founders of Russian impressionism, he created an unforgettable figurative language in which the link between the human and reality is refracted in a special and vulnerable ‘Russian’ angle of classic avant-garde strategies of the 20th century. Yakovlev drew pictures practically blind. On the canvas was left the reflections of the sincere internal vision of the artist and expression in a pure form. This is particularly discernible in his upbeat primitivistic portraits and still-lifes. Yakovlev was a diverse artist but one of his favourite subjects was flowers – his hallmark, similar to the Nemukhin’s cards. Unlike anything in nature, fragile and powerful, sunny and tragic, they were always cosmic and imbued with an ‘intimate magical lyricism’. Most of his work formed parts of series but those pictures which are close in terms of their motifs are far from monotonous. The artist continually improvised, varying a line, colour, form, often naively simplified and always strict and honourable. Yakovlev’s paintings use five or six principle colours, preferring restrained rather cool tones and without fail, white, injecting luminescence to the paintings. Influenced by his grandfather’s painting, he created many impressionistic abstractions and landscapes. At the same time he also painted realistic still-lifes from nature and ‘from himself’, invoking deformation and abstraction. However, underlying his creativity is expressionism, revealing him the person and his internal life. This is the source of the impetuosity of his stroke, communicating the movement of the object and colour.