Robert Falk Raphailovich
(1886-1958)

Robert Falk began his journey of the artist in a noisy group of young renewers painting, the "Jack of Diamonds", where he was the youngest. He studied at the private studios of K. Juon and I. Mashkov (her future mate society), then in the Moscow School of Painting at the K. Korovin and V. Serov (1905-10).

Like other "knaves", Falk sought expressive bulk form, wrote angular patches of saturated color. "During this period, I loved bright, contrasting combinations, generalized expressive contours, even emphasized their dark color," - he wrote later.

The main thing in his concise, devoid of any avaricious and beautiful landscape, made up of the simplest things still lifes of the 1910s. - Physical, tangible full weight houses and tree crowns, bottles or clay earthenware pots. Like his comrades, he uses some of the techniques of "vyvesochnogo" primitive weighting, sealing capacity. Trying to compile the form and fashion a lot of color, it absorbs the current time for art lessons P. Cézanne (the sharp-tongued critic A. Efros, M. Falk called the man "Cezanne's nationality").

Pumping the internal stress of work, he is not afraid to make it a rather sharp deformation, seeks, in his words, "the focus shifts form emotional expressiveness." Such, for example, sharp, nervous portrait Midhada Refatova (1915), "The Negro" (1917), etc.

From bristling with cheerfulness canvases most of his comrades in the society's early works Falk characterized by a certain gloom, the hidden drama, embodied not in the subjects, but only in the most picturesque structure of his work. Especially characteristic "Red Furniture" (1920), stress-predatory and angular, with its heavy, but aggressively intense color.

Gradually, during the 1920s., Falk's painting becomes more complex and subtle. Cubist disappear shifts - the emotional tension in the portrait can now be passed without them. Demonstrative "vyvesochnost" things too early is no longer needed. The surface of the canvas gently vibrates as complex as a moving color. Falk is looking for a complete picture, rich color and light environment, enveloping people and objects.

A few portraits of 1923-24. ("A woman in a white bandage," two self-portraits, etc.), the artist reached the sensation of deep concentration, silence, lasting (and not stopped, as is often the case in the painting) of the time. Dim light side and a generally rounded shape sculpts the face and figure, a man appears immersed in the. Itself significant in his secret, inner life.

During these years, Falk draws two performances in Moscow State Jewish Theatre - "Night at the old market" (1925) and "The Travels of Benjamin III" (1927) Mendele, grotesquely pushing real miserable life with vivid fantasy. In 1928, Falk, dean of the faculty of the picturesque Vhuteina got a business trip to France - "for the study of the classical heritage." There he paused for a long time, a decade.