FILATOV FAMILY ART FUND LENDS FIVE KEY WORKS TO NICOLAI FECHIN EXHIBITION AT THE FRYE MUSEUM, SEATTLE
09 Feb 13
The Filatov Family Art Fund is delighted to lend five key works from their collection to the Frye Museum, Seattle for the exhibition Nicolai Fechin, which takes place from 9 February to 19 May 2013.
Curated by Frye Director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, the exhibition provides a rare opportunity for American audiences to recognize the accomplishments of this important émigré artist. A key figure in Russian art and a protégé of the Russian master Ilya Repin, Fechin burst onto the international scene in Munich, Germany, in 1909 and in the United States in 1910. His early preference for thick layers of color and pigment with very little oil, and a penchant for conflating the real and the abstract, would bring him international acclaim in the first decades of the 20th century in both Europe and the United States.
The Filatov Family Art Fund is pleased to have supported new scholarship at the Frye Art Museum which reveals Fechin's frequent participation in major exhibitions in the United States during what is commonly referred to as his "Russian" period. This new research demonstrates the hitherto undocumented extent of Fechin's success and influence in the United States long before he was to emigrate to the New World.
It is artists such as Nicolai Fechin, whose influence extended far beyond the borders of the country of his birth, that the Fund wishes to bring to international audiences. The Seattle exhibition concentrates on the early period of the artist's career, a period in which the Frye Art Museum has particular strength, and concludes with paintings from Fechin's time in Taos and California. It is the first major overview of Fechin's work at the Frye Art Museum since 1976.
As well as the five works the Filatov Family Art Fund are lending to the exhibition, fifty paintings and drawings will be shown from the holdings of the Frye Art Museum and other museums in the United States, and private US and Russian lenders. The works from the Fund that are included in the exhibition are from all periods within Fechin's development. Nude Figure, 1911, was acquired by the American collector John R. Hunter shortly after Fechin's paintings were first exhibited in the United States. Hunter acquired the canvas after Fechin sent him a photograph of it from Russia. This painting would be included a decade later in the landmark Exhibition of Russian Painting and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum in 1923 and in a solo exhibition of Fechin's work the same year at the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago.
Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1925, is from Fechin's New York period where, as a teacher and highly respected artist, he influenced other artists such as Arshile Gorky who greatly admired Fechin's painterly techniques. Still Life Daisies belongs to a series of still life paintings while Beaver Dam represents another unique body of canvases depicting the American landscape that began in Taos and continued to the end of his life in California.
It is perhaps the series of paintings of the indigenous people of the region that Fechin made in Taos between 1927 and 1933 that comes closest to Fechin's early fascination with the Mari peoples in the Republic of Tatarstan. Friends, a portrait of a Native American girl, demonstrates the impasto brushwork for which the artist is best known.
Nicolai Fechin
9 February - 19 May 2013
11-5, Tues-Sun
11-7, Thurs
Closed Monday
Free admission and free parking
704 Terry Ave Seattle,
WA 98104,
United States
TEL +1 206-622-9250
