POUGNY - NATURE MORTE À LA FLÛTE TRAVERSIÈRE - Lot 155

POUGNY - NATURE MORTE À LA FLÛTE TRAVERSIÈRE Jean POUGNY (1892-1956) Still life with flute, circa 1918-19 Oil on canvas. Signed lower right (in Cyrillic). 52 x 37.5 cm (faded) Accompanied by its certificate from Jean CHAUVELIN dated June 10, 2023 Note: After taking classes with Ilya Repin around 1909, Ivan Albertovitch Pugni (Russian: Иван Альбертович Пуни), known as Jean Pougny, discovered Fauvism and Cubism in 1910 in Paris. He attended the Académie Julien there until 1911. In Petrograd, in 1915, he organized the first Futurist exhibition, presenting artists known as "cubo-futurists". The surprise was to discover two distinct currents: the first represented by Kasimir Malevich, inventor of abstraction (together they created the Suprematism manifesto), who proposed eccentric variations on Cubism, and the second, by Vladimir Tatline, who transposed Cubism into volume. Pougny exhibited eleven Cubist-inspired works. The exhibition caused a scandal. In Russia, he also rubbed shoulders with compatriots such as Exter, Popova and Goncharova. After the October Revolution of 1917, which he supported, Jean Pougny showed a predilection for things that had no aesthetic value, such as letters, numbers and the most utilitarian objects: the object was freed from meaning, to acquire a new meaning without losing its character as an object, and he did not reject the decorative value of color. Our painting, of museum importance, fits perfectly into this language and this key period of the Russian avant-garde. It is a perfect synthesis of the different artistic currents that marked his entire career.