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Portrait of Miron Sherling. 1918
Annenkoff Georges,
Oil on canvas
71,5 x 57,7
State Russian Museum
Annotation
Miron (?) Abramovich Sherling: Photo¬grapher and artist from Petrograd. Held an exhibition of Lichtbildkunst at the Nadezhda Dobychina Bureau d’Art at 63 Moika with photographs of Nikolai Yevreinov, Vsyevolod Meyerhold, Fyodor Chaliapin, Alexander Golovin, Nicholas Roerich, Alexander Yakovlev and others. Boris Grigoriev painted Portrait of the Photographer and Artist Miron Sherling (oil on canvas, 99.3 ı 80.5; private collection).
This portrait is typical of Georges Annenkoff’s punctilious, associative and often grotesque manner. Sherling’s image seems to unite the painter’s own perception of the world and the personal vision of someone known as a “master of artistic photography”. The sitter is depicted en face, doubled by an extended shadow in profile. The tenacious glance of the penetrating eye and the reflected light of the spectacles are not stratification of the personality, but a facet of its perception. Space is resolved in a paradoxical manner; the architectural fragments are like a stream of memories of Paris. The plastics of the canvas are equally paradoxical – “categorical” Cubist forms alongside elegant lines, the enigmatic shine of the lamplight and the alarming rhythm of the colour planes. Georges Annenkoff transforms reality in accordance with his own words: “The artist is wrong to neglect the microscope; a new nature is observing us through the lens of the glass.”