Year 1956 Created 1956 | Type Oil on board | |
Dimensions 50 cm × 53 cm (20 in × 21 in) Location private collection, Moscow Artist Alexander Nikolayevich Samokhvalov Similar Portrait of Catherine Balebina, Horsewoman, Russian Winter Hoarfrost, Spring Day, Nevsky Prospekt | ||
Cafe Gurzuf (Russian: Кафе Гурзуф) is a painting by Alexander Nikolayevich Samokhvalov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Самохва́лов) (1894-1971), well-known Russian painter, watercolorists, graphic artist, illustrator, and art teacher, Honored Arts Worker of the RSFSR, lived and worked in Leningrad, regarded as one of the founder and brightest representatives of the Socialist realism art. In the painting artist has depicted a view of summer cafe in Gurzuf, Crimea, in the middle of the 1950s.
History
The picture painted by the artist in one of his visits Gurzuf, where in 1950–60 years he repeatedly vacationing with his wife Maria Alekseyevna Kleshar-Samokhvalova. She served as a model for the central female figure picture composition (a young woman at a table in a pink blouse, studying, apparently the menu). Model for other female figures of the first plan, - a woman left in a yellow dress with a red bag over his arm, up the steps - became the wife of the artist Eugene Kibrik, with whose family they both rest in Gurzuf.
For the first time painting «Cafe Gurzuf» was exhibited in 1960 at the grand Annual Exhibition of works by the leningrad artists of 1960 in the Exhibition Halls of the Leningrad Union of Artists. In 1963 painting «Cafe Gurzuf» was shown at the first solo exhibition of Alexander Samokhvalov in Leningrad in the Exhibition Halls of the Leningrad Union of Artists and dedicated to the seventieth of the artist. After the death of Alexander Samokhvalov picture kept by his widow, artist Maria Kleschar-Samokhvalova. In 1994, after a long break picture again was shown in 1994 in the halls of the Leningrad Union of Artists at the exhibition of «The Paintings of 1950-1980s by the Leningrad School's artists». In 2012 painting «Cafe Gurzuf» was exhibited in "Manezh" Central Exhibition Hall on Art Fair devoted to 80th Anniversary of Saint-Petersburg Union of Artists. The painting was reproduced in the exhibition catalog. In 2007 «Cafe Gurzuf» was published among others Samokhvalov's paintings in the book "Unknown Socialist Realism. The Leningrad School" by Sergei V. Ivanov. published in Russian and English.