Piotr Petrovitch Konchalovsky Russian, 1876-1956
Piotr Petrovitch Konchalovsky was a major figure of the Moscow avant-garde and a member of the Jack of Diamond mouvement. He his most famous for his "cezanian" landscape and still lives.
Piotr Konchalovsky was born in the village of Slavianka (currently Ukraine) a famous painter and musician's family. The family moved to Moscow in 1889 and became deeply involved with art scene of the 1890's. Piotr Konchalovsky grew up surrounded by famous and successful artists and naturally entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture before travelling to Paris where he studied at the Académie Julian from 1896 to 1898. He then returned to Russia and graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1907.
Like many of his Russian contemporaries - but with impressive ease - Konchalovsky blends together the styles of different avant-gardes artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. A major actor of the Moscow avant-garde, Konchalovsky was a founding member of the Jack of Diamond movement from 1909 (the movement was dissolved in 1917). His landscapes and still lives of that era all show the strong influence of the art of Paul Cézanne.
Trees are one of Konchalovsky's favorite subjects, he depicts them in a complicated game of colors associated with simple shapes in order to create dramatical compositions. Konchalovsky defined the search for his own new artistic style in these terms: "I really aimed to create a landscape in which the trees wouldn't simply grow into emptiness, as is often the case in contemporary art, but planted into the ground so that the viewer can see their roots, like in the old masters works."
