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Leoriardo, Vol. 9, pp. 320-324. Pergamon Press 1976. Printed in Great Britain ROBERT FALIC (1886-1958) AS A TEACHER OF PAINTING* Oleg Prokofiev** Robert Falk [ I ] was born in Moscow on 27 October I886 and died there on I October 1958. From 1910 he was a member of the Knave of Diamonds group. He worked in Paris between 1928-1938 and was in contact with members of the Ecole de Paris and with the painter Chaitn Soiitine. In 1938 he returned to Moscow where he continlied to paint and to teach sfiidents in his studio. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Exhibition Room of the MOSCOW Branch of the Union of Artists, Beregovaya Ulitsa, in Moscow in I966 (Ed. K. Sokolov]. (Figs. 1-4, 6-8 and Fig. 5 of coloiir plate.) I. INTRODUCTION I worked in Falk‘s studio for the three years between 1949-1952 and this article is my tribute to him as an artist and a generous teacher. Over this period I kept a rather unsystematic written account of some of his views of art that were addressed to me as a beginner in painting. They were, therefore, often expressed in almost elementary terms. By and large, his sayings can be divided into two categories. Those in the first category, of a purely pedagogic nature (which I noted down for my own practical guidance), I believe can be regarded as an attempt to propose fundamental rules for ‘work from nature’. For Falk‘s students, work from nature consisted mainly of painting still lifes, occasionally interiors of Falk’s attic studio-flat and, once, in my case, a portrait. This last, however, was more difficult for material reasons, for during these difficult years Falk was hard put to it to make ends meet and could not afford to pay a model, whereas I myself could not always pay even for my instruction , a circumstance that he accepted philosophically enough, remarking only: ‘Well, you’ll pay me when you can.’ A few years later, I did. The second category of Falk‘s sayings were of a more general nature and, unfortunately, I did not always write these down, not perceiving their possible utilitarian value for myself and only occasionally noting things that had particularly interested me. For instance, the reader may be surprised by Falk’s remark: ‘All that is an essential premise, like dogma, belief and the noumenal idea, it would be better to go to the stake than to depart from these given principles by somuch as a hair’s breadth.’ Undoubtedly what he actually said was much fuller, but it was the conclusion, aimed at convincing me of the immense importance he attached to his words, that imprinted itself upon my mind at the time. Many people who got Falk to discuss painting were met at the onset with the.statement: ‘Painting is not a representational art as so many people think; it is, first and foremost, an art plastiqrre [art of forms in space, tr.].’ Some of Falk‘s critics decided that this point of view represented a certain outdated aestheticism or a deliberate narrowing of artistic principles to within the confines of a fixed, formal system. I do not think that this was so. For Falk, this approach to *Based on a text translated from the Russian. **Soviet artist-painter and art historian living at 16 Hyde Vale, Greenwich, England. (Received 30 Apr. 1976.) painting was the cornerstone of artistic cognizance and he considered painting above all a way of understanding the visible world. Hence his contempt for associative arbitrariness no less than for purely external ‘likenesses’ in pictures. It was not that he excluded resemblance to nature, but he considered that this should be ‘the result of correct visual and psychological processes’. ‘There are artists’, he said, ‘who use any means to hand to paint conclusions in an attempt to get a good likeness at whatever cost. They often achieve an extremely close resemblance, but there is no art.’ Passive enslavement to detail, but, equally, too much reliance on individual taste and illustrative fancy are potentially evasive. Evasion was for him the cardinal sin in art, for...

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