Robert Falk

Robert Rafailovich Falk (Russian: , 1886 - 1958) was a famous Russian painter.

Biography

Robert Falk was born in Moscow in 1886. In 1903 - 1904 he studied art in the studios of Konstantin Yuon and Ilya Mashkov, in 1905 - 1909 he studied at Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture from Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov.

In 1910 he was of the founders and the most active participants of artistic group Jack of Diamonds. The group consider Paul Cézanne as the only painter worth following, and the rest of visual art to be too trivial and bourgeois. The distinctive feature of Falk's paintings of the time was sculpturing of the form using many layers of different paints.

In 1918-1928 Falk taught at VKhUTEMAS (State Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops). In 1928 Falk went to a supposedly short trip to France and refused to return, he worked in Paris until 1938, when he returned to Moscow.

Since 1938 until his death in 1958 he worked in Moscow, most of the time in isolation. His works of that time were in Neo-impressionism style with characteristic white-on-white colors (not unlike the later paintings of his teacher Valentin Serov's).

During the Khrushchev Thaw he became very popular among young painters and many consider Falk as the main bridge between traditions of the Russian and French modern of beginning of 20th century and Russian avant-garde and the Russian avant-garde of 1960ies.