Robert Falk

Now, I would like to say a few words about Falk’s still-life paintings. Falk was meticulous when it came to composition. Sometimes, he picked objects to create a certain colour combination that he had in mind; other times, his passion would be lit by a combination of objects spotted by chance, but, for the most part a still- life represented the implementation of a long-cherished image, an idea, and then something seen in real life would nudge him into finally creating the scene he envisaged.

Falk did not like to refer to the genre in which he worked with greatest enthusiasm as portrait painting. For him, the words rang with a note of something overly formal and representative. “I like to paint people,” he said and, showing his friends his paintings at the studio, he added, “Meet my kind of people.” Falk’s people were from all walks of life, but there was not a single person among them whose portrait he had painted solely to commission, rather it was in response to the call of the heart. Others attracted him with their outward appearance and characteristic image. He loved to paint the elderly, who had been worked with the merciless chisel of a long and difficult life. He was also very fond of painting young women’s faces that were delicate as flowers. In Falk’s portraits of women, there is always the sense of an alluring secret. <...> In his male models, he was most often attracted by intelligence and strength of personality. It should be said that Falk was far less interested in a person’s external appearance than he was their inner world. Usually, the desire to draw and paint arose from the sharing of common interests, an exchange of thought and intimate conversation

“Falk! It was a little holiday, it was a great epiphany, a revelation, to discover that he lives a stone’s throw from me (I’m on Ostozhenka, he’s on Soymonovski). Right there, living and working in an unusual studio which is not quite Moscow, nor quite Paris (I’m not judging, who can!), an apostle of art, of painting (I’m no painter, but I’m not blind, either!), a man with a wise face and weary eyes.”

The Serpukhov Museum of History and Art is one of the richest provincial Russian museums and the largest visual arts museum in the Moscow region. It is located in a former mansion that was built in the late 19th century by the architect Robert Klein and belonged to the textile manufacturer, the merchant of the third guild Anna Vasilievna Maraeva.