Zoya Kalatozova

The portraits painted by Robert Falk in the early 1950s, the last decade of his life, reveal the artist’s interest in the faces of young ladies’ faces and the feminine grace of his young models. During that period, he created a number of paintings depicting girls and young women, among them “Portrait of Lenina Rabinovich” (1950, Orlov Art Gallery), “Portrait of Olga Severtseva” (1950-1951, Olga Severtseva collection, Moscow), and “Portrait of Irina Glinka” (1951-1952, National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan) and so on. Falk’s fourth (and last) wife, Angelina Shchekin-Krotova, jokingly gave this period of his art the Proustian title “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom”.