AFA Summer 2020

2020 Antiques & Fine Art 77 Fechin fled an impoverished, post-revolutionary Russia, and arrived in New York in 1923. He supported himself by painting portraits until 1927, when Mabel Dodge Luhan, the New York patron of the arts who moved to Taos in 1917, invited him to Taos, changing his life. A casual bunch of native sunflowers and coreopsis in Fechin’s Sunflowers is painted with the artist’s characteristic furious energy, flashing brushstrokes, and bright colors. This succulent display of brash flowers and the bounty of the harvest, along with domestic folk-art objects—a glass, covered jar, a bowl, a painted ceramic pig—is the kind of painting that brightened the lives and somber walls of collectors’ homes in drearier climates. Nicolai Fechin (American, born Russia, 1881–1955), Sunflowers, ca. 1935. Oil on canvas, 32 x 27 inches.