The posthumous exhibition of Moses Feigin, who died this spring at the age of 104, opened at the Central House of Artists on Krymsky Val.
Moses Feigin was a famous painter. More in the sense that he lived through the entire XX century, the century of modernism, and also outlived all his modernist teachers. He was even listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest working professional artist.
Moses Alexandrovich was the last member of the "Jack of Diamonds" art association in the early 20th century. That is, he was a junior associate of such celebrities as Mikhail Larionov, Natalya Goncharova, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Aristarkh Lentulov, and others.
Feigin had a very receptive nature, in the sense that he borrowed the proprietary, individual techniques from his teachers, which included masters like Lyubov Popova, Alexander Osmerkin, Alexander Tyshler. His apprenticeship could have dragged on for a long time, but with the onset of the totalitarian era, his modernist experiments came to an end.
Feigin had to retrain himself as an artist of the propaganda machine and engage in orthodox socialist realism. Only decades later, when Khrushchev's thaw as well as Perestroika of the late 1980s passed, the artist remembered his previous passion and devoted the rest of his life to catching up.
One can have a different take on his anachronistic variations on the themes of Tyshler and Chagall, the Suprematists and Cezannists. The main thing is that they were created by an artist of the Russian modernism era in the full sense of the word.
