Girl with an Apple

Tatyana Kerner’s paintings speak volumes about the Khrushchev thaw—the artistic explorations of that era, its great hopes and bitter losses. She emerged within the Leningrad underground of the 1960s and immediately attracted attention with her work with color and her bold compositions. The artistic community praised the “blossoming of color” in her paintings, the “eroticism of her palette,” and her “unfeminine ruthlessness toward her own femininity.” Kerner’s remarkable uncompromising nature—both in art and in life—was well known to those around her: because of it she could not hold down steady work as a theater or set designer and instead earned her living as a stoker and sailor.

In Girl with an Apple, we can easily trace the range of Kerner’s artistic pursuits: the “naive” quality of the drawing combined with a conscious modernist gesture, the fauvist boldness and decorativeness, the tension between flatness and volume, and her interest in the painterly experiments of Natalia Goncharova and Olga Rozanova. There are also references to the discoveries of her contemporaries—the empty eyes are reminiscent of Oleg Tselkov’s paintings, while the forms are like those of Eduard Zelenin. Kerner possessed what Larionov, speaking of Goncharova, called “eyes for color.” Her paintings are marked by a distinctive translucent yet saturated palette. In the rosy‑cheeked girls she painted, one can discern a personal manifesto of freedom and defiance.