Alexei Isupov (Alessio Issupoff). Porcelain Seller, 1921

Stylistically, Isupov’s tempera series was a turn toward the icon-painting tradition and early Renaissance painting, in which objects created no shadows and light was seen as a property of the object itself. Several paintings of the period can be grouped into a subseries of ethnographic portraits, whose protagonists include a teahouse waiter, a barber, a dutar player, and a vendor. Despite featuring many everyday details, these portraits elevated Samarkand characters to the level of biblical or other religious figures. The pointed arches in which the figures are inscribed relate the portraits to the Renaissance transition genre of portrait-icons.

Porcelain Seller is a work representative of the series. The deifying eye of the artist has transformed a shop vendor showing his goods to the customer into a saint whose finger draws our attention to some hidden meaning. The plate in his hands is no longer an everyday object, but a sacred symbol with images of clouds and stars circled into a mandala. The apparent sacredness of the painting is enhanced by its background. The two domes with a portal and the hilly landscape on either side of the protagonist bring to mind the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis in Samarkand. However, the white mausoleum in the center, contrasting in color with the seller’s face, is clearly an invented building. This and the exotic vegetation show that the artists of Stepanov’s circle were not immune to the orientalist fantasies of the West and had a Gauguinian perspective on local characters, which filled the “primitive lives” of the Other with “mystical meanings.”

Boris Chukhovich