A Time to Gather. Russian Art From Foreign Private Collections. [Russian edition]

Cityscape in Annenkov's oeuvre slowly formed into an independent easel genre. He found fame with his illustrations for Blok's The Twelve, which depicted a futuristic city of distorted lights and rapidly decaying cardboard-like streets. In his cityscapes of Paris, of the 1920s and 1930s he sustained this feeling of artificiality, of a "dreaming city". However the tragic dynamism and turmoil of form gives way to classical calm and sterile emptiness. Painted with careful attention, monuments of old Parisian architecture seem ghostly additions to the contingency of the city environment. The spatial planes, conceived as flat, semi-transparent layers, are laid out one on the other like theatrical sets. The lines and color patches are easily disjointed. Artistically juggling techniques of painting, graphic art and scenography, Annenkov creates an elegant decorative image. His delicate taste and excellent draughtsmanship allowed him to avoid banality in postcard, tourist corners of Paris