Footnotes

Provenance
With Fenn Galleries Ltd., Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1978.

Exhibited
Dallas, Scottish Rite Cathedral, Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Leading Living American Artists under auspices of Dallas Art Association from Grand Central Art Galleries, February 5 - 25, 1927, no 46, as Madame D.
Los Angeles, Stendahl Art Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings. Nicolai Fechin, February, 1930, no. 9.

Literature
Exh. cat., Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Leading Living American Artists under auspices of Dallas Art Association from Grand Central Art Galleries, 1927, no. 46.
Exh. cat., Exhibition of Paintings. Nicolai Fechin, Stendahl Art Galleries, February, 1930, no. 9.

The work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Fenn Galleries Ltd., Santa Fe, New Mexico.

On the stretcher of the present portrait of a young woman, painted in 1925 by Nikolai Fechin, the name Mlle. Ducter is inscribed. This portrait is recorded as Mlle. Ducter under number 9 in the catalogue of Fechin's personal exhibition, held in February 1930 at the Stendahl Art Galleries in Los Angeles. In the catalogue of a 1927 exhibition in Dallas, which presented leading artists associated with New York's Grand Central Galleries, a portrait of Madame D is listed among Nikolai Fechin's works (no. 46). In the archive of the artist's successors, there is a list titled 'Earl Stendahl', which included the works that the gallery owner collected from different places for his exhibition. It mentions that a portrait of Madame D was delivered from the Grand Central Galleries, indicating dimensions of 30 x 25 inches, which coincides with the dimensions of the portrait of Mlle. Ducter.

The present work participated in another exhibition at the Earl Stendahl Gallery in February 1940, which had an amazing story associated with it. The exhibition was announced by the local press: 'For the first time in history, a complete art exhibition was transported by airplane! Nicholai Fechin's exhibit was scheduled to open at the Stendahl Galleries, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, on Thursday, Feb. 8. On Wednesday, Feb. 5, not a single Fechin canvas had arrived. A letter notifying to forward paintings had been sent early in January. No reply. The staff fumed. Earl Stendahl acted. A long-distance call to a friend brought the offer of a privately-owned airplane. In half an hour, Mr. Stendahl was at the Metropolitan Airport and hopped off for Palm Springs, where Mr. Fechin was painting. In three-quarters of an hour, he landed one hill away from Fechin's camping ground. The Russian artist had never received the letter, or if he had, was too busy painting to read it. In an hour, Fechin's studio was denuded of desert, canyon, marine, and Indian paintings; the plane soared neatly away from cacti and smoke trees and deposited the enterprising art dealer and his complete February show smoothly within Los Angeles territory.'¹

A photograph has been preserved that captures the moment the works were loaded onto the plane, among which is the portrait of Mlle. Ducter. It was painted by Fechin in 1925, in the first years of his emigration and stay in New York, a time full of a sense of freedom, professional relevance, and success. In New York, Fechin often performed commissioned portraits, but to a greater extent, he preferred to maintain the scheme developed in Russia - to paint portraits of models that interested him and present them at exhibitions, from which most of the works were purchased for private collections. This is exactly how this portrait was painted. Perhaps the same girl served as a model for another portrait sketch in 1925.

Fechin's brilliant technical virtuosity is also inherent in the present lot. From the splashes and flickering of iridescent colours, a heap of seemingly chaotic, impasto strokes, the image of a living, real girl with a subtly and precisely modelled face appears. The artist's love of balancing on the border of the figurative and the conventional leaves, on the one hand, the texture of the paint itself naked, and on the other, with sweeping, careless strokes, he designates the texture of different materials: the feathers of a fan, the transparency of a collar, the shine of stones in earrings. The captured moment in a portrait does not freeze; it is full of movement, energy, and emotion. This work stands among other portraits of 1924-1925, such as Recent Bride (1924), Portrait of Kate (1925), Portrait (1925), and others.

¹'Fechin Exhibition First Delivered By Plane', newspaper clipping without imprint. Private archive, USA.

We are grateful to Galina Tuluzakova for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.