Falk saw a portrait as a psychological genre. This set him apart from other artists in the “Jack of Diamonds” group, who likened both portraits and landscapes to still lifes, better suited for fulfilling narrow, purely formalistic tasks: revealing the texture and shape of an object, coloristic design, and original figurative solutions. At the same time, the artists were not interested in the conceptual essence of the subject.

Falk, on the contrary, psychologizes not only portraits, but also still lifes and landscapes. His cubism was called “lyrical” by his contemporaries. The vertical format of the canvas, as well as the elongated verticality of the figure and objects in the picture, create the intonation of an affirmation, or an exclamation, that halts someone’s attention and forces that person to scrutinize the image. There is tension in the figure of the man in the gray shirt, standing with his back to the window. The gloomy concentration on the face is supported by the frozen position of his hands: the left is half-bent, and the fingers have been brought together, the right is lowered and pressed to the body, with the fingers closed in a fist. On the table is a brown jug, there is one red fruit, along with several green ones, on a blue tablecloth and in a white vase. The feeling of heightened concentration and anxiety becomes even more pronounced due to the severe, muted color, in which ‘overcast’ blue-gray tones prevail. They seem to hold back the force of emotions, which nevertheless erupt with two bright red spots in the image of the person’s lips and one fruit in a vase.

The painting uses geometrized, cubist forms. However, the portrait’s cubism is not intrusive. In the middle of the 1950’s, Falk recalled: “To a certain extent, I paid homage to cubism: many of the things I did from that time are distinguished by shifts in form. But this was not a logical device as part of constructivism, and I tried to accentuate emotional expressiveness by means of those shifts in form”. Some angularity and deformation for the person’s figure and face is a way of emotional, dramatic intensification: this enhances the contrast of external stiffness and powerful internal tension.