The collection of the Sevastopol Art Museum named after Mikhail Pavlovich Kroshitsky features the painting “Interior” by the Russian and Soviet painter Konstantin Yuon.

Konstantin Fyodorovich Yuon (1875–1958) was a landscape painter, genre painter, and portraitist. He created paintings on historical and everyday themes and also worked on scenic design. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, with Nikolay Alekseyevich Kasatkin, Konstantin Apollonovich Savitsky, and Abram Yefimovich Arkhipov as his teachers, as well as in the workshop of Valentin Alexandrovich Serov. Later, he taught in his own studio in Moscow together with the artist Ivan Osipovich Dudin. Later, Konstantin Yuon served as director of the Research Institute of Theory and History of Fine Arts of the USSR Academy of Arts and was the first secretary of the board of the Soviet Union of Artists.

The picture from the Sevastopol collection is quite rare in terms of its style for the painter and refers to an early stage in his work, the period of his fascination with Impressionism. Konstantin Yuon was in a state of active search, the formation of a creative outlook. Those were the years, when, even in interiors he was interested not in the substance of objects, but in their complex spatial “relationships”. Here, things tell not so much about the people who live among them, as about the time, the era, conveying a new, upbeat worldview. An apartment in a bustling city, where “life is booming”, is a peculiar image of the new era. A variety of light and color effects, filling the paintings with air, warm sunlight, pure colors and colored shadows, lively texture of quick, energetic strokes — those were the features that made the technique of Konstantin Yuon. His painting is vibrant, improvisationally free, with seemingly endless variations of color, and effects of light perfectly conveyed. In later years, paintings of Yuon would become more picturesque, contours would be sharper, and colorful contrast more common.

This exhibition work was purchased by Isadzhan Stepanovich Isadzhanov, a Moscow collector and admirer of modern painting, for the Museum of Modern Art.