Kazimir Zelenevsky was born in Poland in 1888. His father was exiled to Omsk for his participation in the Polish Uprising of 1863. Kazimir Zelenevsky himself participated in the Revolution of 1905-1907 and was arrested, but escaped from prison and went to Europe. In Geneva and Paris, he studied philosophy, later he entered the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, at the same time studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In 1916, he presented his canvases for the first time at exhibitions in Zurich and Geneva.

‘Still life with Flowers’ is one of the painter’s early works. Zelenevsky painted it while studying at the Vienna Academy in 1915. In those years, he usually created paintings with a restrained color palette. However, in this still life he used bright colors, which he balanced by a dark muted background. Zelenovsky outlined the shapes of objects with crisp contours.

In 1917, Kazimir Zelenevsky returned to Russia. He has had three personal exhibitions in Tomsk. Soon he established the Siberian Folk Art Academy, but it was open only for one month. It was decided at a meeting of the Tomsk Society of Art Lovers that the academy required too much money, and its professors were not competent enough to teach at a higher art school. On July 23, 1918, the Tomsk Provincial Commissariat of the Provisional Siberian Government ordered the institution to be closed. Zelenevsky became disillusioned with the revolution and left Russia.

After several years of traveling, the artist settled in Paris, in Montparnasse. It was the most fruitful period in his life: he created oil paintings, watercolors, and made sketches with charcoal.

Presently, art historians consider Zelenevsky as an artist of the Paris school, where he rose to prominence in the 1920s. Critic André Warnod used the term “School of Paris” to refer to the community of European artists who worked in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. They developed artistic movements of the early 20th century: Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism. Among the brightest representatives of the community were Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani.

At the age of 43, Zelenevsky suffered a stroke and was paralyzed. Hoping that a warm climate would benefit him, the artist moved with his family to Italy. There he painted his last watercolors.

Today, the works of Kazimir Zelenevsky are housed in the Pompidou Center, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Tomsk Art Museum.