Robert Falk is a Russian painter of Jewish origin; his works combine the features of Russian Art Nouveau and the avant-garde. He was born in Moscow in 1886, and attended drawing and painting classes at Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin’s studio, at Ilya Mashkov’s private studio and later at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.

In the first half of the 20th century, Falk became interested in Cubism, an art style based on the superposition of geometric shapes. He participated in the activities of the art association “Jack of Diamonds” and painted his pictures using angular splashes, saturated colors, and sharply distorted shapes. According to him, the Cubists sought “to accentuate the emotional expressiveness by shifting the forms” and to convey the mood of the painting.

The Shebekino History and Art Museum displays two works by Robert Falk, which are the exact opposites of each other.

The picture depicts red-brick factory buildings with turquoise roofs and a smoking chimney. To enhance the contrast, Falk added wide green fields in the foreground, which he painted with sweeping sketchy brushstrokes. Further off, in the shadows, the artist depicted small houses. Factory buildings and constructions became the focus in the picture; their silhouettes made a mosaic of geometric shapes.

After the Great Patriotic War, Falk almost quitted painting landscapes and concentrated on portraits and still-life paintings. Now his paintings are housed in the State Russian Museum, National Gallery of Armenia, State Museum of Arts in Kazakhstan, and other Russian museums, as well as private collections. The artist’s work is in demand at auctions: it is purchased both by Russian and foreign collectors.