Studio: international art (84.1922)

STUDIO-TALK

of travel in the less beaten parts of China.
When shown in Paris in 1920 and in
London the same year, these pictures
proved a veritable epopee illustrating
customs, types and scenery in China.
Work so exacting and accomplished had
not been seen since the days of Ingres.
Most of the paintings had been carried out
in distemper, the colours being of great
brilliance. The drawings, life-size, brought
to the highest possible pitch of finish, in
black and red chalks on white paper, were
of surpassing power. Both paintings and
drawings realised Ingres' theory : " Nous
ne procedons pas materiellement comme
les sculpteurs, mais nous devons faire de
la peinture sculpturale. Dessinez pure-
ment, mais avec largeur. Pur et large :
voila le dessin, voila l'art." Iacovleff's

work was both pure and broad, despite
its wealth of detail. 000
The following year an exhibition of
work accomplished in the interval defin-
itely contradicted whoever might have been
tempted to consider Iacovleff an ethno-
graphic artist. The subjects were por-
traits and landscapes painted in the south of
France in island scenery of a peculiar
nature, the largest among which was the
life-size group in distemper here repro-
duced. The manner, while departing
in its final consequences from that of the
modernists, was not in its elements without
affinity with certain recent discoveries
and doctrines. It would be a mistake to
conclude, from the more obvious symp-
toms, that Iacovleff revives the pre-16th
century masters to the exclusion of other