Kasimov is an ancient town in the Ryazan region on the picturesque high bank of Oka. In those parts, in the village, Vasily Shulzhenko spent his childhood. It was there that he got his first glimpse of bizarre representatives of human fauna, which many years later turned into phantasmagoric characters in his paintings.

Yury Annenkov is an artist of Russian avant-garde, an experimentalist, an innovator of portrait genre. Images of Trotsky, Meyerhold and Akhmatova, which first come to mind for many, belong to his hand. Annenkov is one of the most expensive Russian artists. In the auction ranking, he takes 19th place with a result of 6.3 million dollars for the “Portrait of Alexander Nikolaevich Tikhonov”, sold at Christie's in 2014.

Oleg Tselkov is an artist of life metaphors. His trademark face masks and biomorphic plastics are his toolkit for the visual expression of ideas. He invented this language in the late 1950s and used it until the end of his life.

The porcelain black sculptures and their white counterparts are Oleg Tselkov's first and only experience of transferring his characters into small sculptural plastic. In other words: he had plates, vase, dishes and even a porcelain egg, but there the technique of transferring flat images was used. Tselkov had volumetric plasticity only in porcelain and bronze.

1971 — Steinberg's Moscow-Tarusian period. A light, airy, luminous piece. Figurative basis dominates in this work. Although if you look closely, the background on which the bird flies is dissected by a geometric element, typical of the artist's Suprematist line.

One of the most famous innovators of the post-war generation was expelled several times from various art institutes. Living in the Soviet Union, Oleg Tselkov regularly had to go to subterfuges to be considered an artist and not a slacker. But for some reason, Evtushenko, Akhmatova, Siqueiros and Guttuso came to this untrustworthy subject to see paintings in his room on Sokol. His father, who worked at a secret plant, was then dragged to the KGB to take responsibility for his son's dubious acquaintances.

Works of the inventor of “panic realism” can be very different in their technical complexity. Some “quick” graphics works are done very succinctly, literally in a single pass. Technical stinginess is also characteristic of many paintings by Petr Belenok. But that is not the case today.

According to legend, the sudden appearance of the Suprematist cycle by the expressionist Zverev in the late 1950s occurred after he saw works by Olga Rozanova and Lyubov Popova in the apartment of George Costakis. Being greatly impressed by the Russian avant-garde, he created a series of geometric abstractions of his own. It was a very short and vivid experimental period, which began suddenly and ended suddenly. Since the end of the 1950s, Zverev never returned to this subject.

The exemplary Steinberg of the late 1970s. Even before France, before emigration, before the Claude Bernard Gallery. This is the Moscow-Tarusian Steinberg. And this is the high point of his explorations into the depths of suprematist abstraction.

This painting of rare beauty comes from the collection of Piero Savoretti, an Italian entrepreneur and collector. The painting belongs to a particularly valuable inspired period. At the end of the 1970s Sveshnikov's palette becomes more dense and saturated. Connoisseurs note that in some works fantastic phosphorescent effect begins to appear, which will later disappear from his painting.