§RABIN, OSCAR (B. 1928) Sleeping Doll and Doll in Paris two works, one signed and dated 1974, the other signed, dated 1980 and numbered 51/75 One oil on canvas and the other lithograph on paper, one measuring 90 by 70.5 cm., the other 61 by 53.5 cm. Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist. The Lili Brochetain collection, Paris. Authenticity has been confirmed by the artist. Literature: Oscar Rabin, The State Russian Museum, Palace Editions, 2007, p. 123, illustrated. O. Medvedkina, The Brochetain Collection in Paris, from the series Collecting as a Calling, Russkaya Mysl, January 1993, illustrated. Exhibition catalogue, O. Rabin: Three Lives, The State Russian Museum, p. 193. Related literature: For similar works, see Exhibition catalogue, Oscar Rabin. Three Lives: The Retrospective Exhibition, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Palace Editions, October-December 2008, p. 193. The painting Doll is one of Rabin's celebrated metaphorical compositions whose genre is difficult to determine. Juxtaposing in the single space of this work a child's toy and an illuminated cowshed, the artist transforms his work into a “social still life”. He does not recreate a real landscape, but constructs his own poetic system in which all the real objects of the collage are transformed into symbols, into metaphorical objects which build up a general impression. As an object symbolising the naive and pure world of childhood, an image contrasting with the hopeless absurdity of a hostile world, the doll plays an especially important role in the artist's work in the 1970s. During this period Rabin created many variations on the theme of the tragic dissonance between childhood ideals and the squalid condition of human life. Is not the doll lying in the mud, a broken and abandoned puppet, a symbol of the fate of man at the mercy of arbitrary political power? What is she? A toy in the hands of a higher force of destiny beyond her comprehension? A doll held hostage to the vagaries of fortune by Fate? Or a Hoffman-like machine with a clockwork mechanism in place of a heart? The difference lies only in the source of the controlling force. If forces of active doom pull the strings of weak-willed puppets, then the mechanical doll is tied to herself; her will-power, unenlightened by consciousness and alienated from a conscious ego, is driven not from above, but from the belly: this is an instinctive will, Dante's “vile urge”. In Hoffman's tale the doll complains that she has a clockwork mechanism instead of a heart. Rabin's figures are dolls whose clockwork comes from the belly. They are entirely lacking the qualities normally associated with the human heart. This inevitably poses the question of the existential content of the artist's works such as Drunken Doll (1972, The Other Art Museum, Moscow), Doll in the City (1980, private collection) or Doll, presented here for auction (1974). The contrast between childish purity and naivety and the dirt and senselessness of life becomes a source of a theatre of terror in Rabin's works — even if the artist was inspired only by a transient encounter with an abandoned, unwanted doll, an encounter described superbly by Genrikh Sapgir in his famous sonnet A Moscow landscape with a doll.