* §TSELKOV, OLEG (B. 1934) Matador and a Bull dated 1957, also further signed, titled in Cyrillic and dated on the reverse Oil on canvas, 100.5 by 174 cm. Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the previous owner. The V. Fokin collection. Acquired from the above by the present owner. Private collection, Europe. Authenticity has been confirmed by the artist. Exhibited: O. Tselkov, L. Bozhanov, Japan. The painting Matador and Bull belongs to the early and most interesting period of Tselkov's artistic career. Created in 1957, when the young artist was still seeking his own style and had not yet begun to produce the gigantic pasty faces of the Homo Sovieticus, characteristic of his mature work, this composition conveys with poignant spontaneity the first attempts of Russian unofficial art to absorb the heritage of modernism. It would have been hard to choose a subject which spoke more of its time than bullfighting. It combines everything — the symbolism of the personal human struggle with sinister irrational power and one's own instinct; humanism of the Renaissance, interpreted through the intricacies of the myth of Phaedra's great battle with the Minotaur, and finally, homage to the greatest achievements of the human spirit of the XX century. Allusions to Malevich and Picasso are evident in Tselkov's composition, but the significance of the work goes beyond this. It aims to show why the depiction of the bullfight and its participants was so important for art: the portraits of matadors, the vibrant grotesque Spanish romanticism of Goya, Picasso and Konchalovsky; the bullfights of Marimet, Bizet and Manet; and finally, Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, which came to symbolise the post-war period. The spell-binding tragedy of XX century bullfighting is that the bullfight is played out in the arena of the human spirit where no one can see the bull, except for the matador himself. Tselkov's bullfight is part of the eternal battle of great art of the XX century with its real object, expressed in his striving to break down the heady play of muscles beneath the bull's black hide into stereometric primitive shapes, conventional, expressively geometric, shapes, combinations of different colours and dimensions, and to merge beast and man (who conceals a thin dagger blade behind the bright red cloth of his Muleta) in an asymmetrical composition permeated with inner movement. The artist's striving to reconceptualise the early avant-garde heritage by turning to ancient archetypal images was greeted with great acclaim by his contemporaries. Tselkov's works were noted by the celebrated Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who wrote: “In your path as an artist you are seeking that true reality which has its own figurative expression and poetry! Bravo!” (Letter to Tselkov. May, 1957.)