Vera Nikolajevna Rockline (Russian painter) 1896 - 1934
Vera Rockline began her artistic career in her native Russia, participating in various exhibitions in Moscow, (under the name of Schlezinger), including the Twenty-Fourth Exhibition of the Moscow Association of Artists and the Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures by Jewish Artists. Her style was originally inspired by the impressionists, but she soon began experimenting with Cubism, most likely under the influence of her mentor, Alexandra Exter, with whom she studied in Kiev for several years before moving to Paris. Upon her arrival in Paris in 1921, Rockline participated in the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne, and the Salon des Tuileries, receiving prizes for her works. Although her early work shows the influence of Cubism, her palette was more subtle. She developed her own style in the 1930s, achieving, in the words of a critic writing in L’Art et les artistes (1934), “an artistic balance between Courbet and Renoir.” In November of 1934, the art critic J.-R. Pecheral wrote the following about Rockline in Beaux-Arts: « Her art is a curious and complex phenomenon that manifests the struggle between the two aspects of Vera Rockline’s soul–one is the Slavic side, with all of its dreaminess, haziness, and restlessness, and the French one, which she inherited from her French mother, a typical petit bourgeois who impressed upon her earthy common sense, peasant cunning, and a yearning for stability. Such a combination well explains her life and art ». At a time when contemporary art became increasingly distanced from realism, Rockline’s delicate paintings of nudes became extremely popular with the French public. Rockline’s lyric and poetic sensibility guided her fluid line to express an inner state of grace. In Nu au collier rouge, Rockline demonstrates her incomparable technique for describing flesh blushing with evanescent youth. Keeping the luminous grays and blush pinks in exquisite balance, Rockline has almost reduced her original impression of a young woman to a shimmering color field, denoting with only a few strokes her model’s eyes, lips, and hands. Rockline employs a shallow background reminiscent of those of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, who were themselves influenced by Japanese prints. One of Rockline’s first admirers was the avant-garde French fashion designer Paul Poiret (1879–1944). Poiret led a fashion renaissance, introducing freeflowing dresses and replacing tight corsets with brassieres. Rockline’s Femme gantée de noir comes from Poiret’s private collection that amassed more than 400 works by artists including Bakst, Dérain, Dufy, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso. This painting was presented alongside these works during the exhibition of the Poiret Collection held at the Musée Jacquemart-André in 1974. In this portrait, Rockline portrays her sitter with dignity and poise. The subject holds herself confidently in a relaxed but upright pose, displaying character and individuality. The work has the spontaneity and freshness of Impressionist art. The French art critic Marius-Ary Leblond called Rockline a « sister of the great Venetians and of our own Renoir…a great lyrical talent ». In a memorial address delivered at the Salon d’Automne in 1934, Leblond described the artist’s premature death that year at the age of thirty-eight as « one of the most painful losses to the Parisian art scene in recent years ».
