David Shterenberg
Selma Stern
It is difficult to find an artist of the twentieth century who has been more neglected by art history than the artist David Shterenberg. His works were banned in the 60s and 70s and neither Russian nor foreign art critics were allowed access to Shterenberg’s art works. When the Russian avant-garde was reviewed by art historians, Shterenberg was again neglected as a result of his works being hidden in KGB controlled museum depositories. This article shall contribute to the status and place that David Shterenberg deserves in art history.
David Petrovich Shterenberg was born in 1881 in a small town called Zhitomir in Russia. Instead of remaining as a photographer in Zhitomir or one of the small provincial towns in Russia, Shterenberg went to Odessa in 1901, where he took drawing lessons. He left Odessa for Paris five years later, where he started earning his living by photography while studying art at the Academy Vitty. Shterenberg moved into the famous La Ruche, where he lived with other artists like Chagall, Modigliani and Soutine, and joined the studios of Fernand Leger, Albert Marque, Amédée Ozenfant, Maurice Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon and Pierre Bonnard.
Shterenberg began his career with landscape paintings and portraits which he exhibited in Parisian art salons. The first works of David Shterenberg are dated from 1908. His talent was well recognized in Paris and Shterenberg ranked amongst the young Paris talents. Since 1912 his works were exhibited at the Parisian Salon d’Indépendence.
Shterenberg soon turned to still life, which was a basic genre of the avant-garde development. Cubism was evolving and the figurative element in still lives had lost its meaning turning into a graphical analysis of single objects. Still life began turning towards modern philosophical problems paving the way for the avant-garde movement.
Having received the news about the February revolution in Russia, Shterenberg returned to Moscow where he met Anatoly Lunarchsky, whom he got to know in Paris and who, after the October revolution, became the minister of the state education agency. Lunarchsky appointed David Shterenberg as head of the fine arts department of the ministry. Lunarchsky was far more acquainted with the modernist movement than Lenin, and he was more tolerant of its aims, having known some of the émigré Russian modern painters in Paris, also appointed Marc Chagall as Commissar of Art in the artist’s home town Vitebsk.
Shterenberg’s position at the state ministry had no influence on his life as artist and David Shterenberg soon joined the Russian flaming art scene. His art denied three-dimensional space, representing single objects and decorative color compositions. He brought with him the ideas he had developed in Paris, and French motives appeared in his works. His paintings Herrings, Clabber and Cakes–now in the Tretyakov Gallery–became legendary. The art critics described them as reminiscences of the past famine in Russia.
Whereas Shterenberg enjoyed a happy family life and a successful career as artist in the 20’s, this changed in the 30’s and his life turned into the beginning of a future tragedy. He was stigmatized as so called ‘formalist’ artist and leader of the formalist movement.
His name appeared more often in the art chronicles of the 1920s and 30s than any other artist’s name. Shterenberg’s name was both abused and praised; he was loved and admired by disciples, and hated by conservative traditionalists; amongst the latter many later became ‘proletarian’ and ‘socialist’ artists. Shterenberg’s life ended in miserably–he was abandoned by his country for almost half a century.
David Shterenberg died in 1948 and was buried at the Vagankovo cemetery in Moscow. For further information see the catalogue David Shterenberg. 78 tables, Moscow Center of Art in cooperation with the Moscow House of Photography, March-April 2000, published by ‘Logos/Gnosis’.
