Original watercolor, on paper of Josephine Baker

This is a wonderful original painting executed by the School of Paris painter Boris Solotareff (whose work is in the permanent collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others). He went to Paris in the early 1920’s and associated himself with famous people in the theater (in one catalogue there is an illustration of a portrait of Igor Stravinsky that he painted). Many of his works executed in Paris were of people in the theater, famous opera singers, dancers, directors and pianists of that time. This beautiful watercolor executed in a manner so calming with the soft brown skin tones the red ruby lips that are so soothing, revealing the true beauty of Josephine Baker off the stage.

According to Josephine Baker’s son, Jean-Claude Baker, this portrait was done around the time Josephine shot the movie “Zou Zou,” a personal favorite movie of Josephine’s. A floral corsage accents an asymmetrical background in this pensive and dramatic “Petit maitre” portrait of Josephine Baker. On the back there is also another line drawing with the estate stamp of the artist Boris Solotareff. Provenance: Estate of Louise Bauer Parry, 1986 Private Collection.

About the Artist Boris Solotareff 
Boris Solotareff was born in Bendare, Romania in 1889. He studied art in Odessa until 1907, when, at the age of eighteen he moved to Munich. He arrived in that city just as it was beginning to assert its role as a major European cultural capital. Solotareff enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst during the heyday of the Munich Secession. In the seven years he spent in Munich, he would have been able to experience first hand the dramatic influence of Kandinsky’s Phalanx and Blaue Reiter groups. At the exhibition held by Kandinsky at the Neue Kunstler Vereinigung, the young Romanian artist would have had perhaps his first exposure to the works of Picasso, Braque, and Vlaminck. During the first war he went to Lausanne and then stayed in Paris until 1937.

One of Solotareff’s most splendid paintings, and one of the first to survive, is his Interior of 1913, toward the end of his Munich period. In this depiction of a humble indoor scene, two men are seated around a small table, reading by lamplight. A stove glows in the middle-ground. this image represents the very essence of gemutlichkeit, of domestic coziness. Like so many of the paintings that Solotareff will go on to paint, it is a profoundly, if not exuberantly, happy work of art. it reaffirms the simple pleasures of life, the pleasures of reading and good companionship. Its style is related in a general way to that of German Impressionists like Adolf von Menzel, with the swift panache of its laden brush, the sudden flashes of light. Small Village in Munich was painted a year later. This sympathetic rendering of a country cottage, nestled among trees, suggests that our artist has been closely studying the Brittany paintings of Gauguin. This is seen not only in the dramatically titled perspective, which seems to be that of an airborne bird, but also in the green and russet tones so dear to the French artist. A similarly post – Impressionist influence inspires the attractively composed Snow Covered Roof Tops, in which angular mounds of tawny hay, rendered with deft slices of a palette in the manner of Van Gogh, compete with the stately angles of the brown bar to create an evocative winter scene.

Boris Solotareff lived longer in America than anywhere else, and it was here that he died in 1966. By this time he had been widely exhibited and reviewed, his work was represented in several notable collections, and his presence was felt in the New York art world. By the end of his life, Solotareff had devoted over a half century to creating his peaceful, happy, evocative scenes and portraits.

Boris Solotareff’s was fascinated by ballet danser:
-double portrait titled Stravinsky and Bakst (1918)
- portrait of Marya Freund, Polish cantatrice, Beaugency (France), August 24 1934.
-Claude Debussy, Size: 24,5 x 31 cm ; provenance Music Library Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Museum:
Musee du Luxembourg, Paris, France
Musee du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France San Francisco
Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA
Staten Island Institute of Arts and Science, Staten Island, NY
Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Yale University School of Music, New Haven CT
The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York, NY

Measurements:
17″ X 14″ unframed.
21.5″ X 25″ Framed