(Novobelitsa Mogilev 1903–1987 Moscow)
Moscow, view of the Foreign Ministry building, monogrammed and dated ГН 64, underneath original signature and date ГеоргНисский 72, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, framed

We are grateful to Dr. Olga Sugrobova-Roth for her help in cataloging this work.

Photo-Certificate:
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (2020, Alica B. Lyubimova, Alfiya G. Nizamutdinova, Sergei V. Sirro) Tatiana M. Levina (Moscow, 2020), and the results of the pigment analysis (Sergei V. Chavrin, St. Petersburg, 2020)

Provenance:
Collection of the architect Michail A. Bely, further to heirs, after 2000
Private collection, Berlin

The overloaded "baroque" forms of Soviet painting from the late Stalinist period were replaced by the so-called austere style around 1960. The artists of the austere style drew on the aesthetics of the 1920s, striving for reduced forms, clear lines and free spaces. Georgi Nissky was one of the fathers of the austere style. He studied at Vkhutemas from 1923 to 1930 and had been obsessed with sport and technology since his youth. Alexander Deineka, whom he met early in his career, became Nissky's greatest role model. Nissky's best-known works, in which he harmonised laconicism, dynamism and romanticism, were created between 1955 and 1975.

Through the special atmospheric mood, the painter succeeded in uniting the architecture of two epochs:
the Foreign Ministry building, one of the five famous Moscow skyscrapers, was under construction from 1948 to 1953, while the plain 21-storey buildings in front of it (then two symmetrical buildings of the Hotel Belgrade) were built in the first half of the 1970s. The painting shows the moment when the right wing of the hotel was already built and the left wing was under construction.

The first owner of the painting was the Leningrad architect Mikhail A. Bely. He was the planner of the Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk, founded in 1957, and Nissky's creative comrade-in-arms.