A year after the Brodyachaya sobaka [The Stray Dog] cabaret was closed by the authorities in 1915, its founder, the actor and theatre director Boris Pronin, reopened it in a new guise and a new location as the Prival komediantov [The Comedians' Rest] on the corner of the Field of Mars and the Moyka. These two cabaret-cafes were focal points of Russian Modernist culture and staged poetry performances, lectures, debates, music, and dance. As meeting places for writers, poets, musicians, and artists, these cabarets came to embody the synthesis of all the arts, which was the aim of the Russian Silver Age.

Sergei Sudeikin had been the co-founder of the Stray Dog and had covered its basement walls and ceiling in richly-coloured murals of birds and flowers inspired by Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. When the Comedians' Rest (named after a painting by Sudeikin from 1914) opened in April 1916, Sudeikin was asked to decorate the interior of the new space, along with Alexander Yakovlev and Boris Grigoriev. Sudeikin and his ex-wife, Olga Glebova-Sudeikina, lived in one of the apartments above the cabaret. On another floor was Nadezhda Dobychina’s Art Bureau, the location of many important exhibitions of the 1910s, including those of the Mir iskusstva and Jack of Diamonds groups as well as 0,10, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings.

There were three main rooms in the vaulted basement club: the ‘tavern’ room was decorated with gigantic figures of innkeepers and revellers by Grigoriev; the second room with Yakovlev’s beloved Harlequin figure; and the third room, adjacent to the stage, by Sudeikin. Sudeikin painted the walls and ceilings of this room in black and against this vaulted night sky shone the signs of the zodiac in splintered mirrored glass. To block out every slither of light on even the brightest of the Petersburg White Nights, he painted scenes with the characters of the Commedia dell’arte on plywood made to cover the windows of the basement. This room, where performances were staged, was named ‘The Hall of Gozzi and Hoffmann’ in honour of the Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi and the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, two of the most important influences and symbols of theatricality for the Russian Modernists.

The candlelight filling the present works highlights aspects of the characters' faces and clothing, yet it also works to disguise certain parts of the compositions. The achieved visual contrast would have certainly made the panels look striking against the pitch-black background of the room. The very fact that these scenes were painted on plywood and not directly on to the walls meant that they were able to be removed after the cabaret closed its doors in 1919 and some of them have survived. The decorative schemes by Grigoriev and Yakovlev were destroyed along with the rest of the interior by the great Leningrad flood of September 1924.

The two works forming the present lot resurfaced in France during the early 1990s and were first offered for sale at Replica Shoes ’s London in 1991, where they remained unsold. The works then reappeared at Koller Auctions in Zurich in 2006, where they were acquired by the present owner. They are illustrated, alongside two other panels, in an article by the theatre director Vladimir Solovev on Sudeikin in a 1917 issue of Apollon (fig.1).

Among other known decorations for the Comedians' Rest is My Life (1916), which forms part of the Dudakov-Kashuro collects ion and was acquired by the couple from the Soviet actress Daria Zerkalova, wife of the theatre specialist Nikolai Volkov. Autobiographical in nature, it depicts Sudeikin and his close circle, including Glebova-Sudeikina, the artist’s future wife Vera Bosse, and the poet Mikhail Kuzmin, with whom Sudeikin had an affair, as Commedia dell’arte characters. Two additional panels, illustrated in Dora Kogan’s 1974 monograph on the artist, are currently in the collects ion of the A.A.Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum in Moscow, having been accessioned in 1939 through the Soviet acquisition committee for the arts from the collects or Grigory Grinshtein (fig.2).