OSKAR RABIN | ADAM AND EVE

A gift from the artist to the present owner

Dating from 1957, Adam and Eve is the earliest work by the artist ever to be offered at auction. In the late 1950s Oscar Rabin, his wife Valentina Kropivnitskaya and father-in-law Evgeny Kropivnitsky founded the unofficial art group 'Lianozovo', a creative association of poets and artists named after Lianozovo district in Moscow where most of the members lived and worked. Precluded from participating in the official Artists Union, the Lianozovo artists were considered dissidents and often harassed by Soviet officials.

Rabin was also a driving force behind the infamous Bulldozer exhibition, the show was forcefully raided by the authorities who arrived with bulldozers and water cannons, whence the name. As one of the main organizers, he was arrested and ultimately deprived of his citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union. Rabin later recounted the horror of seeing art crushed and artists arrested: 'It was very frightening … The bulldozer was symbolic of an authoritarian regime just like the Soviet tanks in Prague.' Two of his own paintings were among those destroyed.