Elégantes, Circa 1950

Constantin Terechkovitch  

Russian, French.

Constantin Tereshkovitch is a French naturalized Russian painter, lithographer, engraver and illustrator. Konstantin Tereshkovitch comes from a family of doctors. He spent his childhood near Moscow, then, from 1907, in the city itself, where his parents showed him the collection of Sergei Ivanovitch Chtchoukine. This visit is decisive since it provokes the pictorial vocation of the young man. Before the revolution, he followed the courses of the painter Constantin Youon and, in 1917, at the age of fifteen, entered the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow.

He sees the Russian Revolution as the sign that will hasten his departure for Paris, a city where he had long since decided to settle in order to learn to paint. He arrived there in 1920 and enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. It survives by working in a factory, then serving as a model for a sculptor. He rubs shoulders with all the Russian painters of Montparnasse, Volovic, Krémègne, and paints alongside them at La Ruche.

He presented works at the Salon d'Automne, where his first paintings were accepted in 1925. The Galerie Henry organized a joint exhibition with Lanskoy the same year. He meets young French painters with whom he shares the same exuberant vision of color and the pleasure of painting. These are Roland Oudot, with whom he exhibited in 1926 (Charles Auguste Girard gallery), Brianchon and Legueult.

Tereshkovitch traveled to Switzerland in 1929, where he met Swiss collectors who would support him throughout his career. The links with Soviet Russia were not yet severed: he took part, with Chagall, Zadkine and Pougny, in the exhibition organized by the Tretyakov gallery in 1929. of composition, while remaining figurative. The subjects that made her so successful revolved around the night and music-hall dancers.

His marriage in 1933 with Yvette modified his achievements. His wife becomes his favorite subject, alone then with his two daughters, France and Nathalie. Alongside representations of family happiness, Tereshkovitch paints horses and the world of racing, produces many portraits including those of his painter friends (Vlaminck, Soutine).

His career took an international turn, he exhibited in Geneva in 1934, then in Chicago and New York in 1937. When war was declared, he joined the Foreign Legion and then served in the French army. Demobilized in 1940, he settled in an unoccupied zone. During the occupation, he continued to paint, exhibited in 1942 at Pétridès.

After the war, he moved to Paris in a studio house rue Boulard. He goes from exhibition to exhibition. He deepens his attachment to a serene realism, whose disorderly false appearance aims to magnify all the details of existence, from the largest to the smallest. His palette is always full of clarity and his touch light and sure. He is named painter of poetic reality. The public success of Tereshkovitch's work did not wane. He shares his life between Paris and the South and travels extensively to renew his subjects, including several months in Asia in 1964. He still exhibited at Pétrides (1969, 1971 and 1979) as well as the Matarasso gallery in Nice.

He died in 1978. In 1986, the municipal museum of Menton devoted a major retrospective to him.