2025 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction6 / 24 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Label, Fenn Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Label, The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Fechin’s daughter Eya Fechin Branham wrote, “The involvement goes back to my girlhood in our native Russia and later in the United States, places where I learned the discipline of posing for him as he did portraits of me. The involvement extends to our family move to Taos, in 1927, where Nicolai Fechin found such a kinship with both the land and the native peoples that it satisfied, for a time, the never-ending pull back to his native country and its people. I was with him often, back in New York City for a time, and at last to the beautiful studio on a mountainside at Santa Monica, California, where Fechin found contentment with neighbors and friends and students.
“All during these years, I saw him translate his gifts for drawing, carving, portraiture, landscape and still life into objects of enduring beauty and significance. I saw him delight in teaching others – teaching them not so much the techniques he himself had learned at the Academy in Russia, but how to see, to develop their own individual gifts. He admired the work of other artists, including the good abstract or non-objective painters of past and present. He made deep and abiding friendships, and he enjoyed the acceptance of his own artistry.”
PROVENANCE
Private collection, California
Fenn Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Private collection, Dallas, Texas
Fenn Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Private collection, Phoenix, Arizona
Private collection, Dallas, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2013
Private collection, Wyoming
LITERATURE
Forrest Fenn, The Genius of Nicolai Fechin: Recollections by Forrest Fenn, One Horse Land and Cattle Co., 2001, p. 67, illustrated
