VERA ROCKLINE (1896-1934) Kiki de Montparnasse: Reclining Nude with Red Necklace

oil on canvas 46 x 59 cm Vera Rockline was an important female artist who lived in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. Rockline, along with artists like Tamara de Lempicka and Sonia Delaunay, contributed to the group Ecole de Paris, a community of French and international artists living in Paris in the first decades of the 20th century. Her life was short, Rockline died only at thirty-seven years old, and she achieved significant critical acclaim, exhibiting her paintings at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Tuileries. She had several solo art exhibitions in Paris galleries. Initially, she was known for landscapes and portraits in a Cubo-Futurist style. In the 1920s, Rockline began focusing on female nudes as one of her principal subjects, fusing light and pastel hues of Neo-Impressionism and thick brushstrokes and perspectives influenced by Cubism. Raymond Escholier (1882-1971), journalist, writer, art critic and Petit Palais museum curator, called Rokhline's nude series 'a symphony of flesh.' Born in Moscow in 1897 to a Russian father and a French mother, Rockline, née Schlezinger, moved to Kyiv to apprentice for Aleksandra Exter. Before that, she studied at the studio of neo-impressionist Ilya Mashkov. In 1918–1919, still under the name of Schlesinger, she participated in exhibitions in Moscow devoted to Jewish art. After spending two years in Tbilisi, Rockline and her husband emigrated to France in 1921.