MOSES ZELIKOVICH LEVIN (1895–1946) Beach

signed in Cyrillic ‘M. Levin’ (lower right) watercolour on paper 26.9 × 39.4 cm executed circa 1920s Moses Zelikovich Levin was a Soviet painter, theatre designer and film director who worked in Leningrad and Kazakhstan. In 1919 he studied in the studio of N. Altman at the Petrograd Free Art Studios (former Imperial Academy of Arts). In the early 1920s he worked with several experimental theatres in Petrograd, including the Theatre of New Drama founded by A. Gripich, a pupil of Vsevolod Meyerhold. It was the first expressionist theatre in the new country to employ the techniques of buffoonery, eccentricity and the grotesque. Levin designed sets for a number of productions, among them The Death of Pazukhin by M. Saltykov-Shchedrin and The Tricks of Scapin by Molière, the latter receiving a silver medal at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925.