Portraits of the avant-garde circle

Kulbin moved at the centre of the Russian avant-garde in St Petersburg in the years before the First World War. He was a trained doctor who turned to art, and he knew nearly everyone worth knowing in that scene. The most recognisable human subjects in his work are therefore his contemporaries: poets, performers and fellow painters. These portraits tend to be loose, expressive likenesses rather than formal commissions, closer to character studies than to society portraiture.

That matters for anyone trying to identify his work. A Kulbin figure is rarely posed or polished. Faces are built from quick, angular strokes, and the emphasis falls on energy rather than resemblance. If a painting attributed to him shows a carefully modelled academic portrait, it is worth being cautious. His instinct ran toward the sketch, the caricature and the expressive gesture, and his portrait subjects were almost always people from his own artistic world rather than patrons or family sitters.

Theatre, performance and design work

The second recurring subject is performance itself. Kulbin was involved with avant-garde theatre circles, and a significant share of his output consists of designs for productions, costume studies and drawings that read as choreography on paper. These works show figures in motion, bodies reduced to rhythm and line. For him the boundary between painting and stage design was thin, and many sheets sit deliberately in between.

This is also where his interest in music shows through. He wrote about the connections between sound and visual form, and his performance-related subjects often behave like visual scores, with repeated marks standing in for beats and intervals. A buyer looking at such a work should expect abstraction that still gestures at the human figure. Anyone weighing how these energetic compositions behave on a wall can compare options in choosing canvas or framed poster, since the surface changes how the line reads.

Abstraction and the drawn line

The third group is the most abstract. Kulbin produced many compositions that have no subject at all in the conventional sense, only line, colour and rhythm. These works are usually small in scale and often executed in watercolour or ink, media that reward speed. They belong to the same experimental moment that produced early abstraction across Europe, and they are closer to visual music than to depiction.

For a modern buyer this is the most practical group to know. An abstract Kulbin composition is forgiving in an interior because it carries no scene to argue with the room. It contributes movement and a period accent instead. Readers planning a specific wall can find practical placement advice in sizing a print for a small living room, and those curious how his graphic energy compares with calmer painters can look at Sails on the Oise framed poster as a contrast in temperament.