Vase with Flowers

Sirak Skitnik painted this vase of flowers in 1935, in oil on a sheet of cardboard rather than canvas. By then he was one of the busiest figures in Bulgarian culture, a critic and organizer who that same year took charge of the country's brand-new national radio. Painting flowers was the quieter side of him. He had trained in St Petersburg, under teachers of the Russian World of Art circle who prized stylised line and flat, decorative colour, and that schooling shows here in the way the blooms are simplified into shape and tone rather than copied petal by petal. It is a small panel, about half a metre tall, from the years he was running that new broadcaster out of Sofia.