The Girona Art Museum enriches its collection with the acquisition of a work by Olga Sacharoff
- The Girona institution includes the piece “ The Family”, a prominent work from the artist’s Parisian period .
- With this acquisition , the Girona Art Museum consolidates its commitment to the promotion of art and culture, and invites the public to enjoy these works that are already part of its collection .
The Girona Art Museum (md’A) has incorporated the work “The Family” ( c) into its collection.. 1924), an oil on canvas by the painter Olga Sacharoff (Tbilisi, 1881 – Barcelona, 1967).
“The Family” by Olga Sacharoff
The work “The Family”, measuring 56.5 x 47.5 cm, exemplifies Sacharoff’s Parisian period, considered the painter’s most successful, in which she developed a very unique and characteristic painting style.
The piece, worked with a curious pictorial neatness and in a perfect state of conservation, summarizes very well the themes and the most celebrated style of the artist. In the painting he portrays a petty bourgeois family in a typical scene of the period, with the props common in photographic studios: pedestals, chairs, balustrades and false backgrounds of idyllic gardens. In this context, they pose the three members of a seemingly perfect family – woman, man and child –, motionless and prepared for the portrait flash, only here they will be immortalized by the artist’s critical brush.
The artist, of Georgian origin, developed a long pictorial career, first begun in her native Tbilisi, continued in Munich and developed in Paris, where she lived the interwar period -although with a brief stay in Catalonia during the First World War-. She would end up settling definitively in Barcelona at the beginning of the Second World War, together with her husband the painter and photographer Otto Lloyd. Her pictorial production is wide and diverse, and is marked by two great moments: the Parisian period, with an avant-garde work that would later evolve towards a certain very personal Noucentisme; and a second moment, after the Second World War, with a more decorative work focused on demand and taste characterized by a theme of landscapes, flowers and, above all, portraits of the Barcelona bourgeoisie.
The work was owned by a private Catalan collector who had acquired it in 2023 at an auction in Paris. The purchase by the Museum was formalized last Thursday for a price of €52,500, leftover from the 2024 ordinary budget, most of which came from energy consumption expenses that were not executed.
In 2017, the md’A hosted the exhibition “ Olga Sacharoff: painting, poetry and emancipation“, which explored the painter’s links with Catalan art of the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition was curated by Elina Norandi, who advised the md’A on this new acquisition.
Recovery of historical heritage: fragments of the Sant Feliu altarpiece
On the other hand, during 2024, the Friends of the Art Museum made the donation of several fragments of the altarpiece of Sant Feliu de Girona (1504-1520), including a fragment of the dust cover and one of the pinnacles. These pieces represent an important step in the recovery and conservation of this emblematic heritage site. In addition, the donation of the Amics del md’A also included a gouache by Emili Vilà (Llagostera, 1887-1968), an artist originally from Llagostera who worked as a poster artist for major film producers.
With these new additions, the Girona Art Museum reaffirms its commitment to promoting art and culture, inviting the public to discover and enjoy these works that are part of its permanent collection.