Ivan Puni (in France known as Jean Pougny) was one of the most brilliant and radical innovators of the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s, an artist whose life seemed split between two eras and two cultures. From 1910 to 1914 he travelled in Italy and Paris, absorbing Cubism and Futurism. In 1915, at the legendary “0,10” exhibition, he stood beside Malevich and consciously embraced Suprematism. Together with his wife Ksenia Boguslavskaya he took part in every major event of the Russian avant-garde, taught at the Petrograd Free Studios, and in 1919 organised an exhibition in Vitebsk that brought together Chagall, Lissitzky and Malevich. At the end of 1920 he fled Soviet Russia via Finland to Berlin and in 1923 settled permanently in Paris under the name Jean Pougny.

In emigration the radical avant-gardist unexpectedly became a lyrical, melancholic master of the School of Paris. He painted still lifes, landscapes, street and circus scenes in muted tones filled with quiet nostalgia. Around 1931–1932 the first harlequin appeared – a masked, solitary figure with mandolin and tricorn. After 1943 harlequins became his almost confessional motif: tender, lonely, steeped in longing for the lost world of theatre and youth. Today these late works are valued by collectors and museums far more than his early Suprematist experiments, precisely for their deeply personal, trembling intimacy. Puni’s paintings are held in the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, MoMA and the Centre Pompidou.