Boris Solotareff was born in Bendare, Romania in 1889. He studied art in Odessa until 1907, when, at the age of eighteen he moved to Munich. He arrived in that city just as it was beginning to assert its role as a major European cultural capital. Solotareff enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst during the heyday of the Munich Secession. In the seven years he spent in Munich, he would have been able to experience first hand the dramatic influence of Kandinsky's Phalanx and Blaue Reiter groups. At the exhibition held by Kandinsky at the Neue Kunstler Vereinigung, the young Romanian artist would have had perhaps his first exposure to the works of Picasso, Braque, and Vlaminck.

One of Solotareff's ...