Born in St. Petersburg in 1887, Alexandre Iacovleff, the youngest of my great-grandmother’s four children, displayed an eerily precocious gift for drawing and at eighteen entered the Imperial Academy of Art. His skills were noticed early in his career by the most influential Russian painter of his teachers’ generation, Aleksandr Benois, who wrote that the young man displayed “a tremendous sensibility to nature…. One can not doubt that [his] talent is phenomenal.” While in art school, Iacovleff became fascinated with theater and dance; at the age of twenty-three he married a ravishing stage and cabaret performer, Bella Shensheva (also known as Kazarosa), who was particularly noted for her fiery Spanish gypsy dances. I imagine that Uncle Sasha’s liaison with Kazarosa was very shocking to Sasha’s prim, strong-willed mother. And it is probable that the alliance was stormy from the start, for in 1913, three years into his marriage, Iacovleff’s career as a voyaging artist began.
After two years of traveling in Italy and Spain, where he was particularly drawn to the works of Mantegna and El Greco, he returned briefly to St. Petersburg, only to set out again for the Far East on a traveling scholarship from the art academy. He was in Beijing when the Russian Revolution broke out (he was never again to see his native Russia or his wife, Bella, who would die in 1929). In 1918, Uncle Sasha, while in Beijing, devoted himself to the study of Chinese theater and began to sign his portraits in Chinese characters that read “Ya-Ko-Lo-Fu,” a pun on “Iaco Le Fou.” He ended his first stay in the Orient with a six-month tour of Japan, where he lived for a while among fishermen on the island of Oshima, learning the art of deep-sea diving. A very large, handsome oil of his entitled The Pearl Divers hung over the couch of my parents’ Paris living room in the prewar years; and there still survive in my archives the underwater photographs he took during that stay in Japan, which he took with one of the first impermeable cameras.
In 1919, not being able to return to Russia, my great-uncle took a ship to France for the first time and settled in Paris, where a large community of White Russian émigrés was forming. The self-possessed young artist with the light, pealing laugh, the swift, warm eyes, and the faunlike beard quickly conquered enough of Paris to lead a very good life. His popularity could only have been helped by the current rage for all things Russian: the fascination with Diaghilev’s ballets and Stravinsky’s scores; the notoriety already achieved by Firebird, Rite of Spring, and Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun; the beauty of the hundreds of Russian émigré women who were providing Paris couturiers with their most gorgeous fashion models. Moreover, like many Russian émigrés, Uncle Sasha was a marvel of resourcefulness. Nearly penniless upon arriving in France, he found a seventh-floor walk-up in Montmartre to live and work in and persuaded a nearby restaurant, La Biche, to let him paint frescoes on its walls in exchange for six meals per week. Within two years of his arrival in Paris, Iacovleff had an exhibition of his Chinese and Japanese paintings at a distinguished Paris gallery, and an eminent French art publisher, Lucien Vogel, issued a lavish book on his Asian work.
Iacovleff was now making enough of an income to vacation with a group of fellow artists on the Mediterranean island of Port-Cros. An American artist who summered there with the same circle, the sculptor Malvina Hoffman, remembered him as “a dynamic, imaginative personality around whom an ever widening circle of friends revolved” and tells of his industriousness and his exuberant gift for friendship. He often took breaks from his ten-hour-per-day work schedule to dive for shells and seaweed, plunging to thirty feet below with a clip on his nose and a pair of Japanese sea goggles; his colleagues wondered what purpose his marine booty would serve. One evening, he asked them to go to a certain restaurant for their supper. “We entered a fantastic decor all aglow with mysterious rainbow-like lighting,” Malvina Hoffman recalled. “Candles hidden behind iridescent shells were arranged in garlands of patterns around walls; amid these garlands were oval medallions, framed in more shells and seaweed, which held life-size portraits of each member of our group.”
Beyond his affability, his magnetic charm, and his renown as an adventurous traveler, I suspect Paris society also adopted Iacovleff because of his unusually multifaceted talents: He was a prodigious linguist, an eloquent writer, an exceptionally gifted athlete, and an excellent cook; he designed furniture, was skilled at bookbinding and lacquering techniques, and created theater sets and costumes—one of his dramatic projects was a staging of Rossini’s opera Semiramis. Moreover, there are many accounts of the spell his physical beauty cast over others. “A body, a musculature, made for discus or javelin-throwing,” so one description of Iacovleff in 1926 goes, “an extraordinarily long, chiseled face, its traits so precisely drawn that they seem to have emerged from a Persian etching…. Vivid, piercing eyes. A warm voice which emits brief, precise statements.” I suspect that Uncle Sasha was very aware of his physical appeal and may have been something of a narcissist: In every beachside photo I’ve seen of him, he is careful to display his muscles in their full glory.
Uncle Sasha displaying his muscles in Capri, mid-1920s.
Uncle Sasha was of legendary generosity toward those even needier than he—on many a day he had to put a sign up on the door of his studio that read, “I have no cash today.” Yet like most Russians of his milieu, he was somewhat of a snob, enjoyed hobnobbing with European aristocracy, and seems to have delighted in doing the portraits of many preeminent society figures. Among his subjects were the duchess d’Aoste and her son the duc de Pouilles, whose mistress, Princess Marie-José of Piedmont, later became the queen of Italy; the Brazilian millionaire Arturo Lopez-Willshaw; and Louis de Bourbon, brother of the empress of Austria, who was married to the daughter of the king of Italy.
Whatever means Iacovleff used to charm his way into Paris circles, he gained recognition and a measure of financial comfort. In 1922, he arranged for his sister and his mother, both of whom had fled Russia for Constantinople, to join him in Paris, and the three set up house in an apartment in Montmartre where they were eventually joined by Tatiana. But notwithstanding his very close bonds to his family, Uncle Sasha retained a studio a few blocks away where he carried on his numerous love affairs in style. I know of two particularly glamorous mistresses. One was Anna Pavlova, whose superb oil portrait, painted by Iacovleff in Paris in 1924, now hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The other, a flamboyant theatrical entrepreneur named Henriette Pascar, had a far more fateful impact on my family: She was the mother of a teenage son named Alexandre Liberman who, some twelve years later, would become my mother’s lover and eventually my stepfather.
The month Tatiana arrived in Paris, July 1925, Sasha was just ending his most adventurous voyage to date, an expedition across Africa funded by the Citroën automobile empire. It has gone down in ethnographic history as the Croisière Noire. (Citroën’s next travel venture, a crossing of Asia, was called the Croisière Jaune; one can imagine the ruckus that such titles would provoke today.) The mastermind of these expeditions, the visionary, notoriously shrewd automobile magnate André Citroën, often referred to as “the Henry Ford of France,” had been aware of the civilian potential of the caterpillar tractor since World War I, when it was used in the design of the first military tanks. Eager to patent these novel vehicles before Americans cornered the market, he started manufacturing them in 1920; and in 1922, when he realized that Africana was coming into vogue—the jazz age was dawning, Josephine Baker was soon to start a craze—he decided to sponsor the first automotive crossing of Africa. His Croisière Noire would span eight thousand kilometers of Africa, from Algeria to Madagascar.
Uncle Sasha and Anna Pavlova at the Duchesse de Grammont’s estate.
The expedition took more than a year to prepare, for depots storing some eighty tons of foodstuffs and mechanical supplies had to be established along the scheduled route. To be head of the expedition, Citroën chose a vice president of his company, Georges-Marie Haardt, an explorer and art connoisseur who had already traveled extensively in the Sahara. In addit
ion to a formidable team of automotive engineers and mechanics, Citroën’s group included a geologist, a zoologist, a medical doctor, two prominent photographers and filmmakers, and an artist, Alexandre Iacovleff, whose role, as Citroën saw it, was to record the people of Africa with an intimacy not readily achieved by the camera.
The convoy of eight caterpillar-treaded vehicles that finally set out in October of 1924 in Colomb-Béchar, in southern Algeria, would not reach Madagascar until June of the following year. Beyond the immense desert spaces, the expedition also had to tackle vast stretches of virgin forest and swamps in which its vehicles came close to being buried in mud. Rocky passes had to be blasted with dynamite, savanna fires that could have melted the very rubber of the vehicles’ treads had to be circumvented. Traveling without any previously prepared map, the members of the Citroën group guided themselves solely by their compasses, as if at sea. Some oases were five hundred miles apart, and precise navigation was needed to avoid running out of water—the Sahara, the travelers soon discovered, was littered with the skeletons of ill-fated earlier voyagers. Throughout the crossing, the expedition also had to watch out for marauding brigands, and at night its camp resembled a war bivouac, with all cars parked into a hollow square and loaded machine guns mounted in defensive positions. Moreover, local chiefs and tribesmen had to be courted, pacified, and befriended all along the way; their festivities had to be patiently attended.
Mother’s uncle, artist and explorer Alexandre Iacovleff (Uncle Sasha), during his crossing of the Sahara in the mid-1920s.
Throughout the crises and complications inevitable to such an expedition, “Iaco,” as my great-uncle’s colleagues called him, displayed a cheerful calm and industriousness that became legendary among his peers. Always traveling in the same vehicle with Haardt, with whom he formed a deep friendship that was to grow with the years, he filled pages with drawings even when they were racing through the bush and continued working during his comrades’ rest periods. Never bored and never idle, he had trained his body to be constantly at work; when there were no models to pose for him, he scavenged for fragments of ancient pottery, piecing them together in an attempt to re-create the originals. “Iacovleff, indefatigable, continues to draw notwithstanding the shaking of the vehicle,” Haardt wrote in his journal. “A methodical man, never bored with anything except vulgarity, he is the charming companion of often trying hours.”
Another task assigned to the suave Iacovleff, who displayed a remarkable ability for acquiring the trust of African tribesmen, was to retain good diplomatic ties with local leaders. Iacovleff was able to finish life-size portraits with astounding speed, in less than an hour, through the use of red Conte crayons (“sanguine” in art parlance), which have the advantage of gliding very smoothly over paper. Sensing that the artist’s swift draftsmanship was imbued with magical powers, some nomadic chiefs who had assaulted most earlier travelers allowed the Citroën group to pass unmolested in exchange for a pastel. Iacovleff indeed possessed uncanny insight into the African tribal mind and was even ready to share the most disconcerting local food—in the course of the trip, he often went off on his own to feast with natives on toasted termites or sautéed locusts. The unusual measure of communion he achieved with his African models is recorded in his travel journals.
“Louaho, Chief Waguenia,” he jotted in Stanleyville, Congo.
Alexandre Iacovleff’s portrait of Haile Selassie, 1928.
Prototype of the black chief for an ancient edition of Paul et Virginie. Coarse-featured face with bloodshot eyes, but with a kind, childlike expression. He takes great pains to pose conscientiously; drops of sweat appear on his forehead under the hat decorated with multicolored feathers; his necklace of leopard teeth moves perceptibly on his chest, strained by the immobility of his pose. Upon seeing his double on paper, he is struck with wonder. He has a long conversation with his image and addresses it with great deference, with many salutations and good wishes, before getting onto the bicycle that will carry him back to his village.
Nineteen twenty-five—the year Mein Kampf was first published and Charlie Chaplin issued The Gold Rush—also marked the return of Citroën’s Croisière Noire from Africa. The travelers brought back numerous new maps of heretofore uncharted regions; 80,000 feet of filmed footage; some 8,000 photographs; the specimens of 300 mammals, 800 bird species, and 15,000 insect species, many of them up to then unknown to Europeans; and more than 500 paintings and drawings by Iacovleff. The cult of explorers and heroic travelers in the 1920s was somewhat equivalent to the contemporary cult of rock stars and film idols. I have talked to many French citizens, now in their eighties and nineties, whose families had kept vast maps of Africa on their living-room walls and tracked the advances of the Citroën expedition with pushpins as reports of its progress came out in the national press. Iacovleff’s fame grew by bounds after the expedition’s return. His 1926 exhibit at Paris’s prestigious Galerie Charpentier, in which he showed many large oil paintings based on his African sketches, totally sold out. That fall, the Louvre held a massive five-month exhibition of the treasures brought back by the Croisière Noire: jewels, arms, zoological specimens, more photographs of the expedition, more Iacovleff drawings. The premiere of the film that documented the trip was attended by the president of the Republic, Gaston Doumergue, and it played at the Marivaux Theater for six consecutive months.
After his return from Africa, Iacovleff became increasingly popular for his portraits of eminent Parisian society figures, predominantly done in sanguine, like his African sketches. Some critics were comparing him to David and to Ingres, and John Singer Sargent was proclaiming that Iacovleff was one of the two greatest draftsmen alive. (We have no record of whom he considered to be the other great draftsman.) The artist who had arrived penniless in Paris less than a decade before could now provide comfortably for his mother and sister, and in the late 1920s bought them a three-room apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement, off the Avenue Foch, where I was to spend some of the happiest days of my early childhood. For in 1929, Iacovleff’s niece Tatiana accepted the marriage offer of a young French diplomat, Bertrand du Plessix. It was her Uncle Sasha who bought her trousseau and her beautiful white satin wedding dress, who gave her away in marriage, and whom a year later she chose to be my godfather.
Notwithstanding the increasing celebrity they enjoyed after their return from Africa, Iacovleff and most of his comrade travelers felt a strange emptiness, a restlessness, a spiritual void. “I love traveling, the voluptuous thrill of constant movement, the constant discovery of new wonders,” the artist had confessed in an interview shortly after his return. And indeed I doubt if many months spent in the African wilderness can leave anyone indifferent. Such an experience is more likely to affect us like an infection, or a drug. The members of the Croisière Noire expedition seem to have been intoxicated by the sense of limitless freedom that prevails in the desert; by the crystalline silence of nights punctuated only by the jackal’s yelp, the hyena’s wild laugh, the majestic roar of the lion; above all, by the deep camaraderie bred among men, thrust into situations of dearth and risk, who share a campfire for hundreds of consecutive nights, under Africa’s dazzling stars. The travelers had been home for barely two years when they started talking about a new expedition. “Where would our vagabondings lead to next?” Iacovleff wrote in his journals. “This question could be read in the gaze of my traveling companions, grown used to nomadic life…. Soon after the exhibitions, films, books were behind us our unquiet spirits took off again in search for new adventures.”
André Citroën, too, was inebriated by the glamour brought to his firm by the African trip and wanted more of it. He had recently become interested in the possibility of setting up automobile factories in China, which in the past two decades had begun to admit missionaries and Western traders. What about sponsoring a new expedition, a Croisière Jaune that would send his vehicles on a historic eastward mission across the Asian continent? Although they were aware that
Asia presented far vaster dangers and complications than Africa ever had, the adventurous Georges Haardt and his restless friend Iaco cheered the prospect: They were entranced by the notion of following the ancient route on which Arab and Chinese merchants had brought the East’s treasures to Europe centuries ago, of crossing the terrain on which, in Iacovleff’s own words, “Alexander the Great, Darius, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, and Marco Polo had already left material and spiritual traces.” Buoyed by their enthusiasm, in 1928 the two-and-a-half-year preparation for the Croisière Jaune began.
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