by Peter. Leek
200. Kazimir Malevitch, Peasants, 1928-1932.
Oil on fabric, 53,5 x 70 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersbourg.
Biographies
ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH BENOIS
Alexander Nikolayevich Benois was born on 21 April (3 May, New Style) 1870 in Saint Petersburg. He was the youngest of nine sons of Nikolaï Benois, an Academician of Architecture. In 1890-94, after graduation from K. May’s private school, he studied at the Law Faculty of Saint Petersburg University. In 1887 he became an unregistered student of the Academy of Arts, but, unsatisfied with the quality of education there he left four months later. He began to practice drawing and painting under the guidance of his elder brother, Albert, an academician of watercolour painting. In 1890 and 1894 he travelled to Italy, Switzerland, and Spain; in 1896-98 and from 1905 to 1907 he worked in Paris, Versailles, and Normandy; he subsequently visited France every year and also spent time in Italy, Switzerland, and Spain. He contributed to exhibitions as from 1892. From 1895 to 1899 he was the curator of Princess Tenisheva’s collection. An organizer and the ideological leader of the World of Art association, the initiator behind the establishment of the art journals Mir iskusstua (World of Art) and Khudozhestvenniye sokrovishcha Rossii (The Art Treasures of Russia) he was the editor of the latter from 1901 to 1903. From 1917 on, he was actively involved in the preservation of monuments of art and history and the reorganization of museum practice, particularly at the Hermitage where he headed the Picture Gallery from 1918 to 1926. He produced pictures in watercolour, gouache, pastel and, from 1905, oils forming a series entitled The Last Walks of Louis XIV (1897-98) and the Versailles Series (1905-06). The associated paintings are The Marquise Bathing, The Chinese Pavillon, The Jealous Man and Italian Comedy: Indiscreet Punchinello. Compositions on themes from Russian history commissioned by Iosif Knoebel for his major publication Russian History in Pictures (1907-10) are Parade in the Reign of Paul I, The Entrance of Catherine the Great at the Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, Suvorov’s Camp, Peter the Great Walking in the Summer Gardens. A major place in Benois’ legacy is held by views of old Saint Petersburg and its suburbs — Peterhof, Oranienbaum, and Pavlovsk (1900-02). He produced a large number of landscapes during his travels around Europe to the Crimea, and the villages of Novgorod Province. Benois illustrated and designed the following publications: Pushkin’s Queen of Spades (1898, 1905, 1910), Bronze Horseman (1903, 1905, 1916-22), and The Captain’s Daughter (1904, 1919); N. Kutepov’s famous books devoted to the history of a royal hunt in Russia (1901, 1907, 1908); D. Merezhkovsky’s Paul I (1907); A. Pogorelsky’s Black Hen or The Underground Dwellers (1922); illustrations for A Children’s Alphabet book (1904) and others. He created drawings, head-, and tailpieces for the journals The World of Art, The Art Treasures of Russia, and Zolotoye runo (The Golden Fleece). He produced a series of drawings called Toys in 1904 (issued as postcards by the Publishing House of the Red Cross Society of St. Eugenia) and another, Death, in 1907, as well as pencil portraits of numerous artists, musicians, friends, and relatives and a series of lithographs devoted to Peterhof (1918-22). In 1900 he began to work for the theatre. He designed the productions of Wagner’s opera Götterdömmerung and Nikolaï Tcherepnin’s Le Pavillon d’Armide (1907), he was also involved in directing the latter, at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. In 1907 he created a curtain design for the Antique Theatre which opened in Saint Petersburg. From 1908 to 1911 he was the art director of Diaghilev’s troupe in Paris; for the Russian Seasons he refurbished the decors for Le Pavillon d’Armide and designed other ballets: Chopin’s Les Sylphides (1909), Adam’s Giselle (1910), and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka (1911) — he wrote the libretto for the last and was involved in its direction — as well as Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale (1914), where he was again involved as a director. In 1913-15 he headed the art production section of the Moscow Arts Theatre. In conjunction with Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, he designed and staged productions of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire and Le Mariage forcé, Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, and Pushkin’s Feast in a Time of Plague, Mozart and Salieri, and The Stone Guest. From 1919 to 1923 in Petrograd, he designed and staged Merezhovsky’s Tsarevich Alexei, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Molière’s Les Precieuses ridicules and Le Medecin malgré lui as well as Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters at the Large Drama Theatre; Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (the former Mariinsky) and Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme at the State Academic Drama Theatre (the former Alexandrinsky Theatre). From 1914 to 1917 Benois headed a project to decorate the interior of the Kazan Railroad Station in Moscow with paintings. He drew up the overall plan and produced designs for several panels (Asia, Europe, Labour and Science, and others) but the project was never implemented. By 1899 Benois had become an important art critic and historian. He published an immense quantity of articles in numerous journals and newspapers. He wrote the influential Russian painting section for Richard Muther’s History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century and the books The Russian School of Painting (1904), Tsarskoye Selo during the Reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (Material for the History of Art in Russia in the Eighteenth Century) (1910) and A History of Painting in All Times and Among All Peoples (1912-17, unfinished) and other longer works. After 1926, Benois lived in Paris. He continued to paint and to work in the graphic arts, but focused his efforts on the theatre. From 1927 to 1935 he was the chief artist in Ida Rubinstein’s troupe. He designed over sixty productions in Paris, London, Milan, New York, Vienna, and other cities around the world, more than twenty of them for La Scala, where his son Nikolaï was a production manager. In later life, Benois wrote Reminiscences of the Ballet (1939) and The Life of an Artist, Memoirs (1955). Alexander Benois died on 9 February 1960 in Paris.
IVAN YAKOVLEVICH BILIBIN
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin was born on 4 August (16 N.S.) 1876, in Tarkhovka near Saint Petersburg. On graduation from secondary school he studied simultaneously at the Law Faculty of Saint Petersburg University (1896-1900), the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts (1895-98), and Princess Tenisheva’s private school under the guidance of llya Repin (1898-1900). In 1898 he frequented the studio of Anton Abe in Munich, later he toured Switzerland and Italy. From 1900 to 1904 he was an unregistered student of the Academy of Arts attending Ilya Repin’s studio. In 1900 he became a member of the World of Art Society and contributor to its exhibitions. From 1902 to 1904, commissioned by the ethnographical department of the Russian Museum, he participated in field expeditions to Vologda, Arkhangelsk, Olonets, and Tver Provinces collecting works of folk art and taking photographs of wooden architecture. In 1904 he published the articles Folk Art of the Russian North and The Relics of Art in the Russian Countryside. From 1907 to 1917 he taught at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and from 1910 to 1912 at the Women’s Higher Polytechnic Courses. In February 1917 he worked in the commission for the preservation of art monuments. He began to work in the field of literary and newspress graphic art in 1899. In the 1900s — early 1910s he illustrated traditional Russian fairy tales and designed books of them (Vasilisa the Beautiful, The Frog Princess, Maria Morevna, etc.), Pushkin’s tales (The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Tale of the Golden Cockerel), and bylinas (epic poems) and created originals for postcards issued by the Publishing House of the Red Cross Society of St. Eugenia (about 30). He designed covers, title pages, and head-and tailpieces for a large number of publications (works by Fiodor Sologub, Alexeï Tolstoi, Konstantin Balmont, Alexander Kuprin, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, H. G. Wells, etc.) In 1905 and 1906 he contributed to the satirical journals Zhupel (Bugaboo) and Adskaya Pochta (Hell’s Mail), in the 1900s-1910s, to The WorId of Art, The Golden Fleece, The Art Treasures of Russia, Narodnoye obrazovaniye (Popular Education), Solntse Rossii (The Sun of Russia), etc. He designed posters, stamps, and playing cards. From the 1910s to the 1930s and later he produced landscape drawings a
nd watercolours, including views of the Crimea, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and France. He produced his first work for the theatre — sets and costumes for Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden — at the National Theatre in Prague in 1904. In 1908 he designed costumes for Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov and for Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons in Paris. From 1907 to 1914 he worked for the Antique Theatre (Rutebœuf’s Le Miracle de Théophile, 1907; Lope de Vega’s Fuente ovehuna, 1911) and the People’s Flouse Theatre in Saint Petersburg (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ruslan and Liudmila, 1914) and the Zimin Opera in Moscow (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel, 1909; A. Verstovsky’s Tomb of Askold, 1914). In 1913 he produced sketches for the decoration of halls in the State Bank building in Nizhni-Novgorod and in 1915 designs for the ceiling paintings of the Kazan Railroad Station in Moscow. From 1920 to 1926 he lived in Egypt (Cairo, Alexandria) and in Paris; in 1924 he traveled to Palestine and Syria. In Egypt he produced decorative panels and sketches for iconostases and frescoes. In 1925 he designed productions of Tcherepnin’s Russian Fairy Tale and Romance of a Mummy for Anna Pavlova’s company. In Paris he continued to work for the theatre (Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Borodin’s Prince Igor, etc.), illustrated traditional fairy tales of various nations, and those of the brothers Grimm and Alexander Pushkin. While visiting Czechoslovakia, he produced sketches of frescoes and iconostases for a Russian church in Prague and designed opera productions in the theatres of Brno and Prague. In 1934, at the request of the Soviet embassy in Paris, he created the panel Mikula Selianinovich. In 1936 he returned to Leningrad. From 1936 to 1942 he was a professor at the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, the All-Russian Academy of Arts. He produced illustrations for Alexeï Tolstoi’s novel Peter the Great (1937), Lermontov’s Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov (1938-39), and bylinas (1940-41); designed the production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan at the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre and took part in decorative work for the planned Palace of Soviets in Moscow. He died during the siege of Leningrad on 7 February 1942.
LEON BAKST
Leon Bakst (Lev Samoilovich Rosenberg) was born on 27 April (9 May N.S.) 1866, in Grodno. His family soon moved to Saint Petersburg. From 1883 to 1887 he was an unregistered student of the Academy of Arts under Pavel Chistiakov and Karl Wenig. In 1891 he traveled to Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, and Italy. In 1893, having been commissioned to paint Paris Welcoming Admiral Avelan (completed in 1900), he left for the French capital, where he stayed for six years. In Paris he visited the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Académie Julian, and studied under the Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt. He traveled to Spain and North Africa. In 1907, he made a journey around Greece together with Valentin Serov. In 1890 he joined the circle of Alexander Benois and his friends Konstantin Somov, Dmitry Filosofov, Walter Nuvel, and Sergeï Diaghilev. In 1898, he played an active part in the organization of the World of Art association. He participated in exhibitions as from 1890. From 1906 to 1909 he taught at Yelizaveta Zvantseva’s art school. As from 1909, he mainly lived in Paris. His early ventures in the field of literary and newspress graphic art date from 1888 to 1893: they were the designs of books for children and teenagers, journalistic drawings in the journals Khudozhnik (The Artist) and Peterburgskaya zhizn (Saint Petersburg Life). Later, the style of his graphic works changed markedly. Between 1899 and 1909 he contributed to the journals WorId of Art, The Art Treasures of Russia, Vesy (The Balance), The Golden Fleece, Satiricon, Apollon, and Yezhegodnik Imperatoskikh teatrov (The Annual of the Imperial Theatres), The almanachs of Northern Flowers, The Dogrose, as well as the books: V. Vereshchagin’s Russian Book Sign, A. Benois’ Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, A. Bloke’s collection of poems The Snow Mask, etc. He produced drawings for theatrical programs and postcards issued by the Publishing House of the Red Cross Society of St. Eugenia, sketches for posters, and bookplates. In 1899 and the 1900s he worked in the medium of lithography. He created many graphic portraits including those of Isaac Levitan, Philip Maliavin, Maria Savina (all 1899), Andreï Bely, Konstantin Somov, Zinaida Gippius, Alexander Golovin and Isadora Duncan (all 1905 to 1908). His paintings belong to different genres and include many studies and portraits: A Spaniard (1901), Self-Portrait (1893), A Young Dagomean (1895), portraits of Walter Nuvel (1895), Alexander Benois (1898), Vassily Rozanov (1901), Liubov Gritsenko (1903), Sergeï Diaghilev and his nun (1906); landscapes: The Courtyard at the Musée Cluny in Paris (1891), In the Environs of Nice (1899), Olive Grove, A Rainy Day in the Alps, A Village Church, Autumn in Versailles (all 1903-04); narrative pictures: Siamese Ritual Dance (1901), Supper (1902), Vase: Self-Portrait (1906), Downpour (1906); decorative panels: Elysium (1906), repeating the curtain for the Vera Komissarzhevskaya Theatre), Terror Antiquus (1908). In 1902, he produced boudoir decor designs for the Contemporary Art Store and Exhibition. Bakst turned to theatrical painting, to which he largely owes his fame, in 1902. He designed the following productions: The Marquise’s Heart, a pantomime show (1902, the Hermitage Theatre), J. Bayer’s ballet Die Puppenfee (The Fairy Doll) (1903, the Hermitage Theatre and later the Mariinsky Theatre), Euripides’ Tragedy Hippolytus and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (1902 and 1904, the Alexandrine Theatre). From 1909 to 1921 he worked for Diaghilev’s Company, becoming its artistic head in 1911. He designed a number of ballet productions: Cléopâtre to the music of A. Arensky, S. Taneyev, M. Glinka, and others (1909), Stravinsky’s Firebird (1910, costumes for two characters), Rimsky-Korsakov’s Schéhérazade and Schumann’s Le Carnaval (1910), Weber’s Le Spectre de la Rose and Nikolaï Tcherepnin’s Narcisse (1911), Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, Reynaldo Hahn’s Le Dieu Bleu, Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faun (1912), Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty (1921), etc. He also worked for lda Rubinstein’s company (d’Annunzios Le Martyre de St. Sébastiene, 1911; and La Pisanella, 1912), and Anna Pavlova’s company (Oriental Fantasy with music by Ippolitov-lvanov and Mussorgsky, 1913). During the last years of his life he designed productions in the Grande Opéra, Théâtre du Gymnase, Femina, and Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris; continued to draw portraits: Léonide Massine (1914), Virginia Zucchi (1917), Vaslav Nijinsky (1910s), Anna Pavlova (1920) etc. and designed dresses. He lectured on contemporary art and costume in many cities of Europe and the USA. He created decorative panels for mansions in London, Rome and elsewhere. He is the author of the articles The Ways of Classicism in Art (1909), On Contemporary Art (1914), and of memoirs Serov and I in Greece (1923). He died on 27 December 1924 in Paris.
KONSTANTIN ANDREYEVICH SOMOV
Konstantin Andreyevich Somov was born on 18 November 1869, in Saint Petersburg. He was the son of Andreï Somov, the senior curator of the Hermitage and art collector. He studied at K. May’s private school, where he met Alexander Benois, Walter Nuvel and Dmitry Filosofov. During his school years, he took private drawing lessons and attended the evening drawing classes of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. In 1888 he entered the Academy of Arts and from 1894 studied in Repin’s studio there. In 1897, under the influence of Benois’ circle, he left the Academy and in the autumn of that year went to Paris. He attended the Académie Colarossi and studied the collections of the Louvre, Carnavalet, and the Luxembourg Museum; in the autumn of 1898 he again spent several months in Paris. He took part in exhibitions from 1895 on. He was one of organizers and active members of the World of Art association. He painted small-scale pictures and studies in watercolour and gouache, as well as compositions and portraits in oils. The best examples of his work are distinctive narrative scenes, “retrospective visions” depicting ladies and cavaliers in eighteenth-century costumes, love scenes, scènes galantes, and promenades: A Letter, A Lady by a Pond, A Promenade after Rain (all 1896), Rainbow, A Promenade in Winter (all 1897), In the Bosquet (1898-99), An Island of Love (1900), Evening (1902), The Echo of Times Past (1903), Summer (1904), Winter (1905), The Ridiculed Kiss (1909), Winter, The Skating Rink (1915), etc. In the early 1910s he created the series Harlequinade (Fireworks)
which included the paintings Pierrot and Lady, Harlequin and Lady, Italian Comedy, and Columbine Poking Out Her Tongue. In 1913 he designed a curtain for the Free Theatre in Moscow. Between the late 1890s and the 1910s, he painted many landscapes from life: Road at the Dacha, In Spring: Martyshkino (1896), White Night: Sergiyevo, Moonrise (1897), Autumn in the Versailles Park (1898), Grove on the Seashore, Ploughland (both 1900), Rainbow (1908), Spring Landscape (1910), etc. He also produced several retrospective landscape compositions with figures: In Confidence (1897), Bathers (1899). In the late 1910s — early 1920s such compositions took on a different character: Landscape with a Rainbow, Summer, Summer Morning, Landscape with a Rainbow and Bathers. Throughout his artistic career, he painted portraits, notably of Natalia Ober (1896), his father (1897), himself (1898), Yelizaveta Martynova (Lady in Blue, 1897-1900), Anna Ostroumova (1901-1904), Henrietta Hirschmann (1911), Yelena Oliv (1914), Nadezhda Vysotskaya (1917), and Mefody Lukyanov (1918). From 1906 to 1910 he produced, for the journals The Golden Fleece and Apollon, graphic portraits of Viacheslav Ivanov, Alexander Blok, Yevgeny Lanceray, Mikhaïl Kuzmin, Fiodor Sologub, and Mikhaïl Dobuzhinsky. Closely related to them are his self-portraits (1902, 1903, 1904. 1909) and a portrait of Walter Nuvel (1914). An important place in his work is taken by literary and newspress graphic art. He designed the WorId of Art journal, contributed to the journals The Art Treasures of Russia and the Golden Fleece, produced the cover of The Northern Flowers Almanach for 1901. He designed covers, title pages and frontispieces for A. Benois’ book Tsarskoye Selo during the Reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1902), K. Balmont’s Firebird, The Slav’s Pipe, V. Ivanov’s Cor Ardens and The Theatre (all 1907). He produced relatively few illustrations as such: drawings for Pushkin’s Count Nulin (1899), Gogol’s Portrait and Nevsky Prospekt (1901). He completely designed an edition of Franz Blei’s Lesebuch der Marquise (1907), including the title page and half-title, a large number of illustrations, numerous vignettes, head-and tailpieces, frames, ornamental patterns, and initials: some elements of the ornamentation were, like the headpieces for The Golden Fleece, executed in a silhouette technique. He worked extensively in the field of applied graphic and decorative art: he designed many posters, theatrical programs, postcards for the Publishing House of the Red Cross Society of St. Eugenia (the Days of the Week series, 1904), tobacco-boxes, items of jewelry, fans, and embroidered articles. In 1905 he created models which were used at the Imperial Porcelain Factory to cast the statuettes The Lovers, Lover, and Lady Removing Her Mask. Late in 1923 he went to New York with a group of artists accompanying an exhibition of Russian art and remained in America; in 1925 he moved to France. During his years abroad he painted retrospective scenes to commission, produced a number of watercolours devoted to the Russian ballet in Paris, and portraits (including Sergeï Rakhmaninov, 1925, and Self-Portrait before a Mirror, 1934). He died on 6 May 1939 in Paris.