Russian Painting

by Peter. Leek

  VALENTIN ALEXANDROVICH SEROV

  Valentin Alexandrovich Serov was born on 7 January (19 N.S.) 1865, in Saint Petersburg, the son of the composer and music critic Alexander Serov. From 1872 to 1874 he lived with his mother in Munich and took lessons from the artist Karl Köpping. Between October 1874 and the summer of 1875, while in Paris, he regularly attended Ilya Repin’s studio. In 1877 he studied at Nikolaï Murashko’s private drawing school in Kiev. From 1878 to 1880 he studied under the guidance of Repin and lived in the artist’s flat in Moscow; in 1880 he accompanied him on his travels to the Crimea, Odessa, Chernigov, and the Zaporozhye area. From 1880 to 1885 he studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and in Pavel Chistiakov’s private workshop. In 1886 he attended classes at the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He frequently traveled to different parts of Europe: Germany (1885, 1889, 1897, 1899, 1902), Belgium and Holland (1885), Italy (1887, 1904, 1911), France (1889, 1900, 1909, 1910), Denmark (1899), Greece (1907) and England (1911). He visited the Caucasus (1883) and the Crimea (1883, 1887, 1893). In the late 1870s and 1880s, he often lived and worked on Savva Mamontov’s Abramtsevo estate near Moscow; between 1886 and 1911 he spent some time almost every year at Domotkanovo, Vladimir Derviz’s estate in Tver Province and from 1901 at his own dacha at Ino in Finland. From 1897 to January 1909, he taught at the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. From 1886 to the end of his life he was a member of the Board of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. He took part in exhibitions from 1886 on and those of the World of Art starting in 1899. As from 1894 he was a member of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions and from 1910 of the reorganized World of Art. He mainly worked in portraiture. He painted portraits of relatives, friends, and children: Olga Trubnikova, his wife (1885, 1886, 1895), Vera Mamontova (Girl with Peaches, 1887), Maria Simonovich (Girl in the Sunlight, 1888), Sasha and Yury Serov (Children, 1889), Alexander Serov, the artist’s father (1889), and Mika Morozov (1901). He created a large gallery of creative people: Angelo Masini (1890), Francesco Tamagno, Konstantin Korovin (both 1891), Isaac Levitan (1893), Nikolaï Leskov (1894), Nikolaï Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergeï Diaghilev (both 1904), Maria Yermolova, Glikeria Fedotova, Maxim Gorky (all 1905), Ida Rubinstein (1910). He painted commissioned portraits of members of the imperial family, high society and the bourgeoisie: Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich (1897), Mikhaïl Morozov (1902), Zinaida Yusupova (1900-02), Felix Yusupov, Felix Sumarokov-Elstone (both 1903), Henrietta Hirschmann (1907), lvan Morozov (1910), Vladimir Hirschmann, Olga Orlova (both 1911). In 1910 he was commissioned by the Italian Ministry of Public Education to produce a self-portrait for the Uffizi Gallery, but no evidence has been found of its completion. His painted landscapes and landscapes combined with elements of everyday life which reflect his interest in rural motifs: Overgrown Pond: Domotkanovo (1888), Landscape with Horses (Village Landscape), 1890; October: Domotkanovo (1895), In a Village: Woman with a Horse (1898), Rinsing Linen, A Hay Stack (both 1905). During his journey to the Russian North in 1894 he produced a series of sketches (The White Night, The Sea Dwellers, The Northern Dvina, At Murman, etc.) From 1900 to 1911 he created many historical works: Emperor Peter II and Tsesarevna Elizabeth Petrovna Riding to Hounds (1900), Catherine II Setting Out to Hunt with Falcons, and Peter the Great Riding to Hounds (both 1902), all illustrations for N. Kutepov’s book The Royal and Imperial Hunt in Russia: Late 17th and 18th Centuries; Peter the Great (1907) for Iosif Knoebel’s publication Russian History in Pictures; as well as Oprichnik (1909); The Grand Eagle Cup, Peter the Great at Monplaisir (both 1910), and Peter the Great at Work (1910-11). He often turned to ancient themes. After his visit to the Crimea in 1893 he painted Iphigenia at Tauris, while his visit to Greece in 1907 inspired Odysseus and Nausicaa and The Rape of Europe (both 1910). In 1894 he produced sketches for the panel After the Battle of Kulikovo Field (for the Historical Museum in Moscow, not completed). In 1887 he created the ceiling painting Phoebus Effulgent for Selezniov’s estate in Tula Province. He created theatrical decor for Alexander Serov’s opera Judith (1907, the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg), various curtain designs, and the curtain itself for Rimsky-Korsakov’s ballet Schéhérazade (1911, the Russian Seasons and Le Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris). Serov was an outstanding master of drawing. He produced many drawings as works in their own right, as well as sketches and studies. Most are portraits of prominent cultural figures: Fiodor Chaliapin, Konstantin Balmont (both 1905), Mikhaïl Vrubel, Wanda Landowska (1907), Eugene Isaye (1903), Ivan Moskvin, Vassily Kachalov, Konstantin Stanislavsky (all 1908), Tamara Karsavina, Michel Fokine, Anna Pavlova (two portraits) (all 1909), and Vaslav Nijinsky (1910). He also created lithographic portraits: Alfred Nurok, Alexander Glazunov, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (all 1899), Ilya Repin (1901), and Leonid Andreyev (1907). From 1896 to 1899 he produced a number of etchings: A Lion Recumbent, October, Self-portrait, Portrait of Vassily Mathé and Peasant Woman with Horse. Between 1895 and 1911 he produced a large series of illustrations for lvan Krylov’s fables. During the revolution of 1905 he was involved in organizing the satirical political journal The Bugaboo and produced a number of scathing satirical drawings: “Soldiers, heroes everyone…”, The Year 1905: Alter the Pacification, Prospects for the Harvest of 1906, as well as some sketches of real events: Baumann’s Funeral, The Dispersal of Demonstrators by Cossacks, The Sumy Regiment. He died on 22 November (4 December N.S.) 1911 in Moscow.

  ALEXNDER YAKOVLEVICH GOLOVIN

  Alexander Yakovlevich Golovin was born on 17 February (1 March N.S.) 1863, in Moscow. From 1891 to 1889 he studied at the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (first in the architectural department, transferring two years later to the painting department) under Illarion Prianishnikov and Vladimir Makovsky. In 1889 he took a number of lessons at the Académie Colarossi and in 1897 studied at Witti’s private school under Raphael Colin and Luc Olivier Merson.

  From 1895 to 1898 he traveled to Italy, Spain, and France. Almost every year before World War I he toured around Europe. He participated in exhibitions as from 1893 and was a member of the World of Art beginning in 1902.

  In the late in the 1890s he worked at the ceramic workshop at Abramtsevo together with Mikhaïl Vrubel and produced majolica works — tiles, utensils, and decorative panels. At Vrubel’s suggestion, he took part in the decoration of the façade of the Hotel Metropole (designs for the majolica panels Cleopatra, Orpheus, Swans, etc.). He produced sketches for the decor of the “Russian dining room” at Yakunchikov’s home (together with Yelena Polenova) and a Russian-style room for the art enterprise Contemporary Art. In 1900 he designed, together with Konstantin Korovin, the handicrafts section of the Russian Pavilion at the Paris World Fair.

  He began to work for the theatre in 1900, designing opera productions for the Bolshoi Theatre: A. Koreshchenko’s House of Ice (1900), Rimsky-Korsakov’s Maid of Pskov (1901), etc.

  In 1902 he was appointed chief decorator of the Imperial Theatres and moved to Saint Petersburg. From 1902 to 1908 he designed opera productions in the Mariinsky Theatre: Rubinstein’s Demon, Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila (together with Konstantin Korovin), Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, Bizet’s Carmen, etc. and in 1905, 1906 and 1907, drama productions in the Alexandrine Theatre: Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea and Phantoms, Sophocles’ Antigone, and others. For Diaghilev he designed the main scenes for Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1908), and sets and costumes for Stravinsky’s ballet Firebird (1910).

  From 1908 to 1917 he collaborated closely with Meyerhold: at the Alexandrine Theatre he designed productions of Hamsun’s At the Gates of the Kingdom (1908), Molière’s Don Juan (1910), Ostrovsky’s Thunder (1916), Lermontov’s Masquerade (1917) and other works; at the Mariinsky Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice (1911), Dargomyzhsky’s opera The Stone Guest (1917), a ballet to Glinka’s Jota Aragonesa (1916), and more.

  In subsequent years he continued to work in the theatres of Petrograd/Leningrad and Moscow. The most significant ventu
re of this period was a production of Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage de Figaro in the Moscow Arts Theatre (1927).

  He designed a curtain for the Mariinsky Theatre (1917) and two curtains for the Odessa Theatre (1925). He devoted much time to easel painting, creating portraits of major cultural figures: Nicholas Roerich (1906), Mikhaïl Kuzmin (1910), Konstantin Varlamov (1914), Vsevolod Meyerhold (1917), and others; performers in roles: Chaliapin as Mephistopheles (1905 and 1909), the Demon (1906), Farlaf (1907), Holofernes (1908), and Boris Godunov (1912), Maria Kuznetsova-Benois as Carmen (1908), Dmitry Smirnov as de Grieux (1909), etc., the Spanish Women series (1902-11); formal portraits: Marina Makovskaya, Natalia Vysotskaya, Yevfimia Nosova (all 1910s) etc., as well as landscapes: Pond in a Grove, Landscape: Pavlovsk, Autumn Landscape, etc.), still lifes: (Phloxes, Porcelain and Flowers, Golden Tansies, etc.).

  He designed concert and theatrical programs, trademarks of publishing companies, bookplates, covers for books and journals; in the 1920s he produced illustrations for Leconte de Lisle’s Les Erinyes, Hoffmann’s Doubles, Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, etc.

  During the last years of his life, he wrote the book Meetings and Impressions. He died on 17 April 1930, at Detskoye Selo (formerly Tsarskoye Selo, now Pushkin) outside Leningrad.

  NICHOLAS ROERICH

  Nicholas Roerich was born on 27 September (9 October N.S.) 1874, in Saint Petersburg. From 1893 to 1897, after attending K. May’s private school, he studied at the Academy of Arts under Arkhip Kuinji (from 1895) and simultaneously at the Law Faculty of the university. In 1900-01 he perfected his skills in painting at Fernand Cormon’s studio in Paris. During his school years, as a student, and after graduating from the university, he took part in barrow excavations in Saint Petersburg Province; he was a member of the Russian Archaeological Society and lectured at the Archaeological Institute. In 1899 he made a journey along the ancient route from the Varangians to the Greeks — from Lake Ladoga to Novgorod — making sketches and scholarly observations, as well as recording legends. In 1903-04 he visited many old Russian cities (Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Rostov the Great, Uglich, Vladimir, Suzdal, Pskov, Izborsk, Pechory, Smolensk, etc.); in 1906 he traveled to France (then again in 1908), Italy, and Switzerland, in 1907 to Finland, in 1911 along the Rhine and around Holland. From 1901 on he was the Secretary of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, from 1906 to 1918 the Director of the Drawing School attached to that society. He contributed to exhibitions beginning in 1900, was a member of the Union of Russian Artists as from 1903 and of the World of Art from 1910; from 1910 until 1919 he was its chairman. He produced more than 7,000 paintings. Many of them form series: The Beginning of Rus: The Slavs Messenger: People Have Risen Against People (1897), The Idols (1901), Guests from Overseas, Building a City (both 1902), The Slavs on the Dnieper (1905), paintings devoted to the earlier stages of Russian history: The Sea Dwellers: Evening (1907), The Stone Age (The Call of the Sun) (1910), Our First Ancestors (1911), the Viking cycle (The Song of the Viking) (1907), The Viking’s Triumph (The Viking’s Grave) (1908), The Varangian Sea (1910). He created several series of sketches during his journeys to old Russian towns (1903-04, about ninety works); around Italy and Switzerland (1906); Finland (1907). He produced works about religious figures revered in Russia: The Prophet Elijah (1907), St. George the Victorious (1908), St. Procopius the Righteous Praying for Those At Sea (1914), St. Pantaleon the Healer and St. Nicholas (both 1916) as well as a series of striking “apocalyptic visions”: The Sword of Valor, The Last Angel (1912), The Serpent’s Cry (1913), The Messenger, The Doomed City, Human Affairs (1914); the Heroic series (1917); the Karelia cycle (1917), etc. He produced drawings for the journals The Balance and Lukomorye (1905), vignettes for the book Talashkino (1905), and for a collection of his articles entitled Roerich (1916), a frontispiece for the journal Apollon (1910), the cover for the anthology Beneath a Favourable Sky (1911). He created a number of lithographs (Krimherd the Giantess, The Cemetery, The Hiding Place, all 1915) as well as many narrative drawings and watercolours. He designed interior painting and mosaics for churches in the village of Parkhomovka in Kiev Province and near Schlüsselburg (1906), in Pskov (1913) and for the Pochayevskaya Lavra (1910); his most significant work in this field was the paintings and mosaics in the Church of the Holy Spirit at Talashkino, near Smolensk (1910-14). He painted the Heroic frieze of seven large panels (Volga, Ilya Muromets, Sadko, etc.) between 1907 and 1910 for F. Bazhanov’s house in Saint Petersburg and made cartoons for two paintings intended to decorate the Kazan Railroad Station in Moscow: The Fight on the Kerzhenets and The Conquest of Kazan (1913-16). He began to work for the theatre in 1907: Nikolaï Yevreinov’s Three Magi (1907) and Lope de Vega’s Fuente ovehuna (1911) at the Antique Theatre, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden at the Reinecke Drama Theatre in Saint Petersburg (1912), and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Arts Theatre in Moscow (1912). For the Russian Seasons in Paris, he designed stage sets for Borodin’s opera Prince Igor (1909, a second version for the Covent Garden Theatre, London, 1914) and for some scenes of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Maid of Pskov (1909). He wrote the libretto and designed the production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring (1910-12, staged in 1913). He designed stage sets for Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1912), Maeterlinck’s La Princesse Maleine (1913) and A. Davydov’s Soeur Beatrice (after Maeterlinck, 1914), which were not staged. In 1916 he moved to Serdobol (Sortavala), and after the separation of Finland from Russia in 1918 found himself abroad. In 1919 he moved to London and lived in the USA from 1920 to 1923. He initiated the creation of the Cor Ardens art union, the United Institute of Arts, and the Corona Mundi International Arts Center. In 1923 the Roerich Museum opened in New York. That same year he went to India. He organized expeditions to Sikkim and Bhutan (1924), Central Asia (1925-28), China and Mongolia (1934-35) and founded the Urusvati Research Institute for Himalayan Studies in the Kulu Valley (1928). In 1929 he published a draft of the “Pact for the Preservation of Cultural Treasures during Armed Conflicts” (the Roerich Pact) which served as a basis for the final act of the Hague convention in 1954. From the 1920s to the 1940s, he produced a huge number of works including the series The Dreams of Wisdom, Saints, The Messiah, The Banners of the East (The Teachers of the East), Maitreya, The PearI of Searching, The Secrets of the Mountains, as well as series of Mongol, Tibetan, and Himalayan mountain views and many other paintings. During World War II he turned again to images of Russian epic heroes and saints: Alexander Nevsky, The Fight of Mstislav and Rededia, and Boris and Gleb. He wrote many essays and books (from 1898) devoted to the problems of archaeology, art, and culture, including The Flowers of Morii (a collection of poems), The Heart of Asia, The Kingdom of Light, The Gateway to the Future, The Sheets of a Diary (about one thousand essays). In 1947 everything was made ready for his return to his native country. He died on 13 December 1947 at Nagara in the Kulu Valley in India.

  YEVGENY YEVGENYEVICH LANCERAY

  Yevgeny Yevgenyevich Lanceray was born on 23 August (4 September N.S.) 1875 in Pavlovsk near Saint Petersburg. He was the grandson and great-grandson of eminent architects, Nikolaï Benois and Albert Cavos respectively, the son of the sculptor Yevgeny A. Lanceray, and Alexander Benois’ nephew. After the death of his father in 1886 he lived in the house of his grandfather Benois in Saint Petersburg. From 1892 to 1895 he studied at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts under Jan Tsionglinsky and Ernst Liphart. In 1891 and 1893 he traveled around the Yaroslavl, Vladimir and Ufa provinces of Russia and in 1894 made his first trip abroad (Poland, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France). From 1895 to 1898 he studied at the Colarossi studio under Anne-Louis Girodet and Gustave Courtois and at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurent and Benjamin Constant. In 1897 he made a journey to Brittany, in 1898 to Germany and Prague between 1902 and 1905 to Pskov, Novgorod, and some other provinces; to Siberia, Manchuria, and Japan; in 1904 he traveled to the Caucasus, and in 1907 toured Italy. In 1914-15 he was on the Turkish-Caucasian F
ront. From 1912 to 1915 he was head of the art sections at the lapidary works at Peterhof and Yekaterinburg, as well as the porcelain and glass works in Saint Petersburg. In 1917 he moved to Daghestan and in 1920 to Tbilisi in Georgia. From 1920 to 1922 he worked as an artist at the Ethnographical Museum in Tbilisi, from 1925 at the Caucasian Archaeological Institute. He took part in many scientific expeditions in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorny Daghestan. In 1922 he made a journey around Turkey; in 1927 he was sent to Paris on official business. In 1934 he moved to Moscow. He taught at the Academy of Arts in Tbilisi (1922-34), at the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad (1934-37), and at the Architectural Institute in Moscow (1934-43). He was a member of the World of Art and contributor to its exhibitions as from 1898. His creative career began with illustrations and vignettes for Y. Balabanova’s Legends about the Old Castles of Brittany executed in 1897-98. From 1899 on he was a regular contributor to The World of Art. He took part in the journals The Art Treasures of Russia, The Golden Fleece, Detskiy otdykh (Children’s Rest), Krasnaya niva (The Red Cornfield), Yezhegodnik Obshchestva arkhitektorov-khudozhnikov (The Annual of the Society of Architect-Artists), the Shipovnik almanachs (The Dogrose) and other periodicals. During the revolution of 1905-07, he was involved with the satirical journals Zritel (The Viewer) and The Bugaboo; after the latter was closed, he became the editor and one of illustrators of Hell’s Mail. He took part, with other artists, in designing N. Kutepov’s Royal and Imperial Hunt in Russia: Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries (1902) and Alexander Benois’ Tsarskoye Selo during the Reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1908); he designed the books S. Makovsky’s Poems (1905), S. Kondurushkin’s Syrian Stories (1908), A Tribute to Wrangel (1916) etc.; he produced the covers for many books: Muther’s History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century (1902), Portraits of Russian Writers (1903), Alexander Benois’ Russian School of Painting (1904), V. Kurbatov’s Gardens and Parks (1915), etc. He designed and illustrated literary works dealing with the Caucasus: Leo Tolstoy’s stories Hadji-Murat (1912-16, 1931, 1936-37, 1941) and The Cossacks (1917-37), Lermontov’s fairy tales Ashik-Kerib (1914-15) and his poem The Demon (1914-16). He worked in the sphere of applied graphic art. He devoted most of his graphic works and paintings in the 1900s and the first half of the 1910s to Saint Petersburg: The Old St. Nicholas Market in Saint Petersburg (1901), Peter the Great’s Boat (1906), The Kazan Cathedral (1903), Empress Elizabeth Petrovna at Tsarskoye Selo (1905), Saint Petersburg in the Early Eighteenth Century (1906), Walking along the Breakwater (1908), Ships from the Age of Peter the Great (1909, 1911; for Knoebel’s edition A Russian History in Pictures); works from the late 1910s to the first half of the 1930s were devoted to the Caucasus: landscapes, architectural monuments, national types. Between 1929 and 1931, he created the triptych The Red Partisans of Daghestan Descending from the Mountains to Defend Soviet Power, in 1942 he created a series The Trophies of the Russian Army. He produced sketches for decorative paintings in the Large Moscow Hotel (1906), the Rossiya Insurance Company in Belgrad (1907), Ya. Zhukovsky’s dacha in the Crimea (1909), G. Tarasov’s mansion in Moscow (1910-12), the Memorial Hall of the Library of the Academy of Arts in Petrograd (1915) and the Palace of Railroad Workers in Kharkov (1931). Between 1935 and the early 1940s he worked in Moscow designing decorative panels for one of the metro stations, the Moscow Hotel, the Lenin Library, and the Bolshoi Theatre. In 1916-17 he was involved in the unrealized project to decorate the Kazan Railroad Station; in 1933-34 he designed decorative paintings for the restaurant at the station; in 1945-46 he worked on two panels for the vestibule — Victory and Peace (completed by his assistants). His first theatrical work was for the Antique Theatre in Saint Petersburg — set designs for productions of Nikolaï Yevreinov’s Fair on St. Denis’ Day (1907, unfinished) and Calderon’s Purgatory of St. Patrick (1911). In the 1920s, while living in Tbilisi, he designed sets for the Maly Theatre in Moscow (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, 1923) and for theatres in Odessa and Kutaisi. In Moscow he created sets for Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit (1938, the Maly Theatre), Boris Asafyev’s ballet A Peasant Lady (1946, the Bolshoi Theatre) and Prokofyev’s opera A Betrothal in a Convent (1946, unfinished). He wrote and illustrated a book of travel impressions about Turkey, A Summer in Angora (1922). He died on 13 September 1946 in Moscow.