Russian Painting
Page 13
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 Front. 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. Balabanov
a’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.
MSTISLAV VALERIANOVICH DOBUZHINSKY
Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky was born on 2 August (14 N.S.) 1875 in Novgorod. He studied in Saint Petersburg at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, from 1895 to 1899 at the Law Faculty of Saint Petersburg University, in 1897 at the studio of the engraver and painter Lev Dmitriyev-Kavkazsky. In 1899-1901 he studied in Munich at the art schools of Anton Ažbe and Simon Hollósy; in 1901, on his return to Saint Petersburg, he trained in etching under Vladimir Mathé. Over the years, he traveled widely in Europe (Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland) and around Russian cities (Vilno, Chernigov, Nezhin, Voronezh, Kursk, Pskov, Novgorod, etc). During World War I he visited the front to sketch from life. He was a member of the World of Art and contributor to its exhibitions as from 1902. From 1906 to 1910 he taught at Yelizaveta Zvantseva’s school, from 1911 to 1917 at the New Art Studio (M. Gagarina’s school), in 1918-19 at the State Workshops of Decorative Arts (the former Stieglitz School of Technical Drawing) and at the same time at the Vitebsk Practical Art Institute, in 1919 at the Institute of Photography and Photo-technology and in A. Gausch’s private school, in 1922-23 at VKhUTEIN (the Academy of Arts). After 1917 he participated in the work to preserve Saint Petersburg’s monuments, in the activities of various artistic councils and was the deputy chairman of the House of Arts. His work in the field of literary and newspress graphic art began with drawings for the journals Strekoza and Shut (1897-1902). In 1905-06 he contributed satirical drawings to the political journals The Bugaboo and Hell’s Mail. From 1902 to 1915 he contributed to the journals The World of Art, The Art Treasures of Russia, The Golden Fleece, Apollon, the almanachs Beliye nochi (White Nights), Nevskiy Almanach (The Neva Almanach), and others. In the 1920s he worked for the journals Perezuony (Peal of BelIs), Zhar-Ptitsa (The Firebird), etc. He designed many book covers and also designed and produced illustrations for S. Ausländer’s Prince of the Night (1909), Pushkin’s Station Inspector, La Demoiselle paysane (1919), and The Covetous Knight (1921), Karamzin’s Poor Liza, Leskov’s Toupée Artist (both 1921), Dostoyevsky’s White Nights (1922), and several more publications. He worked in the field of applied graphic art (posters, bookplates, stamps, postcards for the Publishing House of the Red Cross Society of St. Eugenia, etc.). His easel works are mainly devoted to the urban theme: paintings embodying “Dobuzhinsky’s Saint Petersburg” — A Corner in Saint Petersburg (1904), A House in Saint Petersburg (1905), Winter (1909), City Outskirts: the Priazhka River (1914), etc.; numerous views of Russian provincial towns; capitals and cities of European countries such as Vilno: Omnibus (1906-07), Chernigov: A Photograph (1912), Tambov: Baker’s Shop (1923), A Bridge in London (1908), Haarlem (1910), Naples (1911), etc.; a series of fantastic compositions Urban Dreams (1906-1920s); a series of autolithographs of Saint Petersburg in 1921-22. Between 1907 and 1911 he created a number of paintings devoted to historical subjects: The Provinces in the 1830s, Training of New Recruits and A Military Settlement (for Knoebel’s publication A History of Russia in Pictures), Peter the Great in Holland (panel for the Peter the Great School in Saint Petersburg, sketches, and variants). From 1910 on, he drew dozens of portraits: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Lydia Koreneva, Grigory Yakulov, Tamara Karsavina, Alexander Benois, Dmitry Mitrokhin, etc. He also practiced monumental decorative art. In 1910 he designed a number of interiors and produced designs for the painted decoration of the Kazan Railroad Station in Moscow. In 1918 he created 48 sketches for the decoration of the Admiralty during the celebration of the first anniversary of the October Revolution. During his life abroad he decorated private dwellings and social buildings in Lithuania, Paris, and Brussels. As a theatrical designer, he worked on productions of Adam de la Halle’s A Play about Robin and Marion at the Antique Theatre and Remizov’s Devilish Act at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre in 1908, as well as Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (at the same theatre) and Potiomkin’s Petrouchka at the Lukomorye Theatre. In 1909-17 he designed twelve productions at the Moscow Arts Theatre, including Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in a Village, Nikolaï Stavrogin and The Village of Stepanchikovo, both after Dostoyevsky’s works, and Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit. In 1914 he worked for Diaghilev’s company (Schumann’s Les Papillons and M. Steinberg’s Midas) and for Anna Pavlova’s troupe (Bayer’s Puppenfee). In 1919-20 he designed productions of M. Levberg’s Danton, Schiller’s Die Râuber, and Shakespeare’s King Lear, followed in 1921 by Anatoly Lunacharsky’s dr
ama Oliver CromwelI at the Maly Theatre in Moscow. From 1924 to 1939 he lived in Kaunas, Lithuania, spending long periods in France and England. He worked for the Lithuanian State Theatre, taught art, and continued to paint landscapes as well as to draw portraits and produce works of graphic art for publications. From 1926 to 1928 he worked for N. Balieff’s cabaret-theatre La Chauve-Souris in Paris. He illustrated Yury Olesha’s novel The Three Fat Men (1928) and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1936). In 1939 he moved to the USA. He designed more than one hundred theatrical productions at various theatres in America and elsewhere — France, Italy, Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark. He produced a number of paintings inspired by Dmitry Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and designed an edition of The Lay of Igor’s Host. He wrote the books Recollections of Italy and Reminiscences. He died in New York on 20 November 1957.
ANNA PETROVNA OSTROUMOVA-LEBEDEVA
Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva was born on 5 May (17 N.S.) 1871 in Saint Petersburg. From 1889 to 1992 she studied at the Stieglitz Central College of Technical Drawing under Vassily Mathé, Nikolaï Koshelev, Genrich Manizer and Alexander Novoskoltsev, from 1892 to 1900, with breaks, at the Academy of Arts under llya Repin (from 1896) and Vassily Mathé (from 1899). In 1898-99 she practiced painting in the studio of James Whistler and studied western European and Japanese engraving.
In the late 1900s she improved her skills in watercolour in Yelizaveta Zvantseva’s private school under Leon Bakst. She traveled widely in Europe: Italy (1899, 1903, 1911), Finland (1905, 1908), Paris and Austria (1906), Germany (1911), Holland and Belgium (1913), Spain (1914), Berlin and Paris (1926), as well as to the Caucasus (1916, 1929) and the Crimea (1902, 1924).