Select language:

American Artists from the Russian Empire

 / Главная / Russkiy Mir Foundation / Publications / American Artists from the Russian Empire

American Artists from the Russian Empire

24.02.2009

On February 19, the “American Artists from the Russian Empire” exhibition opened in the Benua Wing of the Russian Museum. The exhibition is part of a series devoted to the “Art of Russian Emigres.”

The exhibition includes works by painters and sculptors who emigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union up until the late 1930s. The names of many of them have virtually been erased from the history of our national art, and their creative legacy is unknown to many of our fellow countrymen.

The exhibition includes approximately 100 works from 40 museums, galleries and private collections in the United States, most of which were brought to Russia for the first time. The exhibition also contains works from the collections of the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery.

The exhibition is being held jointly with the Foundation for International Arts & Education. Morgan Stanley is the principal sponsor, with Lukoil, SeverStal, the Russkiy Mir Foundation and Energy Standard Group S.A. also acting as sponsors.

“Russian artists had a significant influence on visual arts in the United States, especially in the 20th century,” said Evgenia Petrova, deputy director of the Russian Museum. “The entire world knows the names of those ingenious American artists like David Burliuk, Mark Rothko, John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Max Weber, Pavel Tchelitchew and Nikolai Fechin. And these were Russians! Alas, with such mad generosity, Russia drove huge numbers of talented people to emigrate. And today we don’t even know what’s important about their destinies, about who their friends were, about who influenced whom, and about how they worked with one another there. We don’t know how that ‘melting pot’ worked, which, owing to Russians, gave birth to American art. The exhibition at the Russian Museum is the first step toward acquiring this knowledge, and now I think that it is up to scholars to complete the task. As before, we have a lot of talent here in Russia, so we really need to work on learning how to do things so these talented people don’t leave the country.”

For the majority of contemporary art lovers and experts in Russia, Mark Rothko will be a major discovery. This great American surrealist was actually born in Latvia as Marcus Rothkowitz. Several of his work are on display, including Figure Composition from 1936-1937. Rothko’s works should arouse considerable interest among audiences, especially considering the fact that none of them can be found in Russia – either at the Russian Museum or the Tretyakov Gallery.

A leading theorist and founder of abstract expressionism, John Graham, was born as the Ukrainian Ivan Dombrovsky. In the American art scene from 1930-1950, Graham was a truly legendary figure. This was the master, the abstract expressionist, who changed the stereotypes of American art and its mythology. An idea of Graham’s style can be obtained by looking at his work Untitled (Pink Acrobat) from 1927. Among the shenanigans and the grotesque, a cycle that Graham devoted to Russian soldiers stands out. The cycle was created by Graham during the Great Patriotic War (e.g. Reclining Soldier, 1942). By painting the brave imperial soldiers, the artist was also expressing his solidarity with the Soviet soldiers who fought for the motherland.

Arshile Gorky was a good friend of Graham’s and a participant in all of his shenanigans. As a young Armenian with the name Vostanik Manoog Adoya, he had escaped the Turkish genocide. His idol was Maxim Gorky, and when he came to the United States, he cast himself as the nephew of the famous writer. An adherent of Cubism and Surrealism, two of Gorky’s works are presented from 1930 under the name Abstract Composition.

The towering futurist David Burliuk, whom Mayakovsky referred to as his teacher, was banned in Russia. In the 1920s, the poet and artist, who declared himself the founder of proletarian culture and the first Bolshevik in the arts, was an active participant in Knave of Diamonds young painters movement. Despite his enthusiasm, he found himself unable to live in post-Revolutionary Russia and escaped through the Far East to the United States. He became a famous and well-known artist in America, and on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, Burliuk appealed to the General Consulate of the Soviet Union in New York with a request to return home, which was denied. Although the work from his mature period was virtually unknown in the Soviet Union, his early works can be found in almost all of Russia’s provincial museums, and the best works from that period are stored in the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery.

Burliuk got lucky in the United States. This bright man, who was able to speak convincingly about life and art, soon became acquainted with Katherine Dreyer, who was fascinated at the time with what was taking place in modern Russian culture and later wrote a book about him. He also got to know Christian Brinton, an influential American critic who was a close follower of Russian emigres. Burliuk’s friendship with these people, as well as with many artists from different countries, helped him to fit into American life. At the exhibition on display at the Russian Museum, David Burliuk’s huge canvas Shame to All but to the Dead (also titled Unemployedville, 1933) is on display.

“It was a tremendous success for us to obtain this work, as museums generally don’t like to lend such huge works to traveling exhibitions,” Petrova emphasized. “This was such visionary work for Burliuk. As is commonly known, he went through his Cubist and Futurist period in Russia. Initially, his Cubism and Futurism was received well in America, but during the Great Depression, like many other Russian artists, he was faced with the question of how best to reflect the life of Americans. And we can see his own reaction in Unemployedville. This work became the most vivid metaphor for America’s Great Depression, with its poverty-stricken people, negroes and rickety old men. Here are also the dead, naked figure of the philosopher Diogenes and his lantern with sad and thoughtful living people gathered around in jeans, as well as the forgotten Egyptian obelisk that is of interest to no one. Sweeping, broad and spiritless capitalism in the left corner with its gigantomania and its skyscrapers. In the right corner there is the collapse of capitalism where we see the American workers, the creators, thrown to the sidelines in the slums. The work belongs to the Brooklyn Museum.”

It is no wonder that many museums in the United States house the works of such famous artists as Ivan Aivazovsky, Vasily Vereshchagin and Pavel Svinin. Artistic contacts between America and Russia were born long before the first wave of Russian emigration. In 1811, Pavel Svinin, Secretary to the Russian Consul-General, arrived in Philadelphia. During his travels across America, the young diplomat created several albums of watercolors. Vereshchagin, who decided to visit the United States after the Russo-Japanese War, had President Theodore Roosevelt as one of his fans. Roosevelt invited the artist to depict the Battle of San Juan Hill and liked the painting so much that he purchased it. Aivazovsky liked to travel to the United States as well. In the middle of 20th century, two of his paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art were used by Jacqueline Kennedy in an act of “quiet diplomacy.” In the midst of the Caribbean crisis, she arranged for a White House exhibition of the paintings to emphasize the friendly feelings Americans had for the Russian people and their willingness to help in difficult moments. One of the paintings depicted an American ship in a Russian port bringing food during the 1892 famine. The other shows a trio carrying American aid to residents of Feodosiya. During the 1891-1892 famine on the Volga, America gave Russia over 5 million tons of grain.

Venerable Russian artists left a noticeable mark on nineteenth-century American culture, and many of their works adorn private and museum collections in the United States. Such visits were sporadic, however. At the beginning of the 20th century the “exodus” of artists from the Russian Empire to America in search of a better life turned into a major movement.

The first wave of immigrants were Jews who moved to America to escape oppression and the pogroms that were taking place before the Revolution at home. Among them were such well-known artists of the future as the Soyer brothers, Louis Lozowick, Ben Shahn, Mark Rothko, Peter Blume, and others. All of them began their lives in a difficult childhood of exile rather than with art classes. According to Rothko’s sister, when he came to America, like many of his peers, he started out selling newspapers. The family of the Soyer brothers moved to America in 1912. Despite the fact that their father was a teacher of Hebrew, the brothers had to work during the day as unskilled laborers, and it was only in the evenings that they could paint. This existence was normal for virtually everyone starting a creative career in America. In order to survive and adapt more easily, emigres naturally pulled together, especially if their acquaintances or friends were in useful professions. During the first decades of the 20th century Russian emigre artists either created themselves or joined societies, schools and art associations where they could study for a profession, learn English, learn how to communicate in their new environment, and learn how to find the galleries for exhibitions and future buyers.

The second wave of emigration can be described as those who arrived in the United States after the political upheaval of February and October 1917 and the end of the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the artists who fled Russia during this period were already well-known and had an excellent drawing and painting culture with its own theme and style. Russian exiles brought with them a wealth of experience from Russian artistic life in the early 20th century, but Americans had a special interest in their status. As a result, exhibitions of artists from Soviet Russia in the early 1920s frequently took place in the United States.

Nikolai Fechin, whose life Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov described in One-Story High America, enjoyed incredible success in his new country. A student of Repin’s and a graduate of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, Nikolai Fechin combined the deep realism of the old masters with the spirit and identity of abstract expressionism. As strange as it may seem, it was Repin who turned Fechin to impressionistic painting techniques. The artist left Russia in 1923, and although he was not an enemy of the Soviet regime and in fact took inspiration from the October Revolution – he was widely known for his portraits of leaders of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Lunacharsky – in the 1920s the art and cultural situation in the country was changing so profoundly that he found it impossible to further his creative mind and continue to exist at all in Soviet Russia. He wrote to the painter Isaak Brodsky, his comrade at the Academy, “...before the Revolution, I still found things more or less tolerable here, but now that I have lost all contact with the outside world, things are becoming unbearable...” Isaak Brodsky remained in Russia, becoming a semiofficial artist. Perhaps, having remained in Russia as well, Fechin would have found himself on the same path, as he was not a fighter but an artist. He would draw portraits of Soviet bonzes just as he did in the United States, when, during his lesser periods of creativity, he fulfilled orders for colorless portraits of various officials. Years later when his friend, the artist Sergey Konenkov, returned to the Soviet Union during Khrushchev’s Thaw, he tried to persuade Fechin to follow him, although dramatic personal and family events would not allow him to leave America.

The Russian Museum houses very few of Fechin's works. It mainly holds artists’ works that were created before they left the country. Today, art lovers in Russia are rediscovering his name, and they do not miss a rare auction where the master’s works can be acquired. “How Fechin worked in the U.S. was not something we really knew about earlier,” says Evgenia Petrova. “In preparing the exhibition, we found that a large collection of Fechin's work is located in a museum in Texas, and there are also works in Oklahoma. About ten years ago, the Russian Museum accidentally bought a portrait of Burliuk that was painted by Fechin, although it turned out to be our good fortune. And for the exhibition we have brought paintings from the museum in Oklahoma. Now viewers can compare – the ‘Russian’ Fechin was seemingly like the ‘American’ Fechin, but then again, no! The ‘Russian’ Fechin was always such a bright, classical impressionist, while in the United States Fechin suddenly began to use purple and orange – colors that were unthinkable in Russia. Russian impressionists on American soil moving toward dark colors was, surprisingly enough, seen as very organic! Nikolai Fechin went down in American culture as a venerable American realist.”

Several works in the exhibition were created by Boris Anisfeld. The large canvas The Descent from the Cross was clearly inspired by the ancient biblical story. The electrifying form, chosen by the artist, brings the story up to date, drawing direct parallels between the suffering of the first Christians and the apostles, mournfully touching he who died for the sins of mankind, and the merciless Moloch perpetually moving an endless armada of sinners, doomed to grope about the churchyard. According to Petrova, this form, which was chosen by Anisfeld, is an obvious Americanism, a modern presentation that was a big plus for artists who had an opportunity to revive the classic painting techniques.

Russian emigres’ lives and careers turned out quite differently. At first, the artists coming to the United States painted on Russian themes. There were those like Boris Grigoriev (Faces of Russia, 1923), who in America was called “the picturesque narrator of the Russian Terror,” and Sergey Sudeikin (Maslenitsa, latter half of 1920s), one of the most successful emigre artists with his Russian holidays and folk festivals. These men were unable to enter into artistic life in America. Those artists who continued to work later changed for the most part, trying to adapt.

There were those like Pavel Tchelitchew and Boris Margo, who were not understood entirely either in America or Russia. Prior to their move to the United States, the acquired Russian and European artistic skills. In the 1930s and 1940s, the American public did not embrace Tchelitchew’s complex metaphysical language, and real fame came to him only after his death. In Russia, until recently, the master’s work was not known at all. His attitude toward life, with all its vices and moral ugliness, was expressed in the painting Phenomena, 1936-1938, which was the most vivid embodiment of the myths about Hell. The artist gave this painting, a centerpiece to his art, to the Tretyakov Gallery, which offered it up for this exhibition. Tchelitchew had three eternal themes: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. In the 1940s, his so-called anatomical works appeared (Anatomical Painting, 1946 and The Head of Gold, 1947). Boris Margo, a disciple of Pavel Filonov, brought the experience of abstract expressionism with him to America, and it was in this spirit that he created the bulk of his American works (e.g., Matrix of an Unborn World 1939).

Max Weber (The Talmudists, 1934) and Ben Shahn (New York, 1947 and Maimonides, 1954) held a special place in American art during the 1930s and 1940s. Both of these artists created figurative expressionist works on social issues. However, these works, reflecting American history, in many respects had their roots in the Jewish-Russian origins of the artists – in metaphorical images and direct appeal to Biblical motifs, as well as in lasting memories of childhood and adolescence.

Diverse styles, manners, and themes characterized the works of the “Russian Americans.” The Soyer brothers’ sharp and piercing everyday sketches of first-generation immigrants (e.g., Bibliophile, 1934, Moses Soyer; and Roommates, 1934, Raphael Soyer). Peter Blume’s mysterious industrial and domestic paintings depict observation of reality running through symbolism, and even surrealism (Pig's Feet and Vinegar, 1927). Louis Lozowick’s poetic praise of city skylines (Pittsburgh, 1922-1923) was once one of the central figures in the constructivist movement in American art during the 1920s.

Many of us recently saw with great interest the work of emigres that was presented at the “Russian Paris” exhibition. According to Evgenia Petrova, the Russian Museum hopes to hold a similar exhibition called “Russian Berlin.” “We want to return audiences to the Russian emigre artists, return them to themselves in a way in order to explore and leave something for future generations,” said Petrova. “This exhibition provides a great means for reflection, especially for young minds. We can’t allow them to lose these layers of culture. Americans are not aware of early work of many artists who are part of their own national heritage, and likewise, we do not know the later works of our former compatriots. We need to all join together in order to better understand the history of world culture.”

Another stormy cultural dialogue has been clearly denoted in Russian-American relations. The “Russian roots” of many classic American paintings that were shown in “American Artists from the Russian Empire” at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (University of Oklahoma) from October 4, 2008 to January 11, 2009 proved shocking to Americans. According to Petrova, an unusually large number of visitors came to look at the “Russians,” and for many of them, the exhibition became a “cultural shock,” as they had little notion that the “Slavic” influence was so impressive. The exhibition ended with a special conference on Russian culture in Oklahoma, and there was a heated debate about the political, economic and cultural relations between our two countries. Americans proudly remember the Russian musicians, ballet masters and actors who have enriched the cultural and spiritual life of North America. The conference ended with the University of Oklahoma declaring the Year of Russian Culture and the organization of a special department devoted to the study of Russian language and literature.

Oklahoma has now passed the baton to St. Petersburg. An impressive American delegation was present for the opening of the exhibition at the Russian Museum, and they brought with them the hope of continuing the discussion as to what constitutes the conglomerate of our two cultures. According to Gregory Guroff, president of the Foundation for International Arts & Education, forty years ago it was impossible to even think of an exhibition of artists with Russian origins being held in Russia. “As a Russian who was born abroad, it’s very important to me that people in Russia find out that Russian culture is continuing in faraway places,” said Guroff. Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky did not miss the opportunity to demonstrate the celebrated American business sense by suggesting that the Russian sponsor SeverStal finance a long-term lease of Burliuk’s Unemployedville for display in the Russian Museum. After taking a deep breath, the representatives from SeverStal promised to seriously consider the proposal.

After the exhibition is displayed in the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, it will move to the Museum of Art in San Diego.

Rubric:
Subject:
Tags:

New publications

Italian entrepreneur Marco Maggi's book, "Russian to the Bone," is now accessible for purchase in Italy and is scheduled for release in Russia in the upcoming months. In the book, Marco recounts his personal odyssey, narrating each stage of his life as a foreigner in Russia—starting from the initial fascination to the process of cultural assimilation, venturing into business, fostering authentic friendships, and ultimately, reaching a deep sense of identifying as a Russian at his very core.
Ukrainian authorities have launched a persecution campaign against the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the biggest one in the country's modern history. Over the past year, state sanctions were imposed on clergy representatives, searches were conducted in churches, clergymen were arrested, criminal cases were initiated, the activity of the UOC was banned in various regions of the country, and monasteries and churches were seized.
When Nektary Kotlyaroff, a fourth-generation Russian Australian and founder of the Russian Orthodox Choir in Sydney, first visited Russia, the first person he spoke to was a cab driver at the airport. Having heard that Nektariy's ancestors left Russia more than 100 years ago, the driver was astonished, "How come you haven't forgotten the Russian language?" Nektary Kotlyaroff repeated his answer in an interview with the Russkiy Mir. His affinity to the Orthodox Church (many of his ancestors and relatives were priests) and the traditions of a large Russian family brought from Russia helped him to preserve the Russian language.
Russian graffiti artists from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, and Nizhnevartovsk took part in an international street art festival in the capital of Chile. They decorated the walls of Santiago with Russian and Chilean symbols, conducted a master class for Russian compatriots, and discussed collaborative projects with colleagues from Latin America.
Name of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko is inscribed in the history of Russian theater along with Konstantin Stanislavski, the other founding father of the Moscow Art Theater. Nevertheless, Mr. Nemirovich-Danchenko was a renowned writer, playwright, and theater teacher even before their famous meeting in the Slavic Bazaar restaurant. Furthermore, it was Mr. Nemirovich-Danchenko who came up with the idea of establishing a new "people's" theater believing that the theater could become a "department of public education."
"Russia is a thing of which the intellect cannot conceive..." by Fyodor Tyutchev are famous among Russians at least. December marks the 220th anniversary of the poet's birth. Yet, he never considered poetry to be his life's mission and was preoccupied with matters of a global scale. Mr.Tyutchev fought his war focusing on relations between Russia and the West, the origins of mutual misunderstanding, and the origins of Russophobia. When you read his works today, it feels as though he saw things coming in a crystal ball...