Russian Culture Lexicon

Bryullov, Karl Pavlovich

▪ Russian artist

original name Charles Bruleau , Bryullov also spelled Briullov, Bryulov, Brülov, Brüllov , or Brülow

born Dec. 12 [Dec. 23, Old Style], 1799, St. Petersburg, Russia

died June 11 [June 23], 1852, Marsciano, near Rome, Papal States [Italy]

Russian painter who combined technical proficiency and classical academic training with a Romantic spontaneity to produce some of the liveliest examples of Russian art of the period.

Bryullov was descended from French Huguenots, and his father was a sculptor. (The family name was Russified in 1821.) Bryullov was educated at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts (1809–21). He studied in Italy from 1823, painting his best-known work, the monumental “Last Day of Pompeii” (1830–33), while there; it brought him an international reputation. Though he painted other large canvases with historical subjects, none was as successful as “Pompeii.” Much of his continuing reputation rests on his more intimate portraits and his watercolours and travel sketches.

Repin, Ilya Yefimovich

▪ Russian painter

born August 5 [July 24, Old Style], 1844, Chuguyev, Russia

died September 29, 1930, Kuokkala, Finland

Russian painter of historical subjects known for the power and drama of his works.

Born to a poor family near Kharkov, Repin learned his trade from a painter of icons named Bunakov and in 1864 became a student at the Academy of Fine Arts at St. Petersburg. In 1871 he won an academy scholarship that enabled him to visit France and Italy, and when he returned to Russia he devoted himself to depicting episodes from Russian history. In 1894 he became professor of historical painting at the academy in St. Petersburg.

The powerful “Volga Bargemen” (1873) epitomizes the stark realism and socially critical cast of much of Repin's work, which was to serve as a model for Socialist Realist painting in the Soviet Union. His treatments of Russian subjects tend to be grim in tone, sharply drawn, and boldly composed. Among his pictures are “Religious Procession in Kursk Gubernia” (1880–83), “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, November 16, 1581” (1885), and “Zaporozhian Cossacks” (1891), the latter perhaps his best-known work. He also did vigorous portraits of his great Russian contemporaries, such as Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Glinka, and Modest Mussorgsky.

Kandinsky, Wassily

▪ Russian artist

Introduction

Russian in full Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky

born Dec. 4 [Dec. 16, New Style], 1866, Moscow, Russia

died Dec. 13, 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Fr.

Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”; 1911–14) and began completely abstract painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic (e.g., “Tempered Élan,” 1944).

Early years

Kandinsky's mother was a Muscovite, one of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border; the boy thus grew up with a cultural heritage that was partly European and partly Asian. His family was genteel, well-to-do, and fond of travel; while still a child he became familiar with Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the Crimean Peninsula. At Odessa, where his parents settled in 1871, he completed his secondary schooling and became an amateur performer on the piano and the cello. He also became an amateur painter, and he later recalled, as a sort of first impulse toward abstraction, an adolescent conviction that each colour had a mysterious life of its own.

In 1886 he began to study law and economics at the University of Moscow, but he continued to have unusual feelings about colour as he contemplated the city's vivid architecture and its collections of icons; in the latter, he once said, could be found the roots of his own art. In 1889 the university sent him on an ethnographic mission to the province of Vologda, in the forested north, and he returned with a lasting interest in the often garish, nonrealistic styles of Russian folk painting. During that same year he discovered the Rembrandts in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, and he furthered his visual education with a trip to Paris. He pursued his academic career and in 1893 was granted the degree equivalent of a doctorate.

By this time, according to his reminiscences, he had lost much of his early enthusiasm for the social sciences. He felt, however, that art was “a luxury forbidden to a Russian.” Eventually, after a period of teaching at the university, he accepted a post as the director of the photographic section of a Moscow printing establishment. In 1896, when he was approaching his 30th birthday, he was forced to choose among his possible futures, for he was offered a professorship in jurisprudence at the University of Dorpat (later called Tartu), in Estonia, which was then undergoing Russification. In what he called a “now or never” mood, he turned down the offer and took the train for Germany with the intention of becoming a painter.

Munich period.

He already had the air of authority that would contribute to his success as a teacher in later years. He was tall, large-framed, impeccably dressed, and equipped with pince-nez glasses; he had a habit of holding his head high and seeming to look down at the universe. He resembled, according to acquaintances, a mixture of diplomat, scientist, and Mongol prince. But for the moment he was simply an average art student, and he enrolled as such in a private school at Munich run by Anton Azbé. Two years of study under Azbé were followed by a year of work alone and then by enrollment at the Munich Academy in the class of Franz von Stuck. Kandinsky emerged from the academy with a diploma in 1900 and, during the next few years, achieved moderate success as a competent professional artist in touch with modern trends. Starting from a base in 19th-century realism, he was influenced by Impressionism, by the whiplash lines and decorative effects of Art Nouveau (called Jugendstil in Germany), by the dot technique of Neo-Impressionism (or Pointillism), and by the strong, unrealistic colour of central European Expressionism and French Fauvism. Often he revealed that he had not forgotten the icons of Moscow and the folk art of Vologda; sometimes he indulged in patterns of violent hues that would have delighted his Asian ancestors. He exhibited with the vanguard groups and in the big nonacademic shows that had sprung up all over Europe—with the Munich Phalanx group (of which he became president in 1902), with the Berlin Sezession group, in the Paris Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants, and with the Dresden group that called itself Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). In 1903 in Moscow he had his first one-man show, followed the next year by two others in Poland. Between 1903 and 1908 he traveled extensively, from Holland to as far south as Tunisia and from Paris back to Russia, stopping off for stays of several months each in Kairouan (Tunisia), Rapallo (Italy), Dresden, the Parisian suburb of Sèvres, and Berlin.

In 1909 Kandinsky and the German painter Gabriele Münter (Münter, Gabriele), who had been his mistress since 1902, acquired a house in the small town of Murnau, in southern Bavaria. Working part of the time in Murnau and part of the time in Munich, he began the process that led to the emergence of his first strikingly personal style and finally to the historic breakthrough into purely abstract painting. Gradually, the many influences he had undergone coalesced. His impulse to eliminate subject matter altogether was not, it should be noted, due merely or even primarily to strictly aesthetic considerations. No one could have been less of an aesthete, less of an “art for art's sake” addict, than Kandinsky. In addition, he was not the sort of born painter who could enjoy the physical properties of oil and pigment without caring what they meant. He wanted a kind of painting in which colours, lines, and shapes, freed from the distracting business of depicting recognizable objects, might evolve into a visual “language” capable—as was, for him, the abstract “language” of music—of expressing general ideas and evoking deep emotions.

The project was not, of course, entirely new. Analogies between painting and music had long been common; many thinkers had attempted to codify the supposed expressiveness of colours, lines, and shapes; and more than one fairly ancient sketch might compete for the honour of being called the first abstract (abstract art) picture. Moreover, in these years just before World War I, Kandinsky was by no means alone in his attack on figurative art. By 1909 the Cubists were turning out intellectualized and fragmented visions of reality that baffled the ordinary viewer. Between 1910 and 1914 the list of pioneer abstract artists included many fine painters. A strict examination of works and dates can show, therefore, that Kandinsky does not quite deserve to be called, as he often is, the “founder” of nonfigurative painting; at least he cannot be called the only founder. But, when this historical point is conceded, he remains a pioneer of the first importance.

Kandinsky's widely accepted claim to historical priority rests mainly on an untitled work dated 1910 and commonly referred to as “First Abstract Watercolour.” On the basis of research done in the 1950s, however, this work can be dated somewhat later and can be regarded as a study for the 1913 “Composition VII”; and in any event it must be considered merely an incident—among many for which the evidence has not been preserved—on Kandinsky's route. In “Blue Mountain” (1908) the evolution toward nonrepresentation is already clearly under way; the forms are schematic, the colours nonnaturalistic, and the general effect that of a dream landscape. In “Landscape with Steeple” (1909) similar tendencies are evident, together with the beginning of what might be called an explosion in the composition. By 1910 “Improvisation XIV” is already, as its somewhat musical title suggests, practically abstract; with the 1911 “Encircled,” there has definitely developed a kind of painting that, though not just decoration, has no discernible point of departure in the depiction of recognizable objects. After that come such major works as “With the Black Arch,” “Black Lines,” and “Autumn”; in such pictures, done between 1912 and 1914 in a slashing, splashing, dramatic style that anticipates the New York Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, most art historians see the peak of the artist's achievement.

Kandinsky was an active animator of the avant-garde movement in Munich, helping to found in 1909 the New Artists' Association ( Neue Künstlervereinigung). Following a disagreement within this group, he and the German painter Franz Marc (Marc, Franz) founded in 1911 an informally organized rival group, which took the name Der Blaue Reiter (Blaue Reiter, Der) (“The Blue Rider”), from the title of one of Kandinsky's 1903 pictures.

Russian interlude.

When World War I was declared in 1914, Kandinsky broke off his relationship with Gabriele Münter and returned to Russia by way of Switzerland, Italy, and the Balkans. An early marriage to a cousin had been dissolved in 1910 after a long period of separation, and in 1917 he married a Moscow woman, Nina Andreevskaya, whom he had met the previous year. Although he was past 50 and his bride was many years younger, the marriage turned out to be extremely successful, and he settled down in Moscow with the intention of reintegrating himself into Russian life. His intention was encouraged by the new Soviet government, which at first showed itself anxious to win the favour and services of avant-garde artists. In 1918 he became a professor at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the arts section of the People's Commissariat for Public Instruction. His autobiographical Rückblicke (“Retrospect”) was translated into Russian and published by the Moscow municipal authorities. In 1919 he created the Institute of Artistic Culture, became director of the Moscow Museum for Pictorial Culture, and helped to organize 22 museums across the Soviet Union. In 1920 he was made a professor at the University of Moscow and was honoured with a one-man show organized by the state. In 1921 he founded the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. But by then the Soviet government was veering from avant-garde art to Social Realism, and so, at the end of the year, he and his wife left Moscow for Berlin.

In spite of the war, the Russian Revolution, and official duties, he had found time to paint during this Russian interlude and even to begin a quite drastic transformation of his art. Whereas in his Munich work as late as 1914 one can still find occasional allusions to landscape, the canvases and watercolours of his Moscow years show a determination to be completely abstract. They also show a growing tendency to abandon the earlier spontaneous, lyrical, organic style in favour of a more deliberate, rational, and constructional approach. The change is evident in such pictures as “White Line” and “Blue Segment.”

Bauhaus period.

By this time Kandinsky had an international reputation as a painter. He had always, however, been interested in teaching, first as a lecturer in law and economics just after getting his university degree, then as the master of a painting school he had organized in Munich, and more recently as a professor at the University of Moscow. He seems not to have hesitated, therefore, when early in 1922 he was offered a teaching post at Weimar in the already famous Bauhaus school of architecture and applied art. At first his duties were a little remote from his personal activity, for the Bauhaus was not concerned with the formation of “painters” in the traditional sense of the word. He lectured on the elements of form, gave a course in colour, and directed the mural workshop. Not until 1925, when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, did he have a class in “free,” nonapplied painting. In spite of the somewhat routine nature of his work, however, he appears to have found life at the Bauhaus rewarding and pleasant. The climate was one of research and craftsmanship combined with a certain amount of aesthetic puritanism; it was classical, to use the term rather loosely, by comparison with the warm romanticism of his pre-1914 days in Munich.

Kandinsky responded to this climate by continuing to evolve in the general direction of geometric abstraction, but with a dynamism and a taste for detail-crowded pictorial space that recall his earlier sweeping-gesture technique. That Kandinsky was keenly interested in theory during these years is evident from his publication in 1926 of his second important treatise, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (“Point and Line to Plane”). In his first treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he had emphasized in particular the supposed expressiveness of colours, comparing yellow, for example, to the aggressive, allegedly earthly sound of a trumpet and comparing blue to the allegedly heavenly sound of the pipe organ. Now, in the same spirit, he analyzed the supposed effects of the abstract elements of drawing, interpreting a horizontal line, for example, as cold and a vertical line as hot.

Paris period.

Although he had been a German citizen since 1928, he emigrated to Paris when, in 1933, the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close. The last, and one of the finest, of his German pictures is the sober “Development in Brown”; its title probably alludes to the Nazi brown-shirted storm troopers, who regarded his abstract art as “degenerate.” He lived for the remaining 11 years of his life in an apartment in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, becoming a naturalized French citizen in 1939.

During this final period his painting, which he began to prefer to call “concrete” rather than “abstract,” became to some extent a synthesis of the organic manner of the Munich period and the geometric manner of the Bauhaus period. The visual language that he had been aiming at since at least 1910 turned into collections of signs that look like almost-decipherable messages written in pictographs and hieroglyphs; many of the signs resemble aquatic larvae, and now and then there is a figurative hand or a lunar human face. Typical works are “Violet Dominant,” “Dominant Curve,” “Fifteen,” “Moderation,” and “Tempered Élan.” The production of such works was accompanied by the writing of essays in which the artist stressed the alleged failure of modern scientific positivism and the need to perceive what he termed “the symbolic character of physical substances.”

Kandinsky died in 1944. His influence on 20th-century art, often filtered through the work of more accessible painters, was profound.

Roy Donald McMullen Ed.

Additional Reading

Will Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work (1959), is a sympathetic biography by a friend of the artist. Hans K. Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky (1979), is an illustrated treatment of his work, while Kandinsky: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil-paintings, 2 vol. (1982–84), is a comprehensive reference work. Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (1979), studies the influences in pre-World War I Munich. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style

Malevich, Kazimir

▪ Russian painter

born , Feb 23 [Feb. 11, old style], 1878, near Kiev

died May 15, 1935, Leningrad

Russian painter, who was the founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting.

Malevich was trained at the Kiev School of Art and the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts. In his early work he followed Impressionism as well as Fauvism, and, after a trip to Paris in 1912, he was influenced by Picasso and Cubism. As a member of the Jack of Diamonds (q.v.) group, he led the Russian Cubist movement.

In 1913 Malevich created abstract geometrical patterns in a manner he called Suprematism (q.v.). From 1919 to 1921 he taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad, where he lived the rest of his life. On a 1926 visit to the Bauhaus in Weimar he met Wassily Kandinsky and published a book on his theory under the title Die gegenstandslose Welt (“The Nonobjective World”). Later, when Soviet politicians decided against modern art, Malevich and his art were doomed. He died in poverty and oblivion.

Malevich was the first to exhibit paintings composed of abstract geometrical elements. He constantly strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions, repudiating all sensuality and representation in art. His well-known “White on White” (1918; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) carries his Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion.

Suprematism

▪ painting

Russian Suprematism,

first movement of pure geometrical abstraction in painting, originated by Kazimir S. Malevich (Malevich, Kazimir) in Russia in about 1913. In his first Suprematist work, a pencil drawing of a black square on a white field, all the elements of objective representation that had characterized his earlier, Cubist-Futurist style, had been eliminated. Malevich explained that “the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.” Referring to his first Suprematist work, he identified the black square with feeling and the white background with expressing “the void beyond this feeling.”

Although his early Suprematist compositions most likely date from 1913, they were not exhibited until 1915, the year he edited the Suprematist manifesto, with the assistance of several writers, most notably the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich). In these first Suprematist works—consisting of simple geometrical forms such as squares, circles, and crosses—he limited his palette to black, white, red, green, and blue. By 1916–17 he was presenting more complex shapes (fragments of circles, tiny triangles); extending his colour range to include brown, pink, and mauve; increasing the complexity of spatial relationships; and introducing the illusion of the three-dimensional into his painting. His experiments culminated in the “White on White” paintings of 1917–18, in which colour was eliminated, and the faintly outlined square barely emerged from its background. Finally, at a one-man exhibition of his work in 1919, Malevich announced the end of the Suprematist movement.

Suprematism had a few adherents among lesser known artists, such as Ivan Kliun, Ivan Puni, and Olga Rosanova. While not affiliated with the movement, the distinguished Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (Kandinsky, Wassily) showed the influence of Suprematism in the geometrization of his forms after 1920. This geometrical style, together with other abstract trends in Russian art, was transmitted by way of Kandinsky and the Russian artist El Lissitzky to Germany, particularly to the Bauhaus (q.v.), in the early 1920s.

Chagall, Marc

▪ Russian-French artist

Introduction

born July 7, 1887, Vitebsk, Belorussia, Russian Empire [now in Belarus]

died March 28, 1985, Saint-Paul, Alpes-Maritimes, France

Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker, and designer. He composed his images based on emotional and poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic. Predating Surrealism, his early works, such as I and the Village (1911), were among the first expressions of psychic reality in modern art. His works in various media include sets for plays and ballets, etchings illustrating the Bible, and stained-glass windows.

Early life and works

Chagall was born in a small city in the western Russian Empire not far from the Polish frontier. His family, which included eight other children, was devoutly Jewish and, like the majority of the some 20,000 Jews in Vitebsk, humble without being poverty-stricken; his father worked in a herring warehouse, and his mother ran a shop where she sold fish, flour, sugar, and spices. The young Chagall attended the heder (Jewish elementary school) and later went to the local public school, where instruction was in Russian. After learning the elements of drawing at school, he studied painting in the studio of a local realist, Jehuda Pen, and in 1907 went to St. Petersburg, where he studied intermittently for three years, eventually under the stage designer Léon Bakst (Bakst, Léon). Characteristic works by Chagall from this period of early maturity are the nightmarish The Dead Man (1908), which depicts a roof violinist (a favourite motif), and My Fiancée with Black Gloves (1909), in which a portrait becomes an occasion for the artist to experiment with arranging black and white.

In 1910, with a living allowance provided by a St. Petersburg patron, Chagall went to Paris. After a year and a half in Montparnasse, he moved into a studio on the edge of town in the ramshackle settlement for bohemian artists that was known as La Ruche (Beehive, The) (“the Beehive (Beehive, The)”). There, he met the avant-garde poets Blaise Cendrars (Cendrars, Blaise), Max Jacob (Jacob, Max), and Guillaume Apollinaire (Apollinaire, Guillaume), as well as a number of young painters destined to become famous: the Expressionist (Expressionism) Chaim Soutine (Soutine, Chaim), the abstract colourist Robert Delaunay (Delaunay, Robert), and the Cubists (Cubism) Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger (Léger, Fernand), and André Lhote (Lhote, André). In such company nearly every sort of pictorial audacity was encouraged, and Chagall responded to the stimulus by rapidly developing the poetic and seemingly irrational tendencies he had begun to display in Russia. At the same time, under the influence of the Impressionist (Impressionism), Post-Impressionist (Post-Impressionism), and Fauvist (Fauvism) pictures he saw in Paris museums and commercial galleries, he gave up the usually sombre palette he had employed at home.

Maturity

The four years of his first stay in the French capital are often considered Chagall's best phase. Representative works are Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers (1912), I and the Village (1911), Hommage à Apollinaire (1911–12), Calvary (1912), The Fiddler (1912), and Paris Through the Window (1913). In these pictures Chagall was already essentially the artist he would continue to be for the next 60 years. His colours, although occasionally thin, were beginning to show the characteristic complexity and resonance he would eventually achieve. The often whimsical figurative elements, frequently upside down, are distributed on the canvas in an arbitrary fashion, producing an effect that sometimes resembles a film montage and suggests the inner space of a reverie. The general atmosphere of these works can imply a Yiddish joke, a Russian fairy tale, or a vaudeville turn. Often the principal character is the romantically handsome, curly-haired young painter himself. Memories of childhood and of Vitebsk were major sources of imagery for Chagall during this period.

After exhibiting in the annual Paris Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne, Chagall had his first solo show in Berlin in 1914, in the gallery of the Modernist publication Der Sturm (Sturm, Der), and he made a strong impression on German Expressionist circles. After visiting the exhibition, he went on to Vitebsk, where he was stranded by the outbreak of World War I. Working for the moment in a relatively realistic style, Chagall painted local scenes and a series of studies of old men; examples of the series are The Praying Jew (or The Rabbi of Vitebsk, 1914) and Jew in Green (1914). In 1915 he married Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a wealthy Vitebsk merchant; among the many paintings in which she appears from this date onward are the depiction of flying lovers entitled Birthday (1915–23) and the high-spirited, acrobatic Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1917).

Chagall was initially enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917) of October 1917; he became commissar for art in the Vitebsk region and launched into ambitious projects for a local art academy and museum. But after two and a half years of intense activity, marked by increasingly bitter aesthetic and political quarrels with the faculty of the art academy, he gave up and moved to Moscow. There he turned his attention for a while to the stage, producing the sets and costumes for plays by the Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem and murals for the Kamerny Theatre. In 1922 Chagall left Russia for good, going first to Berlin, where he discovered that a large number of the pictures he had left behind in 1914 had disappeared. In 1923, this time with a wife and daughter, he settled once again in Paris.

Chagall had learned the techniques of engraving while in Berlin. Through his friend Cendrars he met the Paris art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard (Vollard, Ambroise), who in 1923 commissioned him to create a series of etchings (etching) to illustrate a special edition of Nikolay Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay)'s novel Dead Souls, and thus launched Chagall on a long career as a printmaker (printmaking). During the next three years, Chagall executed 107 full-page plates for the Gogol book. By then Vollard had a new idea: an edition of French poet Jean de La Fontaine (La Fontaine, Jean de)'s Fables, with coloured illustrations resembling 18th-century prints. Chagall prepared 100 gouaches for reproduction, but it soon became evident that his colours were too complex for the printing process envisaged. He switched to black-and-white etchings, completing the plates in 1931. By this time Vollard had come up with still another commission: a series of etchings illustrating the Bible. Chagall had completed 66 plates by 1939, when World War II and the death of Vollard halted work on the project; with the project renewed in the postwar years, Chagall eventually completed 105 plates. The Paris publisher E. Tériade, picking up where Vollard had left off, issued Dead Souls in 1948 (with 11 more etchings for the chapter headings, making 118 in all), La Fontaine's Fables in 1952 (with two cover etchings, making 102 in all), and the Bible in 1956. Along with these much delayed ventures, in the 1920s Chagall also produced a number of smaller collections of engravings, many single plates, and an impressive quantity of coloured lithographs and monotypes.

During the 1920s and early '30s, Chagall painted fewer large canvases, and his work became more obviously poetical and popular with the general public. Examples are Bride and Groom with Eiffel Tower (1928) and The Circus (1931). With Hitler's rise to power, however, and the growing threat of a new world conflict, the artist began to have visions of a very different sort, which are reflected in the powerful White Crucifixion (1938). In this painting, Jewish and Christian symbols are conflated in a depiction of German Jews terrorized by a Nazi mob; the crucified Christ at the center of the composition is wrapped in a tallith, a Jewish prayer shawl.

Throughout this interwar period Chagall traveled extensively, working in Brittany in 1924, in southern France in 1926, in Palestine in 1931 (as preparation for the Bible etchings), and, between 1932 and 1937, in Holland, Spain, Poland, and Italy. In 1931 his autobiography, My Life, was published. His reputation as a modern master was confirmed by a large retrospective exhibition in 1933 at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland.

Late career

With the outbreak of World War II, Chagall moved to the Loire district of France and then, as the Nazi menace for all European Jews became increasingly real, further and further south. Finally, in July 1941, he and his family took refuge in the United States; he spent most of the next few years in and around New York City. For a while Chagall continued to develop themes he had already treated in France; typical works of this period are the Yellow Crucifixion (1943) and The Feathers and the Flowers (1943). But in 1944 his wife Bella died, and memories of her, often in a Vitebsk setting, became a recurring pictorial motif. She appears as a weeping wife and a phantom bride in Around Her (1945) and, again, as the bride in The Wedding Candles (1945) and Nocturne (1947).

In 1945 Chagall designed the backdrops and costumes for a New York production of Igor Stravinsky (Stravinsky, Igor)'s ballet The Firebird. He was honoured with a large retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946 and at the Art Institute of Chicago a few months later.

In 1948 Chagall settled again in France, first in the suburbs of Paris and finally on the French Riviera at Vence and nearby Saint-Paul. Between 1953 and 1956, without forgetting his native Vitebsk, he produced a series of paintings inspired by his affection for Paris.

Chagall was prolific for the last 30 years of his life, continuing to paint on canvas while completing many large public projects in other media. He mastered the difficult art of stained glass in the late 1950s, and he designed a number of windows at international locations such as the Cathedral of Metz in France (1958–60), the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (1960–61), the United Nations building in New York (1964), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1977). His stained-glass windows are often considered to be some of the strongest work of his late career; the medium's capacity for brilliant colour was perfectly suited to his magical imagery.

Chagall also remained involved in theatre design, completing a number of projects for the Paris Opéra and the New York Metropolitan Opera, including his highly regarded set and costume designs for the 1967 production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. In 1973 the Museum of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message was dedicated at Nice, France, and in 1977 France honoured him with a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in Paris.

Assessment

Chagall's repertory of images, including massive bouquets, melancholy clowns, flying lovers, fantastic animals, biblical prophets, and fiddlers on roofs, helped to make him one of the most popular major innovators of the 20th-century School of Paris. He presented dreamlike subject matter in rich colours and in a fluent, painterly style that—while reflecting an awareness of artistic movements such as Expressionism, Cubism, and even abstraction—remained invariably personal. Although critics sometimes complained of facile sentiments, uneven quality, and an excessive repetition of motifs in the artist's large total output, there is agreement that at its best it reached a level of visual metaphor seldom attempted in modern art.

Roy Donald McMullen Ed.

Additional Reading

Sidney Alexander, Marc Chagall (1978, reprinted 1989), is an excellent biography. Critical works include Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall (1964; originally published in German, 1961); Werner Haftmann, Marc Chagall (1972, reissued 1998; originally published in German, 1972); Jean Cassou, Chagall, trans. from French (1965), an easily accessible work, emphasizing the painter's aesthetic and philosophical outlook; Susan Compton, Chagall (1985), an exhibition catalog; Aleksandr Kamensky, Chagall: The Russian Years, 1907–1922 (1989; originally published in French, 1988); and Andrew Kagan, Marc Chagall (1989).

Rodchenko, Aleksandr Mikhailovich

▪ Russian artist

born Nov. 23 [Dec. 5, New Style], 1891, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Dec. 3, 1956, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Soviet painter, sculptor, designer, and photographer, an important member of the Constructivist movement.

Rodchenko studied art at the Kazan School of Art in Odessa from 1910 to 1914 and then went to Moscow. He soon abandoned a Futurist style of painting in favour of a completely abstract, highly geometric style using a ruler and compass. His first major show was part of an exhibition organized in Moscow in 1916 by Vladimir Tatlin, and in 1918 Rodchenko presented a one-man show in Moscow. In the latter year he painted a series of black-on-black geometric paintings in response to the famous “White on White” painting of his rival, Kazimir Malevich. In 1919 Rodchenko began to make three-dimensional constructions out of wood, metal, and other materials, again using geometric shapes in dynamic compositions; some of these hanging sculptures were, in effect, mobiles.

Rodchenko led a wing of artists in the Constructivist movement—the Productivist group—who wanted to forge closer ties between the arts and industry and to produce works that they considered more appropriate in the daily lives of worker-consumers. He thus renounced easel painting in the 1920s and took up other art forms, among them photography; poster, book, and typographic design; furniture design; and stage and motion-picture set design. He held various government offices concerned with art-related projects, helped to establish art museums, and taught art.

Constructivism

▪ art

Russian Konstruktivizm

Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the “painting reliefs”—abstract geometric constructions—of Vladimir Tatlin (Tatlin, Vladimir Yevgrafovich). The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner (Pevsner, Antoine) and Naum Gabo (Gabo, Naum) joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was “to construct” art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial materials such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-engineers.

Other important figures associated with Constructivism were Alexander Rodchenko (Rodchenko, Aleksandr Mikhailovich) and El Lissitzky (Lissitzky, El). Soviet opposition to the Constructivists' aesthetic radicalism resulted in the group's dispersion. Tatlin and Rodchenko remained in the Soviet Union, but Gabo and Pevsner went first to Germany and then to Paris, where they influenced the Abstract-Creation group with Constructivist theory, and later in the 1930s Gabo spread Constructivism to England and in the 1940s to the United States. Lissitzky's combination of Constructivism and Suprematism influenced the de Stijl artists and architects whom he met in Berlin, as well as the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy (Moholy-Nagy, László), who was a professor at the Bauhaus. In both Dessau and Chicago, where because of Nazi interference the New Bauhaus was established in 1937, Moholy-Nagy disseminated Constructivist principles. See also Bauhaus; Stijl, De; Suprematism.

Benois, Alexandre

▪ Russian artist

Russian in full Aleksandr Nikolayevich Benois

born May 4 [April 21, old style], 1870, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Feb. 9, 1960, Paris

Russian theatre art director, painter, and ballet librettist who with Léon Bakst and Sergey Diaghilev cofounded the influential magazine Mir iskusstva (“World of Art”), from which sprang the Diaghilev Ballets Russes.

Benois aspired to achieve a synthesis of new western European trends and certain elements of traditional Russian folk art; Mir iskusstva, established in 1899 in St. Petersburg, attacked the low artistic standards of the realist Peredvezhniki Society and the deadening influence of the Russian Academy and stressed individualism and artistic personality. The magazine, which he coedited until 1904, soon exerted great influence on stage design.

Benois began his career (c. 1901) at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, as scenic designer for the ballets Sylvia and Cupid's Revenge. When the Diaghilev Ballets Russes opened in 1909, Benois designed decor and costumes for, among others, Les Sylphides (1909), Giselle (1910), and Petrushka (1911), on which he collaborated with Igor Stravinsky. His later works include grand designs for La Valse (1929, Ida Rubinstein Company), The Nutcracker (1940, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), and Graduation Ball, for which he also wrote the libretto (1957, London Festival Ballet). Among his writings are Reminiscences of the Ballet Russe (1941) and Memoirs (1960). Benois's collaboration with Stravinsky and Michel Fokine presented some of the greatest dance drama in history and helped found modern ballet.

Goncharova, Natalya

▪ Russian artist

Russian Nataliya Sergeyevna Goncharova, Goncharova also spelled Gontcharova

born June 4, 1881, Ladyzhino, Russia

died Oct. 17, 1962, Paris

innovative Russian painter, sculptor, and stage designer who was important as a founder, with Mikhail Larionov, of Rayonism (c. 1910) and as a designer for the Ballets Russes.

The daughter of an aristocratic family, Goncharova studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow. After an early preoccupation with sculpture, in 1904 she began seriously to paint, experimenting with the Cubist and Futurist styles during the next few years. It was as a synthesis of these movements that Goncharova and Larionov, whom she later married, conceived of Rayonism, which sought to portray in two dimensions the spatial qualities of reflected light. In 1912 Goncharova took part in Roger Fry's Postimpressionist exhibition in London and in the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich.

Goncharova earned a high reputation in Moscow for her scenery and costume designs for the Kamerny Theatre. When she and Larionov moved to Paris in 1914 she became a designer for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, her vibrant, Byzantine-inspired designs for the ballet “Coq d'Or” being especially notable.

Bolshoi Theatre

▪ Russian theatrical company

Russian Bolshoy Teatr, official name State Academic Bolshoi Theatre of Russia

leading theatre company for ballet and opera in Russia. The original group, which was made up of several smaller troupes, was organized in Moscow in the mid-1770s, performing primarily at the mansion of Count R.I. Vorontsov. In 1780 the first permanent theatre building in Moscow was opened as the company's home, but it burned in 1805. A year later the Bolshoi Theatre was made a government institution, and a new building was opened in 1825. It, too, was destroyed by fire, in 1853, but it was rebuilt and enlarged in 1856 to accommodate an audience of more than 2,000. By the end of the 19th century the Bolshoi's operatic and ballet productions of Russian and other European works were influencing the performing arts throughout the Western world. In 1924 a smaller auditorium was added to the theatre complex, and in 1961 the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, with a capacity of about 6,000, was acquired as a third performing space for bigger productions.

The company was kept intact during the Russian Revolution of 1917, both world wars, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990–91. Since the mid-1950s the opera and ballet troupes have traveled extensively.

Plisetskaya, Maya

▪ Russian ballerina

born Nov. 20, 1925, Moscow

prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow, admired particularly for her technical virtuosity, expressive use of her arms, and ability to integrate acting with dancing.

A niece of the dancers Asaf and Sulamith Messerer, Plisetskaya studied with Paul Gerdt's daughter Yelizaveta and with Agrippina Yakovlevna Vaganova and graduated from the Bolshoi school in 1943. Plisetskaya was noted for her unique, individualistic portrayals in both Soviet and classic ballets; her repertory included Zarema in The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, Laurencia, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain in The Stone Flower, Kitri in Don Quixote, Giselle, Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, and the dual character Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, frequently considered her greatest role. She performed in a number of countries, including the U.S., India, and China, and was a guest artist with the Paris Opéra in 1961 and 1964. Her performances have been recorded in the films Stars of the Russian Ballet (1953), Swan Lake (1957), and Plisetskaya Dances (1966). In 1964 she received a Lenin Prize for outstanding work in the arts. She appeared in ballets by such non-Soviet choreographers as Roland Petit, Maurice Béjart, and Alberto Alonso. From 1975 she also performed with the Ballet de XXe Siècle of Brussels. Her first choreography was Anna Karenina (1972).

Nureyev, Rudolf

▪ Russian dancer

in full Rudolf Hametovich Nureyev

born March 17, 1938, Irkutsk, Russian S.F.S.R. [now Russia]

died Jan. 6, 1993, Paris, France

ballet dancer whose suspended leaps and fast turns were often compared to Vaslav Nijinsky's legendary feats. He was a flamboyant performer and a charismatic celebrity who revived the prominence of male ballet roles and significantly widened the audience for ballet.

Of Tatar descent, Nureyev began his ballet studies at 11, left school at 15, and supported himself by dancing. At 17 he entered the Leningrad Ballet School, where he was taught by Aleksandr Pushkin. He was an outstanding but rebellious student, refusing to join the Komsomol (Communist youth organization), disobeying curfew regulations, and learning English privately.

After graduating in 1958, he became soloist with the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) Kirov (now Mariinsky (Mariinsky Ballet)) Ballet and danced leading roles with its touring company. While in Paris with the Kirov Ballet in June 1961, Nureyev eluded Soviet security men at the airport and requested asylum in France. He said later that the rigidly organized Soviet ballet had limited his opportunities to dance frequently and to perform in a variety of roles.

After his defection he danced with the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and made his American debut in 1962, appearing on American television and with Ruth Page's Chicago Opera Ballet. Later that year he joined the Royal Ballet (London) as permanent guest artist, but he never became a member of a major dance troupe in the West, preferring to work with various companies on a temporary basis.

Nureyev became well known as Dame Margot Fonteyn (Fonteyn, Dame Margot)'s favourite partner. Dancing with her, he interpreted such roles as Albrecht in Giselle, Armand in Marguerite and Armand, and Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. He was a popular guest artist in companies large and small throughout the world. Also working as a choreographer, Nureyev reworked Swan Lake (Vienna, 1964), giving the dominant role to the male dancer. His version of Sergey Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (1977) was produced by the London Festival Ballet, and his Manfred (1979) was performed by the Paris Opéra Ballet. In 1980 Nureyev staged The Nutcracker for the Berlin Ballet, and in 1981, owing to a further resurgence of interest in dance in Italy, Nureyev staged his version of Romeo and Juliet at La Scala, with Fonteyn as Lady Capulet. Nureyev's capabilities also extended to modern repertoires, and he performed in works by Martha Graham, Murray Louis, and Paul Taylor. Graham created the role of Lucifer (1975) for him, and in 1978 Nureyev appeared in the American premiers of Canarsie Venus and Vivace, choreographed for him by Louis.

His autobiography, Nureyev, was published in 1962. In 1973 he codirected (with Robert Helpmann) and starred in a filmed version of Don Quixote, and he had acting roles in the films Valentino (1977) and Exposed (1983).

Nureyev became an Austrian citizen in 1982. From 1983 to 1989 he was artistic director of the Paris Opéra Ballet.

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

▪ Russian-American dancer

in full Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov

born Jan. 28, 1948, Riga, Latvia, U.S.S.R.

Soviet-born American ballet dancer who was the preeminent male classical dancer of the 1970s and '80s. He subsequently became a noted dance director.

The son of Russian parents in Latvia, Baryshnikov entered Riga's opera ballet school at age 12. The success that he achieved there convinced him to devote himself to dancing. In 1963 he was admitted to the Vaganova ballet school (the training school for the Kirov (now Mariinsky) Ballet in Leningrad [St. Petersburg]), where he was instructed by Aleksandr Pushkin. In 1966 he joined the Kirov Ballet (Mariinsky Ballet) as a soloist without having to serve the customary apprenticeship as a member of the corps de ballet. As the Kirov Ballet's premier danseur noble, Baryshnikov appeared in the leading roles in Gorianka (1968) and Vestris (1969), two original ballets that had been especially choreographed for him.

Baryshnikov was extremely popular with Soviet audiences, but he began to chafe at the official restrictions that were placed upon him as an artist, particularly the prohibition on his performance of contemporary foreign ballets. While on a dance tour in Toronto in June 1974, Baryshnikov defected and was granted asylum by the Canadian government. Soon thereafter he began a series of highly successful appearances before North American audiences. As a dancer, his great physical prowess and unsurpassed leaping ability enabled him to perform the most difficult combinations of steps with remarkable elegance of line.

Baryshnikov joined the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in 1974 and danced with that company for four years, during which time he rechoreographed the Russian classics The Nutcracker (in 1976) and Don Quixote (in 1978). He danced with the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine in 1978–79, but from 1980 to 1989 he returned to the ABT as that company's artistic director. In 1990, he created the White Oak Dance Project, a small touring company of experienced dancers.

In addition to his ballet career, Baryshnikov played a leading role as dancer and actor in the motion pictures The Turning Point (1977), White Nights (1985), That's Dancing! (1985), and Dancers (1987). He played a dramatic role in the Franz Kafka play Metamorphosis (1989) and appeared as a recurring love interest of lead character Carrie Bradshaw in the television series Sex and the City (2003–04).

Vertov, Dziga

▪ Soviet director

pseudonym of Denis Arkadyevich Kaufman

born Jan. 2, 1896, [Dec. 21, 1895, Old Style], Belostok, Russia

died Feb. 12, 1954, Moscow

Soviet motion-picture director whose kino-glaz (“film-eye”) theory—that the camera is an instrument, much like the human eye, that is best used to explore the actual happenings of real life—had an international impact on the development of documentaries and cinema realism during the 1920s. He attempted to create a unique language of the cinema, free from theatrical influence and artificial studio staging.

As a newsreel cameraman during the Russian Civil War, Vertov filmed events that were the basis for such factual films as Godovshchina revolyutsii (1919; The Anniversary of the October Revolution) and Boi pod Tsaritsynom (1920; Battle of Tsaritsyn). At age 22 he was the director of a government cinema department. The following year he formed the Kinoki (the Film-Eye Group), which subsequently issued a series of manifestos against theatricalism in films and in support of Vertov's film-eye theory. In 1922 the group, led by Vertov, initiated a weekly newsreel called Kino-pravda (“Film Truth”) that creatively integrated newly filmed factual material and older news footage.

The subject matter of Vertov's later feature films is life itself; form and technique are preeminent. Vertov experimented with slow motion, camera angles, enlarged close-ups, and crosscutting for comparisons; he attached the camera to locomotives, motorcycles, and other moving objects; and he held shots on the screen for varying lengths of time, a technique that contributes to the rhythmic flow of his films. Outstanding among Vertov's pictures are Shagay, Sovyet! (1925; Stride, Soviet! ), Shestaya chast mira (1926; A Sixth of the World), Odinnadtsatyi (1928; The Eleventh), Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1928; The Man with a Movie Camera), Simfoniya Donbassa (1930; Symphony of the Donbass), and Tri pesni o Lenine (1934; Three Songs of Lenin). Vertov later became a director in the Soviet Union's Central Documentary Film Studio. His work and his theories became basic to the rediscovery of cinéma vérité, or documentary realism, in the 1960s.

Tarkovsky, Andrey Arsenyevich

▪ Soviet film director

born April 4, 1932, Moscow

died Dec. 29, 1986, Paris

Soviet motion-picture director whose films won acclaim in the West though they were censored by Soviet authorities at home.

The son of a prominent Russian poet, Tarkovsky studied filmmaking at the All-Union State Cinematography Institute and graduated in 1960. His diploma work, Katok i skripka (1960; The Steamroller and the Violin), won a prize at the New York Film Festival, and his first full-length feature film, Ivanovo detstvo (1962; Ivan's Childhood), about the experiences of an orphaned boy on the Russian Front during World War II, established his international reputation. His next film, Andrey Rublyov (1965), the story of a medieval Russian icon painter, was acclaimed as a masterpiece for its vivid evocation of the Middle Ages. His subsequent films included Solyaris (1971; Solaris), Zerkalo (1975; A Mirror), and Stalker (1979).

Tarkovsky's films were notable for their striking visual images, their symbolic, visionary tone, and their paucity of conventional plot and dramatic structure. Several of his films were barred from domestic distribution by the Soviet authorities, and in 1984 Tarkovsky decided to remain in the West after having filmed Nostalghia (1983; Nostalgia) in Italy. His last motion picture, also made in western Europe, was The Sacrifice (1986).

Paradzhanov, Sergey Yosifovich

▪ Armenian director

original name Sarkis Paradzhanian

born Jan. 9, 1924, Tbilisi, Georgia, U.S.S.R.

died July 20, 1990, Yerevan, Armenian S.S.R.

Armenian director of lyrical, visually powerful films whose career was curtailed by official harassment and censorship.

Paradzhanov studied music at the Tbilisi Conservatory and cinema at the State Institute of Cinematography. In 1952 he joined the Kiev Dovzhenko Studios, but the early motion pictures that he directed were never released in the West. His fifth feature film was Teni zabytykh predkov (1964; Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors), a richly impressionistic fantasy based on a novella by Mykhaylo Kotsyubysky with a Ukrainian setting. Although it won 16 international awards, including the grand prize at the 1965 Mar del Plata Festival in Argentina, his overt rejection of the official aesthetic of Socialist Realism brought him into conflict with Soviet authorities.

Paradzhanov went even further with Tsvet granata (1969; The Colour of Pomegranates, or Sayat Nova), in which he used ancient Armenian music to enhance symbolic episodes drawn from the colorful life of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova. In 1974 he was tried on a range of charges, including homosexuality, currency offenses, and “dealing in anti-Soviet legislation,” and was sentenced to five years at hard labour. An international campaign led to his release in 1978, but he was arrested again in 1982. He was finally allowed to resume filmmaking in the later-1980s era of glasnost.

Pushkin Fine Arts Museum

▪ museum, Moscow, Russia

formally State Fine Arts Museum in the Name of A.S. Pushkin , Russian Gosudarstvenny Muzey Izobrazitelnykh Iskusstv Imini A.S. Pushkina

collection in Moscow, Russia, of ancient and medieval art and western European painting, sculpture, and graphic arts. It was founded in the 1770s at Moscow University. Especially noteworthy are its holdings of French art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries gathered by the Russian collectors S.I. Shchukin and I.A. Morozov.

The museum is in a Neoclassical-style building dating from 1812. It is unrelated, except in name, to the Alexandr Pushkin Museum, also in Moscow, that specializes in the life and times of that author and has specialized collections of contemporary literature, portraits, and drawings and watercolours of St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Tretyakov Gallery

▪ museum, Moscow, Russia

in full State Tretyakov Gallery, Russian Gosudarstvennaya Tretyakovskaya Galereya,

Moscow art museum founded by Pavel M. Tretyakov in 1856. It contains the world's finest collection of 17th- and 18th-century Russian icons, having more than 40,000 of them.

There are also 18th-century portraits, 19th-century historical paintings, and works of the Soviet period. The museum is organized into Early Russian Art, Art of the 18th Century, Art of the First Half of the 19th Century, Art of the Second Half of the 19th Century, Art of the Early 20th Century, and Soviet Art.

Hermitage

▪ museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

in full State Hermitage, Russian Gosudarstvenny Ermitazh

art museum in St. Petersburg founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great (Catherine II) as a court museum. It adjoined the Winter Palace and served as a private gallery for the art amassed by the empress. Under Nicholas I the Hermitage was reconstructed (1840–52), and it was opened to the public in 1852. Following the October Revolution of 1917, the imperial collections became public property. The museum is housed within five interconnected buildings, including the Winter Palace (1754–62) and the Small, Old, and New Hermitages.

The Hermitage has a rich collection of western European painting since the Middle Ages, including many masterpieces by Renaissance Italian and Baroque Dutch, Flemish, and French painters. Russian art is well represented. The Hermitage also has extensive holdings of Oriental art, especially noteworthy being its collection of the art of Central Asia.

Bakst, Léon

▪ Russian artist

original name Lev Samoylovich Rosenberg

born January 27 [February 8, New Style], 1866, St. Petersburg, Russia

died December 28, 1924, Paris, France

Russian artist who revolutionized theatrical design both in scenery and in costume.

Bakst attended the Imperial Academy of Arts at St. Petersburg but was expelled after painting a too-realistic “Pietà.” He returned to Russia after completing his studies in Paris and became a court painter. He was a cofounder with Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich) of the journal Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”) in 1899. Bakst began to design scenery in 1900, first at the Hermitage court theatre and then at the imperial theatres. In 1906 he went to Paris, where he began designing stage sets and costumes for Diaghilev's newly formed ballet company, the Ballets Russes. The first Diaghilev ballet for which he designed decor was Cléopâtre (1909), and he was chief set designer thereafter, working on the ballets Scheherazade and Carnaval (both 1910), Le Spectre de la rose and Narcisse (both 1911), L'Après-midi d'un faune and Daphnis et Chloé (both 1912), and Les Papillons (1914). Bakst achieved international fame with his sets and costumes, in which he combined bold designs and sumptuous colours with minutely refined details to convey an atmosphere of picturesque, exotic Orientalism. In 1919 Bakst settled permanently in Paris. His designs for a London production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty

Kamerny Theatre

▪ Russian theatre

Russian Kamerny Teatr,

small, intimate theatre founded in Moscow in 1914 by the Russian director Aleksandr Tairov (Tairov, Aleksandr Yakovlevich) (q.v.) to support his experimental synthetic theatre that incorporated all theatrical arts—ballet, opera, music, mime, and drama—as an alternative to the naturalistic presentations of Konstantin Stanislavsky's realism at the Moscow Art Theatre. Instead of staging plays of everyday life, Tairov offered a theatre of heroics, in which the hero was to elevate the audience above the quotidian levels of existence. The Kamerny developed as an experimental theatre specializing in foreign plays. Among the many reforms associated with the Kamerny are the use of music, dance, gesture, and mime and the inclusion of chanted or intoned speech. In many of its choreographed movements, which made use of offbeat rhythms and atonal sound patterns, the Kamerny anticipated certain dance configurations now associated with modern dance. Enlarged to 1,210 seats in 1930 by Tairov, the Kamerny achieved its greatest recognition in 1934 in Moscow with its production of Optimisticheskaya tragediya (“The Optimistic Tragedy”), an acceptance of Soviet Socialist Realism, which he interspersed with his experimentation. Thereafter, the experimental nature of the theatre declined. The theatre closed in 1950 with Tairov's death.

Tatlin, Vladimir Yevgrafovich

▪ Russian sculptor

born Dec. 16 [Dec. 28, New Style], 1885, Kharkov, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]

died May 31, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Ukrainian painter, sculptor, and architect remembered for his visionary “Monument to the Third International” in Moscow, 1920.

Tatlin was educated at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1910. Late in 1913 he went to Paris, where he visited Pablo Picasso, whose reliefs in sheet iron, wood, and cardboard made a deep impression on him. Returning to Moscow, Tatlin created constructions that he called “painting reliefs,” which he exhibited at a Futurist exhibition held in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in February 1915. He became the leader of a group of Moscow artists who tried to apply engineering techniques to the construction of sculpture. This developed into a movement known as Constructivism (q.v.).

This type of avant-garde art continued for a brief period after the Russian Revolution of 1917, during which time Tatlin created his most famous work—the “Monument to the Third International,” which was one of the first buildings conceived entirely in abstract terms. It was commissioned in 1919 by the department of fine arts and exhibited in the form of a model 22 feet (6.7 m) high at the exhibition of the VIII Congress of the Soviets in December 1920. A striking design, it consisted of a leaning spiral iron framework supporting a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube, each of which could be rotated at different speeds. The monument's interior would have contained halls for lectures, conferences, and other activities. The monument was to be the world's tallest structure—more than 1,300 feet (396 m) tall—but it was never built owing to the Soviet government's disapproval of nonfigurative art.

About 1927 Tatlin began experimentation with a glider that resembled a giant insect. The glider, which he called Letatlin, never flew, but it engaged his interest throughout his later life. After 1933 he worked largely as a stage designer.

Tairov, Aleksandr Yakovlevich

▪ Russian director

original name Aleksandr Kornblit

born June 24, 1885, Romny, Russia

died Sept. 25, 1950, Moscow

founder and producer-director (1914–49) of the Kamerny (Kamerny Theatre) (Chamber) Theatre in Moscow, which, during the era of the Revolution, rivaled the Moscow Art Theatre in professional competence.

Tairov took up law briefly before settling on a theatrical career. He worked in several companies, including that of the Mobile Theatre of P.P. Gaydeburov. In 1913–14 he managed the shortlived Free Theatre Moscow prior to founding the Kamerny.

In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution—at a time when the United States had broken off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union—Tairov brought to Moscow audiences the work of the American playwright Eugene O'Neill, notably The Hairy Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings, and Desire Under the Elms. Tairov's style was avant garde, particularly with respect to staging. He helped develop the functional “constructivist” setting, a bare, multilevel scaffolding devoid of traditional decorative scenery. His approach to theatre was stylized and antirealistic and was diametrically opposed to that of the followers of actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky. He attached great importance to the actor's physical attributes; members of his company were rigorously trained in dancing, singing, acrobatics, and rhythmic precision of move ment. His 1934 production of Vsevolod Vishnevsky's The Optimistic Tragedy was regarded as a high point of Socialist Realist theatre. Under pressure from Stalinist authorities, however, Tairov was eventually compelled to work under the guidance of a state theatre committee. His wife, Alisa Koonen, starred in many of his productions.

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