Oil Painting -> Zinaida Serebryakova
Zinaida Serebryakova
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Zinaida Serebryakova Zinaida Evgenyevna Serebryakova (December 10, 1884 - September 19, 1967) is the first Russian woman-painter of distinction. Family He was arrested and murdered in the German concentration camp Auschwitz. |
She belongs to the artistic family of Lansere (sometimes spelled Lanceray). Her grandfather Nicolai Leontievich Lansere was a famous architect, chairman of architect's society and member of Russian Academy of Science. Her uncle Alexandre Benois was a famous painter, founder of Mir iskusstva art group. Her father, Yevgeniy Nikolaevich Lansere, was a well-known sculptor, and her mother, who was Alexandre Benois's sister, was good at drawing. One of Zinaida's brothers, Nikolai Evgenievich Lansere, was a talented architect, and her other brother, Yevgeniy Yevgenievich Lansere, had an important place in Russian and Soviet art as a master of monumental painting and graphic art. Great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and Russian-English actor and writer Peter Ustinov were also her relatives.
Youth
In 1900 she graduated from women's gimnasium and entered the art
school founded by princess Tenisheva. She learnt from Repin (since
1901) and from portrait artist Braz (1903-1905). In 1902-1903 she
traveled to Italy. In 1905-1906 she studied at Academie de La Grande
Chaumiere in Paris.
In 1905 Zinaida Lansere married student (later railroad engineer)
Boris Serebryakov and took his surname.
Happy years
Ever since her youth Zinaida Serebryakova strove to express her
love of the world and to show its beauty. Her earliest works—Country
Girl (1906, Russian Museum) and Orchard in Bloom (1908, private
collection)—speak eloquently of this search, and of her acute
awareness of the beauty of the Russian land and its people. These
works are etudes done from nature, and though she was young at the
time, her extraordinary talent, confidence and boldness were apparent.
Broad public recognition came with Serebryakova's self-portrait At the Dressing-Table (1909, Tretyakov Gallery); first shown at a large exhibition mounted by the Union of Russian Artists in 1910.The self-portrait was followed by Girl Bathing (1911, Russian Museum), a portrait of Ye. K, Lansere (1911, private collection) and a portrait of the artist's mother Yekaterina Lansere (1912, Russian Museum)—mature works, strict in composition.
She joined the World of Art movement in 1911, but stood out from the other members of the group because of her preference for popular themes and because of the harmony, plasticity and generalized nature of her paintings..
In 1914-1917 Zinaida Serebryakova was in her prime. During these years she produced a series of pictures on the theme of Russian rural life, the work of the peasants and the Russian countryside which was so dear to her heart: Peasants (1914-1915, Russian Museum), Sleeping Peasant Girl (private collection).
The most important of these works was Bleaching Cloth (1917, Tretyakov Gallery) which revealed Zinaida Serebryakova's striking talent as a monumental artist. The figures of the peasant women, portrayed against the background of the sky, gain majesty and power by virtue of the low horizon.
When in 1916 Alexander Benois was commissioned to decorate the Kazan Railway Station(*) in Moscow, he invited Yevgeny Lansere, Boris Kustodiev, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Zinaida Serebryakova to help him. Serebryakova took on the theme of the Orient: India, Japan, Turkey and Siam are represented allegorically in the form of beautiful women. At the same time she began compositions on subjects from classical mythology, but these remained unfinished.
Revolution
Zinaida met October Revolution in her family estate of Neskuchnoe.
Suddenly all her life changed. In 1919 died of typhus her husband,
Boris. She was left with her four children and sick mother without
any income. Hunger. All reserves of Neskuchnoe were marauded. She
had to stop oil
paining for less expensive techniques of coal and pencil.
This was the time of her most tragic painting House of Cards showing
all her four orphaned children.
She did not want to switch to popular in the earlier
Soviet art futurist style nor paint the commissar's portraits, but
he found some work in Kharkov Archeological Museum, where she made
pencil drawings of exponents. In December 1920 she moved to Petrograd
to her great father’s apartment. After October Revolution
inhabitants of private apartments were forced to share them with
new inhabitants sent for podselenie. Lansere's family was given
actors of MKhaAT theater. This was the time of her theatric series
of paintings.
Paris
In the autumn of 1924 Serebrvakova went to Paris, having received
a commission for a large decorative mural. On finishing this work
she intended to return to Russia, where her mother and two children
remained. But life turned out differently and she was not able to
return to Russia and became separated from all of her beloved children.
Serebryakova's long years away from Russia and her family were full of nostalgia and brought her neither joy nor creative satisfaction. She struggled to obtain even small money to send them back to her children in Russia.
Zinaida Serebryakova traveled a great deal. In 1928 and 1930 she travels to Africa, visiting Morocco and Algeria. Landscapes of Africa's north astonished her, she paints Atlas mountains, Arab women, Africans in ethnic clothes. She also paints a cycle devoted to Britannia's fishermen. The salient feature of her later landscapes and portraits is the artist's own personality—her love of beauty, whether in nature or in man. And yet, the most important thing was missing—the connection with what was near and dear to her.
During Khruschev's Thaw, the Soviet Government
allowed contact with her. In 1960 after 36 years of forced separation
she was visited by her daughter Tatiana (Tata), who became a theatrical
artist working for MKhaAT. In 1966 a large exhibition of Zinaida
Serebryakova's works was mounted in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev.
She instantly became very popular in Russia, her albums were selling
by the millions and she was compared to Boticelli and Renoir.
