The Art of Sinaida Serebryakova

Sinaida Serebryakova ist eine in den Ländern des Westens der Allgemeinheit weniger bekannte Künstlerin. In Rußland und in Emigrantenkreisen war und ist sie ein e anerkannte Künstlerin, deren Leben ebenso interessant ist wie ihr Werk. Es gibt wenig bis gar keine Literatur in nicht-kyrillischer Schrift über sie und offensichtlich hat sich bisher auch kein westlicher Verlag gefunden der ihr Werk und Leben einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit bekannt machen will.

Mir haben es besonders ihre ausdrucksvollen Kinderbilder angetan. (deshalb haben wir unsere Tochter im dritten Vornahmen nach Sinaida Serebryakova genannt.´) Ich möchte einen kleinen Beitrag dazu leisten daß das herrliche Werk dieser ganz besonderen Künstlerin auch im Westen bekannter wird.

Den Text habe ich einem vergriffenen Buch in russischer Sprache entnommen.

Text von Tatyana Savitskaya

English translation  by Graham Whittaker

I cannot imagine what there is in my work that can attract the attention of the Soviet public Because of course, judging by the comments of the press and public here in Paris, my art has nothing of originality in its subject matter, in the manner of drawing, and so on...” Zinaida Serebryakova thus wrote to her relatives in the Soviet Union on the eve of her 1965 Moscow exhibition, the first exhibition of her work which her fellow countrymen had seen since she went to live in Paris in 1924; and it was also the first exhibition in which her art was represented, not just by a single picture or even a single period, but by the full range of her work from throughout her artistic career. And indeed, before this exhibition, hardly anyone could have known the full extent of her work: few people in Moscow had encountered the pictures she had painted abroad, and in Paris there were few people who remembered her work from before she emigrated. It was not even easy for the artist herself to imagine this exhibition, since she had forgotten about the existence of some of her early works, and those she did remember she now looked on quite differently.

The response to the exhibition was communicated to Serebryakova through letters from friends and relations, some of whom also sent her press-cuttings. After long years away from her native land, years of depressing meditation  about her  life ‘wasted’ abroad, about being unrecognized and unwanted in her new homeland and about how impossible it was to work as she was accustomed, this news of the reception of the 1965 exhibition was an unexpected and long-forgotten joy to her. Although the exhibition came too late to change anything in the artist’s own life, as she was already turned eighty, it was nevertheless of great importance in wider terms. For the majority of Soviet art lovers, who knew her work principally from her self-portrait in the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow  (Woman at the Mirror,  1909), the 1965 exhibition was a real discovery: they saw Serebryakova work in all its fine artistry, in all the fascination and charm of youth, beauty and her own sense of optimism. A page of Russian and Soviet art history, which had previously been left half empty, was now properly filled. “I shall return to St. Petersburg in my memoirs at the slightest excuse— like a lover to the object of his worship,” thus wrote Alexandre Benois, artist, art critic, author, and Zinaida Serebryakova’s uncle on her mother’s side. In these memoirs Benois talks of the large ‘clan’, well-known in St.Petersburg in the nineteenth century, which was formed by the inter-related descendants of the Cavos, Benois and Lanceray families. The founders of the Russian branches of these families had left their own countries (France and Italy) and settled in Russia around the end of the eighteenth century. Although retaining in their everyday lives many customs of their forefathers, they served their new homeland zealously and even began to think and feel like Russians.

At one point Alexandre Benois refers to the ‘ardent Russian  nationalism’  of  the  sculptor  Yevgueny Lanceray, Zinaida’s father, and goes on to say: “He did not refute his French forefathers, he even valued highly what they meant to him, but these blood ties with France were nothing in comparison to his idolization of Russia.” This latter feeling related in the main to St. Petersburg, one of those cities of which it is insufficient to say that it exercised an influence on this or that artistic personality: it would seem, rather, that without the city in question and the atmosphere of its past and its present, the particular artistic personality could never even have existed.

St.Petersburg has a special significance for both Russian and world art; it steeps the literary works, for example, of the poet Alexander Pushkin and the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The city’s exacting spirit, its majestic harmony and artistic perfection became the ‘measure of things’ in architecture, literature, music, dance, the graphic arts and, perhaps mostly so, in drawing, where accuracy, purity and elegance of line are of paramount importance. This ‘St.Petersburg’ quality, indeed, gave rise to a particular style: Benois, for instance, talking of the style of the artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, related this style to the ‘noble severity’ of her artistic skill. In this sense the aura and influence of St.Petersburg can also be felt in the work of Serebryakova.

After the early death of Yevgueny Lanceray, his widow took her six young children (Zinaida was not yet two years old) and went to live with her father Nikolai Benois, a well-known architect of the time, in St.Petersburg. Zinaida thus grew up in a large house near the Mariinsky Theatre in Russia’s capital city, surrounded by the special atmos-“ere of a large and happy family, where every-hing was conducive to the study and practice of art. Many of Zinaida’s relatives were highly accom-•lished in at least one field of the arts, right from ~.er great grandfather Cavos, a composer, who was one of the originators of the Cavos-Benois-Lanceray clan’ in St.Petersburg.

It was not just that many members of the family were engaged in artistic pursuits: art, rather, was an integral part of the household’s way of life. Thus everyone was an avid reader of books; the whole family and many of the family friends had musical abilities, and the house contained a piano, a harmonium, a violin and a cello; everyone, also, shared the Russian intelligentsia’s passion for the theatre. The whole round of family festivals — name-days and birthdays — were filled with domestic theatrical activities and other artistic pursuits. But the family’s interest in art was not merely talented dilettantism; there was a serous  approach to all artistic activities, which demanded both knowledge and systematic effort, and which had nothing to do with the gratification of petty aspirations and material prosperity. Thus Alexandre Benois, referring to his brother Leonty’s wife, sets out the Benois family credo: she “belonged, in nature, upbringing and way of life, to a totally different category of people from that of the Benois family... For her, a typical daughter of the commercial world, art was a means of making money, acquiring social esteem, and making one’s life comfortable for oneself and envious to others; but that artistic creativity should contain any sort of spiritual essence, that art should be able to express the aspirations and ideas of a higher order —• ail this was beyond her comprehension and desires.” This utilitarian view of art was contradictory to the very spirit of the house in which Yevgueny Lanceray’s children were now being brought up. Zinaida’s inclination for art was discovered at a fairly early age; while she was still at school she very often spent her free time with her album making plein-air sketches. The older members of the family helped her to improve her drawing, and also taught her watercolour techniques. One of the favourite subjects for her early drawings was the estate of Neskuchnoye where she had been born and where the family now spent the summer months; across the Muromka River from the Lanceray estate was another small estate which belonged to the Serebryakovs, the family of Yevgueny Lanceray’s sister.

The life and countryside of Neskuchnoye and the estate beyond the river were an important part of Zinaida’s own life at this time, and they became a constant source of spiritual and artistic inspiration for her. In one of her letters to her mother in St.Petersburg, she wrote: “How wonderful it is to be here in Neskuchnoye. Yesterday we had the first cherry buds in blossom, and soon the whole garden will be white and fragrant. Last night, with a light, warm rain, the whole garden became green, the meadows are now decked in flowers, and the fields are bright green with new shoots. In the evenings we go for walks, and listen to the nightingales which fill both gardens with their songs.” The ecstasy of life, nature and art, expressed with special force in Neskuchnoye, filled the many landscape, portrait and genre sketches which she drew in the house, in the garden, in the fields, in the cattle-yard and in peasant huts. All the views and people of Neskuchnoye were included in her album, nothing and no one was left out: peasant workers, their wives and children, as well as every living creature within range — cows, horses, pigs, dogs, turkeys, and so on. This simple chronicle of village life shows  a frank and ingenuous view of the world, and at the same time there is a reserve and severity in it: neither in the colour nor the form is there any attempt to strive for complexity or outward effect.

Everything around the young artist, whether her family, the city or Neskuchnoye, helped to educate her and enrich her knowledge. It was in fact characteristic of artists of her generation that they learnt their skills outside the rigourous and graduated learning process of an art school. Thus, for example, The World of Art (Mir Iskusstva), the largest group of artists in Russia at the turn of the century, had been formed from a circle of school friends, for many of whom the lack of artistic awareness was overcome by frequent intercourse with the cultured society of the time and by their own high standard of general education. It is incidentally worth noting that some of the meetings and debates of this first, short-lived, World of Art group were held in the Benois household, although Zinaida herself was too young to participate in these activities or even to take any particular interest in them; but many years later when The World of Art resumed its existence, both Zinaida and her brother Yevgueny exhibited with it. To mention the events of Zinaida’s youth, however, which had a real influence on the formation of the future artist, the most noticeable traces were left by a journey in 1902—3 to Italy in company with her mother, sisters and friends of the family. At this time Alexandre Benois, Zinaida’s uncle, was living in Itaily: he was a great authority on Italian art, and proved to be an inspired guide. No matter how much spiritual nourishment Zinaida found in the world around her, she still longed for ‘real’ knowledge. When she left school she began to attend the art classes of Princess Teni-sheva. Although these classes were a well-known part of the St.Petersburg art world, they ceased to function within a month of Zinaida joining. She therefore continued her studies for a year and a half under the artist Osip Braz. Her studies in this short period were centred on realistic drawing — the basis of all graphic skills. The question as to whether she should .pursue a career in art was a natural one for a young girl of her social circle, but it was felt unlikely that her art would withstand the tests of family life. Her mother, for instance, had once attended classes in the St.Petersburg Academy of Arts, but her marriage and the birth of her children had ousted all else from her life. Zinaida, however, feeling that her artistic education was severely deficient, wanted to study even more thoroughly, and for this purpose decided to go to Paris. Her mother, considering the expense of such a trip as weighed against the family’s limited budget, was unwilling to let her go; but she finally gave her consent, seeing how much good her daughter believed would come of a visit to the artistic capital of the world. This was in 1905, when the events of the first Russian revolution had rocked the country. The progressive elements of the intelligentsia sympathized with the aims of the revolution; many of Zinaida’s own friends and relations attended political meetings, sometimes taking her with them;  and her brother Yevgueny made contributions to satirical journals opposed to the Tsar’s harsh and autocratic rule. But it so happened that, at this dramatic and historical time, Zinaida was living one of the happiest periods of her life: she had just married Boris Serebryakov, her cousin and childhood friend from the estate over the river from the Neskuch-noye estate, and no heavy clouds could darken her spirit’s joyful mood.

The trip to Paris finally took place towards the end of 1905 and Zinaida’s husband, who was still a student, soon joined her there, when the revolution caused all the educational establishments in St.Petersburg to be temporarily closed. The young couple enjoyed looking round Paris, they attended exhibitions,  and sometimes went to the theatre. Zinaida made sketches of the streets and the city’s inhabitants, while her husband photographed the bridges and embankments of the Seine. The most important part of their stay in Paris, however, was to have been the visits to artists’ studios. Unfortunately, these visits were a great disappointment to Serebryakova, as she found it strange to see the masters’ negligent attitude to their pupils, the latter being left largely to their own resources. Recompense was nevertheless to be found in the art  galleries, especially the Louvre, where she spent much time copying the masterpieces of the great artists she admired. For the space of about six months the process of spiritual acquisition continued, until it was time to return home, to St.Petersburg. There, Zinaida Serebryakova was to be faced with new-cares and duties; now she would see how well her art could stand the test  of  family  life.  In  her  diary  she wrote:   “...I  have  given birth  to  a son,  a  small, dark  and  terribly  thin  boy,  he  weighed  seven pounds on the second day. We bottle-fed him for three days, two parts water, one part milk. On the fourth day Anna Grigoryevna brought a wet-nurse, a beautiful girl of eighteen. She brought with her her two-week-old  son,  who cried  day  and night without seeming even to pause for breath...” She made very detailed notes in her diary of all the upheavals connected with the births of her children (four in all); it is clear from her diaries that this was a difficult time for her, as she was not only impressionable, but was also far from being a strong and healthy person. Side by side with her ‘family’ entries, nevertheless, her diaries contain equally carefully made notes of purely concrete nature,  for  example:   “Canvas  for  oil  painting should be sized, not oiled, as is generally done nowadays.  The best sizing for  this  purpose is casein: add 20 grammes of casein to, 100 grammes of cold water and mix, but not with a metal rod...”

These two, so very different, types of notes alter-; throughout her diaries, often counteracting other, but in the final analysis merging into surprising unity and whole. There are also a lumber of small photographs from this period; one these shows Serebryakova standing by her easel i a meadow, she is trampling down the long grass, a wide-brimmed hat shades her face from ; sun, and her long, loose dress cannot fully hide r imminent motherhood. She painted the garden, e village children, the peasant women, the fields retching to the horizon,  and portraits of her iends. And although her brush was becoming e confident, and her own particular style was low clearer to see in her works, the sharp individuality of her future pictures was not yet fully ormed: this was still to come. In the winter of  1909 Boris Serebryakov, now working as a railway engineer, was sent away on prospecting work for his employers, and Serebrya-rova herself felt it easier to await his return in Neskuchnoye than in St.Petersburg. Despite all her household  duties she could  always find time to paint and draw, although her favourite themes, studies and sketches of nature, had to be put off until the spring. The sheet of snow which covered everything around, and the blinding light which poured in through the windows, gave all tangible objects a bright sense of joyousness. Here, in her cottage, Serebryakova painted one of her best-known self-portraits, Woman at the Mirror. Hardly had it made its appearance at an exhibition of the Union of Russian Artists, and been heralded with great enthusiasm and delight by the public, than it was acquired by the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow. At the time Alexandre Benois wrote an article for the newspaper Rech  (Speech), 1910, May  13, in which he commented: “This is Zinaida Serebryakova’s first work to be exhibited... She has presented the public with such a beautiful gift, such a winning smile, that we must not fail to thank her... In this picture we see such a direct simplicity: it is a true artistic temperament, something resonant, young, sunny and bright, something totally artistic...”

The picture  was conceived  and  executed  as the reflection in the mirror of a young, half-dressed woman: she has taken up her loose tresses in one hand and is holding them aloft to be combed by her other ham . The woman expresses a mixture of frankness and cunning, womanhood and chastity, grace and strength. Her mouth is touched with a faint smile, and her brows arch away above her bright, shining eyes. The verticals of the tall white candles echo the white harmony and balance of her figure, and accentuate by contrast her intricate pose and the array of coloured bottles, pins and beads scattered before her. In the background the narrow bed and the small wash-stand support the dominant theme of modesty and whiteness in the room where there is a captivating sense of closeness and evasion, reflection and transformation, truth, magic and play...

The outstanding success of the picture can be mostly attributed to the optimism of the image created, an image all the more unexpected, and yet all the more necessary, since it appeared in the period of reaction on the part of the government, and of spiritual crisis in intellectual circles, which followed  the  failure of the   1905  revolution  in Russia. Serebryakova’s conception of the world was free  from   any sense  of historical   upheavals,  a motif which was so characteristic in Russian intellectual life at that time. It was not simply the emotional  intonation,  but rather the whole style of Serebryakova’s painting, which bore no relation to the then fashionable tendencies of Art Nouveau. Entering the circle of professional artists on equal terms,  Serebryakova  asserted  herself both  as  a complete master of her art and as an independent personality.

This self-assertion on the part of Serebryakova may be seen as quite surprising in the circumstances: she had been brought up in the atmosphere of a closely-knit family group, a family which had very much protected her, even after her marriage, from the turmoil of the outside world. But in her own, at first glance extremely limited world, there were nature, art, and the duties of a mother and wife which merged together and became a major source of creative inspiration: in her art she conveyed the delight and joy of her outlook on the world.

The integrity of the world around her was a necessary condition for Serebryakova’s creativity, and her losses — separation from the places where she was born and brought up, the loss of her family happiness — were to leave unfillable gaps in her spiritual world and her art. Later, recalling the years of her married life, she wrote: “It always seemed to me that to be loved and to be in love was happiness; I was living a life of enchantment, unaware of the life around me...” Her personal happiness coincided with the period of her heighest creative inspiration, but both were only to last just a few years.

The self-portrait Woman at the Mirror was the beginning of a whole series of portraits which Sere-bryakova painted. As in the self-portrait, many of her  portraits  of  other  people showed  a  brightness and lightness of colour, they had a perfectly smooth surface, and there was a particular elegance in the carefully drawn details, like fine brushwork on china.

She mostly painted people who were close to her, and her favourite, and best works were of youth and beauty. Very often she would give the portrait a particular setting, and then the decorative details of an interior or a scene from nature would turn the portrait into a small subject picture. The painting of the portrait, indeed, not infrequently yielded pride of place to this ‘decoration’; thus we have the picture The Bather  (1911), a portrait of the artist’s sister by the Muromka River. The motif of the naked female body now became a constant feature in the work of Serebryakova, an unmistakable influence from her studies of the great masters in museums and art galleries. Following the lead taken by antiquity and the artists of the Italian Renaissance, she created her own canon for the  beautiful   female  body:   it  was  harmonious, powerful, pure, and full of life, as in the picture The Bath-house (1913) and in the sketches for the murals of the Kazan Railway Station in Moscow (1915—16).

Nowhere in these works did Serebryakova try to depict  a social type or portray a psychological depth,  and yet her  images  are far  from being abstractions: her women belong firmly in the twentieth century,  their  inactivity seems transitory, their coquetry is slightly affected, their bodies are not pampered  and  delicate, but powerful  and supple, their eyes  are alive with independence, energy  and  reason.  It should  not be forgotten, moreover, that these pictures were only the beginning: Serebryakova’s greatest achievements in the depiction of the female body were still in the future. Now, when her talent had been recognized, when her timidity in the appraisal of her own powers had been replaced by confidence, she was free to choose her own path, as a true master of her profession. The word ‘choose’, however, may be incongruent in respect of Serebryakova, because she worked so purposefully,  in  such  a  state of  inspiration,  as though her path had long since been determined. The evenings in Neskuchnoye were spent in music and amateur theatricals, and in reading aloud, but the  days were given over to work, either in the house or in the fields. Inactivity was definitely not a characteristic of the Serebryakov or Lanceray families In one of her letters Zinaida Serebryakova wrote: “Boris takes an active interest in the running of the estate; all day today he was at work on the threshing floor, and he is making a fodder silo...” Serebryakova’s mother mentioned the same thing in one of her letters: “Boris is a zealous landlord: he spends all day in the fields, and Zinaida is with him doing her painting...” Serebryakova had no need to invent any of the subjects for her pictures, as they were always all around  her:   the  fields   in   spring  or   autumn, ploughing the fields or digging the garden, a peasant woman combing flax, a little girl asleep under a tree... The sketches drawn from life more and more often became finished works; they were distinctive for their classical completeness of form, and for their tendency towards the monumental and epic, as in the two large compositions of village life — Harvest-time (1915) and Bleaching Linen (1917).

In these paintings we see peasants stopping for a meal at harvest-time, women laying out linen in the meadow, a majesty of figures and poses, land stretching out endlessly into the distance, and rich colours: the gold of the fields, the deep blue of the horizon, the burning red of the clothes... The break from work in the field is an everyday and simple scene, but at the same time it is austerely laconic; there are no chance ‘props’ in it, it is the world of a monumental canvas, where details are superfluous. One of the women is about to divide up the bread lying in her lap, another is pouring out the milk, and their two younger companions are standing nearby. The women’s movement seems to have been halted, their faces and lowered eyes are almost devoid of expression and individual traits. The life and internal dynamics of the picture are in the rhythm of its colour, its lines and volumes, and in the complex polyphony of its relationships. After trying out a number of variations, Serebryakova  painted canvases with  four  women  each, which allowed her to group the figures in pairs, vary the combinations of the pairs and to use these pairs, as it were, in forming dynamic dialogues. The clearest and simplest of combinations is to be found in Harvest-time: two peasant women are sitting on the ground to form the fulcrum of the composition, and two women are standing up, as a frame around this fulcrum; the result is an ideal balance. But the figures themselves, their stances and  colouring,  form  many other  compositional balances besides. These devices on the part of Serebryakova, of course, are not obvious to the viewer, because the artist’s task is to present an integral work of art, and not the devices which lie behind it.

We do not even immediately recognize that the two standing figures differ only in their poses, in their costumes and other ‘accessories’. They are in fact one and the same girl: on the left she is in a composition with the two seated women, and is looking towards her reflection on the right;  and on the right, a little way away from the others, she ‘comes to life’, her eyes are open and she is looking out of the picture at us. Thus there is a transition from the epic background to the foreground, from the static to the dynamic, from reservation to  open  contact,  from neutral  ‘eternity’  to the present time.

Harvest-time shows a panorama of fields as the artist looks on the scene from  above;  but  in Bleaching Linen Serebryakova chooses to look from below, the four figures arranged in a circle seemed to have been raised onto  a pedestal  and their silhouettes are clearly drawn against the background sky. As in a round dance, the scene has no division into main or secondary persons, there is only the free alternation of movements and poses flowing into one another, the eternal round of nature in which the expressiveness belongs to the silhouettes and poses as they merge into a single movement. The movement of the figures has hidden the landscape, and only in the spaces between the four women is there a hint of unending distance. In comparison to Harvest-time, the figures are heavier and more solid, and the reds, highlighted from somewhere below by the golden rays of the sun, are more intense. This natural ‘stage’ also underscores the scenic quality and the decorative expressiveness of the image produced.

In the treatment of their themes, both Harvest-time and Bleaching Linen could well have been fragments of an epic cycle on the subject of man and nature, the eternal round of life. In both pictures we  see the  artist’s clarity of  aim  and  the inexorable subordination of visual impressions to artistic  discipline;   it  is  as  though  Serebryakova had raised herself up onto a broad plateau, having mastered the path from the intimate and personal to the massive and monumental, from the images of domestic life to those which are important for all mankind. Ordinary village scenes become a symbolic embodiment of the beauty of peasant toil. There is  a national  quality to these paintings. Serebryakova’s personal hymn to Russia, not only in the external effects, the landscape, the facial types, the costumes, but also in the bond between people, between people and nature, in the immeasurable expanses, the combination of fertile maturity with youth and freshness. Serebryakova was  an artist in whose  genealogy there was not a single drop of Russian blood, in her self-portraits she emphasized the Gallic type, and in the portraits of her children there is always an Italian brilliance of eye. In Harvest-time and Bleaching Linen, therefore, despite all their Russian qualities, one automatically senses a kinship with classical Italian art, the aesthetics of Renaissance monumental paintings and the plastic art of Italy.  It would seem that in the process of painting Harvest-time Serebryakova felt the need to refresh herself in the atmosphere of Italian art, to check the purity of her lines, rhythms and colours; in 1914 she once more visited Italy.

It is difficult to imagine that Harvest-time and Bleaching Linen appeared in the years of international strife, during the First World War. Peasants from the Neskuchnoye estate were drafted into the Russian army, women sorrowed for their absent husbands and sons, soldiers returned home wounded... and Zinaida Serebryakova knew them all,  she shared their  grief  and  helped  them  in whatever way she could. It was a crisis in all spheres of life, it was a time which demanded a mobilization of her spiritual powers, a willingness to meet the future  and to merge her  fate with that of her country. And it was at this time that she created her cycle of ‘peasant’ canvases. Following the 1917 Socialist Revolution in Russia, Serebryakova no longer felt safe on the Neskuch-noye estate; in 1918, therefore, she went with her mother and children to Kharkov in the Ukraine. Boris Serebryakov at this time was in Moscow; although the First World War had ended, Russia was in a state of civil war and it was with the greatest difficulty that Serebryakov managed to join his family. Shortly after his arrival in Kharkov, however, he died of typhus, which he had caught on his journey from Moscow. A totally new way of life now began for Serebryakova. She suffered adversity and poverty, she had to find work and a roof over her family’s heads, and she had the constant worry of what would become of her children. But she suffered all this as a common and inescapable misfortune of the times, a misfortune which would one day come to an end.

Towards the end of 1920 the family was able to return to Petrograd (St.Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914; in 1924 the name was again changed, to Leningrad.— TV.), and they settled in the flat  formerly  occupied  by  Serebryakova’s grandfather, Nikolai Benois, the flat where the artist herself had spent much of her youth. Now they shared the flat with two friends of the family, the artist Dmitry Bushen and the art critic Sergei Ernst. Living in the building, also, were two of Serebryakova’s uncles, Alexandre and Albert Benois, with their respective families, so that the old family atmosphere was at least partially restored. Serebryakova’s mother had been an invaluable support to her throughout all their troubles, and now she showed a wonderful determination and economic resourcefulness. Moreover, Serebryakova herself was awarded rations of food from the Academy of Arts; she had been nominated for membership in 1917, but the nomination failed to be ratified because of the Revolution. The Academy rations were meagre, they could not be otherwise in a country still torn by civil war, but they helped the two women to survive and to keep the four children alive.

Life, for Serebryakova, meant art. In the midst of her everyday cares it was difficult to find time to paint; and it was even more difficult to find the necessary  materials,  such  as  paints,  paper  and canvas. But she was not to be kept away from her vocation. The world of her art was once again extremely narrow, consisting of self-portraits, and portraits of her children, her other relations and her friends.

Her art, even now, after all she had gone through, would allow of no sense of tragedy; but it had, nevertheless,  changed.   Her   self-portraits  of  the early   1920s  still  show  a young  and  attractive woman, but gone are the hints of evasion, mystery and play which had once been reflected in a dynamic pose, a play of light and shadow, an outlandish costume, or the magic of the world beyond a mirror. In the self-portraits there was now a calmness full of nobility and simplicity, and the look on her face was pensive, almost vacant. The overall image was as harmonious and graceful as before, but her face seemed to be misted over and there remained only a slight trace of her former smile. Life had lost its lustre and joyous hopes, leaving only dignity and sadness. When her portraits are of herself alone, she is seen working at her easel; the portraits of the artist with her children reflect their tender bonds. The time spent in Kharkov is recorded in  a large number of paintings and sketches of her children, such as The House of Cards and On the Terrace in Kharkov (both 1919). There is a marked contrast between  these  pictures   and  Lunch-time   (1914), which was such a happy portrayal of childhood. On the family’s return to Petrograd, however, the children’s portraits are filled not only with elegance and grace, but also with festivity and light. The very themes, such as Katya in Blue, by the Christmas Tree (1922), Tata with Vegetables and Tata Dressed as Harlequin  (both  1923), express Serebryakova’s desire, as earlier, to convey the joy and delight of her outlook on the world. At this time, too, the theatre once more began to play an important part in the lives of the Serebryakov and Benois families. Tanya (Tata), Serebryakova’s  elder  daughter,  was  enrolled  in  the Choreography Institute of the Leningrad Theatre of Ballet and Opera  (formerly the Mariinsky Theatre, now the Kirov Theatre, Leningrad’s major theatre of opera and ballet.— TV.); Dmitry Bushen and Sergei Ernst, moreover, were ardent lovers of the ballet. A new theme thus appeared in Serebryakova’s works, a theme so much in harmony with the essence of her talent and her spiritual longing for beauty and joy. She was given permission to practice her art behind the scenes of the theatre, and in the many models whom she found there she embodied her love for festivity, for the magic of transformation and for beauty. The theatre was in the family’s blood. In the majority of Serebryakova’s paintings, despite their classical reserve, her love for theatricals had always shown through in the particular rhythm and ‘choreography’ of composition, in the linear refinement of her silhouettes, and in the postures, movements and plasticity of the figures. And the theatrical characters themselves, singular though the costumes of their magical world are, charm and fascinate not simply because they represent something exotic, but because they reflect a feeling of tenderness, ingenuousness and kindness. Sere-bryakova painted this theatrical cycle when life was still far from easy, and they are evidence of her spirited determination, her loyalty to her vocation and her faith in the ideals of beauty and goodness.

In 1920, while the family was still in Kharkov, Serebryakova was invited to take up a post as professor in the Academy of Arts, an invitation which enabled her and her family to move back at last to Petrograd. But she was unwilling to accept the post offered, as it was not her true vocation to teach,  and she could not bring herself to do it even for the sake of her children. The first monograph concerning Serebryakova’s art appeared in Petrograd in 1922, its author being Sergei Ernst. Despite  these  external  signs  of recognition, however, her work did not attract a great deal of attention from the public at the time. Her paintings were felt to be too academic and too distant from the major problems of post-Revolutionary Russia, still recovering from the upheavals  and hardships of the Civil War. Serebryakova’s family had no means of support other than her own earnings, and at that time there was still no one in Russia to buy her works. A small income, nevertheless, came from the sale of some of her works at an exhibition of Soviet artists held in the United States. These sales gave her the hope that her art would meet with success abroad, and in 1924 she left her four children in the care of her mother, and herself went to Paris. She expected to be gone only a short period, but hoped there to earn enough to support her large family. “Here I am alone,” she wrote to her brother, a year after her arrival in Paris. “No one realizes how terribly difficult it is to start without a farthing,

and with such obligations as I have (to send home to my children everything that I earn); time is passing, and I feel that I am doing nothing more than running on the spot... I am afraid of what this winter will bring for my family in Leningrad... I am able to send less and less money, as there is a financial crisis here with the falling franc, and there is no one willing to spend money on portrait painting. I often regret that I have come so hopelessly far from my family...” And the tone of her letters home, for all the time she was abroad, never changed; there was always the same sense of hopelessness, regret and pain. “All winter I have had no work, and I have not sold  a  single picture.”  “I  can work very  little; life is so complicated and hard that I can make no time for my beloved art; and this winter has been particularly harsh, all my energies have been spent in keeping the stove alight and in other such matters.”

At the end of the 1920s she was joined by her two younger children, her son Alexander and her daughter Katya. Her world had always been limited to her family and a very few close friends, and now, at least, she was no longer alone. But the arrival of her children made her life yet more complicated: not only was there an increase in her material worries, but she also had a new anxiety, a feeling of responsibility for the future of her son and daughter.

And yet we may consider Serebryakova’s pre-War Parisian  period to have been  fairly productive. While she did not rise to the heights of her best, earlier works, she nevertheless showed that she had lost none of her outstanding talent. A major part of her work now was painting portraits, commissioned from her, a task which she found extremely difficult: she was accustomed only to painting her family and friends, and even the simplest of relationships with others was often beyond her. Many of the portraits she painted in these years are now lost to us, and others we know of only from black and white photographs. A number of her portraits, quite frankly, are poor in quality, very often a reflection of the fact that she failed to establish a personal relationship with the model. And yet the majority of portraits are alive with laconic brevity and majesty of technique, with the intelligent use of technical devices, and with a marvellous combination of reserve and ostentation.

Among these works we may mention the portraits of Henriette Hirschmann (1925), Irina Volkon-skaya, the daughter of Sergei Rakhmaninov (1926), the art collector Alexei Trubnikov (1925), the composer Sergei Prokofyev (1926). It is worth noting that in this period Serebryakova demonstrated a refined severity in her male portraits, and this is an achievement which should not be overlooked in the work of an artist who is, albeit rightly, considered a master principally of the female image. Wherever Serebryakova went in her years abroad, she would paint  landscapes:  in  many  parts  of France itself, on the island of Corsica, in Italy and Switzerland, in England and Morocco. But these landscapes, despite all their artistic merits, are not an integral part of her overall work; since such integrity in her art no longer existed. Her landscapes in Brittany and Morocco, for instance, are excellently executed, but her travels to these places were too infrequent, her stays were too short, and there was always something not to her satisfaction: perhaps the weather was wrong, or she could not find any model. She had too little time to learn and understand these places. And besides, although she enjoyed the originality and luxury of light and forms in these new places, Serebryakova was not to be satisfied with the apparent  feast  and jubilation of her brush;  she longed for the bright, earthy beauty of her native Russia.

In all her portraits of the local people on her travels, there is a noble simplicity and a unique sense of pride; as an artist she asserted the human and aesthetic importance of each individual. And yet these were only sketches, sketches without a future. Serebryakova herself had no illusions on this score, and she pointed out: “In think that even here, in France, I might find themes to which I could dedicate myself. I could paint peasants, for example, but I cannot afford to live in the country and paint simply for my own  pleasure.”  Like many other Russian intellectuals who  emigrated  around the time of the 1917 Revolution, she found life abroad too harsh and she was spiritually unable to put down new roots on foreign soil. It was a lucky chance, her meetings the Belgian manufacturer Baron de Brouwer, which gave her the unique opportunity of travelling to Morocco. Together with her son Alexander she worked on a large number of decorative wall-paintings for Brouwer’s house on the Belgian-French border; the theme of the panels was a symbolic representation of Brouwer’s many and varied activities and interests. Serebryakova put her whole heart into the work;  she was fascinated both by the scale of the task and by the scope for expressing herself in such a broad manner. Of particular note among these works are four recumbent female figures, representing the four seasons, and four standing female figures — Justice, Flora, Art and Light; these eight figures are an anthem to the female body, not as the young and virginal image which the artist portrayed so well elsewhere, but as an image flourishing with mature and sensual beauty. The figures are secular, proud and  majestic.  Serebryakova’s  brother Yevgueny was quick to point out the merits of the work for Brouwer’s house: the compositional mastery, simplicity of execution, the completeness of form, and the broad classical understanding of the form of the human body.

But this was to be the last flight of Serebryakova’s artistic talent,  and it proved to  be  a  dramatic finale:  the  Second  World  War  soon  broke  out, Brouwer’s house was burnt down, and almost all Serebryakova’s work was destroyed. Serebryakova was not exaggerating when she wrote that she felt unwanted abroad. The few exhibitions which were arranged for her works attracted too few visitors,  these  mostly  a  narrow  circle  of friends and friends-of-friends. The favourable articles written about her by respectable art critics were lost in the mass of commentaries about the more fashionable phenomena of the art world at that time. Serebryakova saw with bitterness and indignation how realistic art was being usurped by the new trends which she termed ‘rubbish’  and ‘idiotic tomfoolery’.

After the War, the question of her return to the Soviet Union was raised more and more frequently; her fellow artists invited her back, and her two elder children begged her to come. But Serebryakova hesitated. To her, such a move seemed to be fraught with insurmountable practical difficulties. She was not sufficiently well-off, for example, to make another such gigantic upheaval in her life, and to  leave behind  her  two younger  children: they had not only followed in her footsteps and taken up art as their careers, but they had also inherited her own modesty and impracticality, and she felt it would have been too harsh to deny them her support now. And perhaps the most terrible doubt of all: how would she be received in the Soviet Union, would she be understood now, when her strength was already on the wane? From the canvases of her later self-portraits she looks out at us with the merry liveliness and the special ‘Serebryakova’ smile which lend such charm to   all  her portraits:  her  self-portraits  and the paintings of other women and children, although there may be no family relationship between them, all  seem to be  part of  a  single, happy family. In her late self-portraits she looks incredibly young again; she depicted the youth of a spirit which had suffered much but which had remained true to itself and to its convictions.   As she wrote herself: “People  today  hardly  ever  realize  that  real   art cannot be ‘in fashion’ or ‘out of fashion’, and they demand that an artist should constantly ‘bring himself up to date’. In my opinion, an artist should always remain himself!”

In a letter to her daughter Tanya, who had also taken up a career in art, Serebryakova set out another of her beliefs about real art: “Do not give up,” she wrote, “but draw and paint as well as you can, and think of nothing other than being closer to what you see. Even if you do not achieve the talent of a master, your art will still be a thing of value... and then — who knows? — one day talent may come!  And besides,  who has  any talent nowadays? If we compare the present age, so totally feeble in terms of art, with earlier centuries, then we see that everything today is worthless;  and yet we continue to paint.” And she herself continued to paint, remaining true to her vocation to the end.

In the Russian cemetery just outside Paris, a modest white cross rises above Serebryakova’s grave; and all around are the graves of many of Russia’s other ‘prodigal children’. In the Soviet Union we often talk about these people’s sufferings when they left their native soil, that they lost something in the separation; but perhaps we should also admit that Russia also lost a great deal when they left. Twenty years after the 1965 exhibition, Serebryakova came back to us again, and in 1985 she appeared  as young and beautiful  as ever.  It is a rare phenomenon, even at the best of exhibitions, to see such an all-embracing expression of joy and inspiration as there was at Serebryakova’s second exhibition in Moscow. For the younger generation of visitors to the exhibition her art was a discovery, and those who had been to the earlier exhibition were even more impressed than before. But why should there be so much interest in Serebryakova today? Did she not once seem too idyllic and distant from the realities of life? Perhaps now we are now tired of seeing so many intricate quests for originality, so many fanciful mannerisms and stylizations, so much ambitious self-assertion, all of this merely hiding the absence of feeling, thought and often, even, straightforward ability?

At an exhibition of Serebryakova’s works we enter a world of light, joy and kindness. The faces of her portraits are turned towards us, they are frank and welcoming, and it is a pleasure to see them. We are charmed by their nobility and modesty, by their dignity and intelligence; and in the women, moreover, we find the half-forgotten fascination of femininity and grace.

In Serebryakova’s art we feel not pampered delicacy, but a special feminine sensitivity in the perception of beauty. Beauty, for her, was the earth lovingly tilled by human hand;  beauty was the people of toil, both mental and physical, whom she painted according to the dictates of her heart, not in the fulfilment of a social need; beauty was children, surrounded by their mother’s tenderness; beauty was people both young and old, their eyes radiating humanity and wisdom, and it was immaterial to her whether they were Russian, Negro, Arab, Jewish or French, for Serebryakova the whole human  race was  beautiful.  When,  in the early period of her art, she was looking for her human ideal and felt a love for her models, she would often ‘reincarnate’ herself in them, and they would become her: thus arose the fascinating female image with the  artist’s own features.  Her apotheosis of beauty was a woman, captivating in her transformations and divine in her nakedness. Serebryakova painted the naked body as perhaps others had already forgotten how — sublime, pure and earthly.

In Serebryakova’s works there is no overt ‘refinement’: everything is simple, straightforward and comprehensible to everyone. The laconic compositions, the drawing, and the cogency of the colour -it is seldom in contemporary art that we see such joyful and triumphant reds, blues and greens, although these have long since been favourite colours in Russian folk culture. Behind the apparent simplicity of Serebryakova’s art we can sense the depths of world culture, but in particular the influence of Russian realistic art. We could not imagine Serebryakova’s spiritual world and the solid foundation of her talent were it not for her admiration of the portraits painted by Ilya Repin and Valentin Serov, and the subtlety of her art would have been impossible had it not been for her links with the World of Art group. There are no direct influence on her art, no ‘borrowings’ or ‘quotations’, but it was formed on fertile soil.

And behind the apparent lightness of Serebryakova’s art there was the daily, dogged and exhausting toil  in which she did not spare herself. And she was severe, too, in her criticisms of her work; many of her paintings she felt to be poor, even ugly, she often reproached herself for not having destroyed some of her works, regretting that they had already found their way into art galleries. It cannot matter to us that Serebryakova has never been considered — and perhaps never will be considered — among art’s greatest masters: but this modest and retiring woman, who called her work ‘ingenuous and unpretentious’, gave us a feast of art, and with her whole life she reminded us that underlying all art there must be talent, inspiration and toil, and that there cannot be true art if the artist works without self-sacrifice, humanity and love.

Tatyana Savitskaya

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