Alena Kish

Biography

In 1949 Alena Kish was found drowned in a river. An accident cannot be ruled out, but she is most often written about as a suicide, and most of those who have written about her since share that view.

Her year of birth is uncertain: 1889 or 1896. She was born in the Slutsk district (uyezd) of Minsk Governorate; the village of Ramanau near Slutsk is named as her birthplace, but this appears in a single source, and I would check it. Very little is known about her life in general. Almost no documents survive, and the information was gathered many years later, from stories and from the carpets themselves. It is reported that after losing her parents she moved to her sister’s in the settlement of Hrozau. She had no family of her own, and in her last years she lived with her younger sister.

She was an itinerant craftswoman. She went from village to village, and householders commissioned painted carpets from her, that is, canvases hung on the wall like a shop-bought carpet. Payment varied: money, food, a bed for the night, at times a piece of bread. While working she often sang folk songs, according to the stories that survive. Her main working years fell in the 1930s and 1940s, when villagers were thinking above all about survival. After the war, when villages were being rebuilt and houses needed decoration, demand for her carpets grew, and the late 1940s are regarded as the most productive time of her life. Then demand fell. Factory-made carpets reached the district, ready-made goods displaced hand painting, and Kish’s earnings shrank. Some researchers see in this the cause of her death.

Her subjects are fairy-tale and exotic: “Letter to the Beloved”, “Maiden on the Waters”, “Paradise”, “In the Garden of Paradise”, each made in many versions. The compositions are carefully worked out, the colours local and pure, the details decorative, with many plant motifs, and every carpet is framed by a border. All this is close to local traditional painting. There is an opinion that the subjects are tied to her fate, to an idea of the “woman’s lot” and a dream of paradise. This is hard to prove: she left no word of her own about the meaning of her work.

Recognition came in the late 1970s. Collectors and artists gathered the surviving carpets and showed them to the public, and the exhibition was a great success. The collecting of information about the artist and her work began on the initiative of the painter Uladzimir Basalyha, who had seen Kish’s carpets as a child. Many canvases had been lost by then: the newspaper Nasha Niva wrote that they had to be rescued from cowsheds, where they hung above the cows.

In 1984 Alena Kish was included in the “World Encyclopedia of Naive Art” by Oto Bihalji-Merin, published in Yugoslavia: she was one of few women among 800 names from fifty countries. In 1996, for the centenary of her birth (on the 1896 reckoning), Belpochta, the Belarusian postal service, issued an envelope with a stamp. In 1999 her works were shown in Moscow at the 1st International Festival “Intermuseum”. In 2010 Halina Adamovich made the documentary “Painted Paradise” at the Belarusfilm studio. In December 2013, in Minsk, at the Mikhail Savitsky Art Gallery, the exhibition “For Good Luck” was held, drawn from the collection of the Zaslawye museum; it was prepared by the art historian Tatsiana Bembel together with the patron Kanstantsin Tsereteli. The main collection of carpets is kept in Zaslawye, in the Museum of Belarusian Malyavanka.