Alessio Issupoff

Biography

In 1926 Alessio Issupoff left for Italy with his family. Officially he was sent by the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, which needed a large painting, “The Parade of the First Trade Union Sports Festival”. The assignment stretched to more than thirty years, and the picture, as far as the sources allow one to judge, remained a pretext rather than a task.

He was born on 10 March 1889 (Old Style) in Vyatka, now Kirov, into the family of an iconostasis maker, wood carver and gilder. He gained his first skills in an icon-painting workshop, and from 1903 he took part in exhibitions held in his native town. In 1908 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and graduated in 1912. Among his teachers are named Abram Arkhipov, Apollinary Vasnetsov, Konstantin Korovin, Valentin Serov and Sergey Malyutin. Vasnetsov, it seems, went on helping him after his studies and introduced him to Moscow artistic circles. While still a student, Issupoff exhibited with the Union of Russian Artists and with the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), the association of realist painters, and from 1910 to 1915 his work was shown at the Lemercier gallery, at the spring exhibitions in the halls of the Academy of Arts and at charity exhibitions for the families of those wounded or killed in the First World War.

In 1913 he married Tamara Nikolaevna Ivanova; together they travelled along the Volga and to the Crimea, and after he left the school he went to the Urals.

In 1915 he was conscripted. He served in Tashkent, in the Simbirsk reserve rifle regiment. At the end of 1917, at the request of the Union of Russian Artists, he was discharged on grounds of health; he made his way to Moscow and visited Vyatka. In May 1918 he returned to Tashkent and, after the establishment of Soviet power there, taught at the Turkestan Regional People’s Art School, illustrated books and did decorative work. In 1920 Narkompros, the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Education, sent him to Samarkand. There he headed the art section of the commission for the restoration and protection of monuments, sketched antiquities, studied the archaeology and history of Central Asia and made illustrations for an album about Ulugh Beg. His eastern landscapes and genre scenes, painted outdoors in an Impressionist manner, date from these years: “Uzbeks in a Teahouse”, “Samarkand”, “Market Row. Bish-Agach”, “Eastern Musician”. Later, in Italy, he painted Russian landscapes from memory, and it seems to me that the Turkestan years gave him the light and colour that he afterwards carried over to any subject.

In 1921 Issupoff returned to Moscow and joined the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. He exhibited with the Wanderers, the Union of Russian Artists and the Society of Moscow School Artists. On commission he painted portraits of Soviet state figures and pictures on revolutionary themes: “Exile in Minusinsk”, “Battle at the Aral Sea”, “The Destruction of Nazarov’s Landing Party by the Reds”. In 1926 his “Lenin’s Farewell in the Hall of Columns” was shown at the Palace of Labour. He helped to found a museum in Vyatka and gave it his “Northern Landscape”. In 1924–1925 his work was also shown in America, at a travelling exhibition of Russian artists.

He himself named illness as the reason for leaving for Italy. He later wrote that he and his wife did not belong to the emigration, that their passports were Soviet, and that “it was not the civil war but illness that drove me to Italy”. In 1945 the couple restored their Soviet citizenship.

In Rome Issupoff set to work at once: still lifes, portraits, landscapes, animals, and Italian peasant women who, according to reviews, acquired Slavic features. By some accounts his first solo exhibition took place in Rome as early as 1926. Critics and Italian artists noticed him, among them Giorgio Nicodemi and Michele Biancale. Biancale wrote of a painter “who knows all the joy and power of colour”. Issupoff’s work was shown in Rome, Milan, The Hague, Livorno, Genoa, Florence, Naples, Bergamo, Trieste and Turin, and also in France, the Netherlands and Belgium, and in 1930, by some accounts, it was included in the 17th Venice Biennale. Critics noted his “wide sweep of the brush” and “gentle colours”. He painted “Girl with a Rose”, “Lady with a Glass”, “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife at the Spinning Wheel”, “Woman with a Tray”, “Before the Mirror” and “Self-Portrait with the Dog Vatrushka”. Italian museums bought his paintings, and in Moscow in 1929 the State Publishing House issued a series of 25 postcards, “Turkestan”, after his works. Soviet artists who visited Rome, among them Sergey Konenkov, Alexander Gerasimov and Pavel Korin, came to his studio.

At the end of 1945 a large solo exhibition opened at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and in 1947 the last one in his lifetime was held in Milan. In 1949 Nicodemi published an illustrated monograph on him.

According to his widow, in his last years Issupoff hardly painted and did not attend the openings of his own exhibitions. He died in Rome on 17 July 1957 and was buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Testaccio.

Tamara Nikolaevna, carrying out her husband’s wishes, brought part of his legacy to Russia: about 300 works, some 80 paintings and more than 200 drawings, went to the Vyatka Art Museum, and she gave nineteen to the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1971 the first solo exhibition of his work in the USSR opened in Kirov, and in 2009 the Tretyakov Gallery showed the exhibition “Alexey Isupov. Russia — Italy”.