Alexander Tyshler

Biography

In 1935 Tyshler made two productions that came to be seen as a turning point in his theatre work: “King Lear” for the Moscow State Jewish Theatre (GOSET) and “Richard III” for the Bolshoi Drama Theatre in Leningrad. Until then his stage had been fanciful, at times arbitrary, with traces of Expressionism. After that Shakespeare took the central place in it.

He had begun far from Moscow.

He was born on 26 July 1898 (14 July, Old Style) in Melitopol, in Taurida Governorate, into a family of hereditary Jewish craftsmen; the surname Tyshler means “joiner” in Yiddish. In 1912 he came to Kyiv and studied at the art school there until 1917, and in 1917–1918 he attended the studio of Aleksandra Ekster, where other young artists of the city also gathered: Boris Aronson, Isaac Rabinovich, Pavel Tchelitchew and Nisson Shifrin. In 1919 he joined the Red Army as a volunteer. Attached to the command of the Southern Front, he made posters for the ROSTA windows, the Soviet news agency’s street displays, and illustrated the first primers in Yiddish, Kalmyk, Mordvin and Tatar. After demobilisation in 1921 he entered Vkhutemas, the state art and technical school in Moscow, and joined the studio of Favorsky. Until 1924 he was drawn to non-objective painting, and in 1925 he joined the Society of Easel Painters. Graphic sheets such as “The Slaughterhouse” (1925) and book work date from those years: illustrations for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “A Cloud in Trousers” (1929) and for Ilya Selvinsky’s “Ulyalayevshchina” (1933–1934).

In 1927 he made his debut as a theatre designer, staging several productions for the Belarusian State Jewish Theatre in Minsk. Among them was “Jim Coopercop” by Samuil Godiner, which premiered on 15 February 1930. In the 1930s Tyshler worked in Moscow for many theatres in the capital and in Leningrad, and from 1935 he designed productions for GOSET. In 1940 he designed Sergei Prokofiev’s opera “Semyon Kotko”. At the same time he painted. The art historian Abram Efros, speaking of the “Lyrical Cycle” of 1928, saw in these works compositions of wicker baskets, female bodies and animal heads, closed to rational interpretation. To my mind, this description is more accurate than many later ones. One of his favourite images, a woman with a structure on her head (candles, a house, a ship, a city), appears in “Portrait of a Woman” of 1934, now in the Russian Museum.

During the war Tyshler was evacuated with the theatre to Tashkent. In 1941–1943 he designed productions there, among them “Hamza” by Kamil Yashen and Abbas Umari, directed by Emmanuil Loiter, and worked for the Hamza Uzbek Drama Theatre, where “Muqanna” by Hamid Olimjon was staged (directed by Mikhail Uigur and Solomon Mikhoels). For “Ulugh Beg” he helped the designer Usto Mumin with the lighting. In Tashkent Anna Akhmatova sat for him several times. For his work in Uzbek theatres he was named Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR in 1943, and in the same year his first solo exhibition was held in Tashkent.

After the war his earlier traits showed themselves in different ways in Soviet and foreign drama: “The Optimistic Tragedy” by Vsevolod Vishnevsky at the Moscow Drama and Comedy Theatre (1956), Mayakovsky’s “Mystery-Bouffe” at the Satire Theatre (1957), Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan” at the Lenkom (1958), and Rodion Shchedrin’s opera “Not Love Alone” at the Bolshoi Theatre (1962). He received the Stalin Prize, second class, in 1946 for his designs for “Freylekhs” by Zinovy Shneer. The artist never joined the dominant Socialist Realism, and until the 1960s his paintings were almost never exhibited. His sketches for Shakespeare, however, were given an exhibition at the Central House of Writers in 1964, for the playwright’s four-hundredth anniversary, and in 1966 a solo exhibition was held at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.

In the 1950s he became fascinated by fairy-tale figures made from branches he found in the forest. In his last years he returned to his early abstract works and repeated them.

Tyshler died in Moscow on 23 June 1980 and was buried at Kuntsevo Cemetery. In 1981 an exhibition, “Alexander Tyshler. 1898–1980”, opened in Leningrad, and in 1988 a retrospective was held in Moscow on Kuznetsky Most.