Nathan Altman

Biography

For the first anniversary of the revolution, in 1918, Nathan Altman decorated Uritsky Square in Petrograd, formerly and later again Palace Square. The temporary canvas decoration was afterwards cut up and given to soldiers as foot wrappings. Exactly how much fabric went that way, the sources do not say.

Altman was born on 22 December 1889 (3 January 1890) in Vinnytsia, Podolia Province, into a poor Jewish family. His father was a petty trader, his mother worked as a linen keeper in a hospital. He lost his father at the age of four and was brought up by his grandmother; as a child he attended a cheder. In 1902–1907 he studied painting and sculpture at the Odessa Art School and in 1906 exhibited for the first time. In 1910–1911 he studied in Paris, at a private studio and at Marie Vassilieff’s Free Russian Academy, and came under the influence of Cubism there; in 1911 he showed work at the Paris Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The same year is the date of “Jewish Funeral”, a painting that was well received. From 1912 he lived in St Petersburg, on Vasilyevsky Island, exhibited with the World of Art and the Union of Youth, at “The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10” (1915–1916) and with the Jack of Diamonds (1916), and took part in founding the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Arts.

His best-known painting, the portrait of Anna Akhmatova, was painted in 1914 and is in the Russian Museum. To my mind, its Cubist faceting does not get in the way of the likeness. The same museum holds “Lady with a Dog. Portrait of Esther Schwartzman” (1911), “Jug and Tomatoes” (1912), the sculpted self-portrait “Portrait of a Young Jew” (1916) in plaster, copper and wood, and the non-objective “material” still lifes of 1918–1920.

After the revolution he joined the board for artistic affairs of the Department of Fine Arts of the People’s Commissariat for Education, from 1920 was a member of the Institute of Artistic Culture, and in 1921–1922, according to one account, directed the Museum of Painterly Culture in Petrograd. He modelled Lenin from life (bronze, 1920) and drew him in pencil, and the drawings came out as a separate album; after his portrait of Lenin, Mikhail Adamovich painted the plate “He Who Does Not Work Shall Not Eat” at the State Porcelain Factory. In 1921 Altman designed Mayakovsky’s “Mystery-Bouffe”, performed at the First State Circus in Moscow in German for the delegates to the Third Congress of the Comintern. The Jewish theatres became the main thing for him. For Habima he designed S. An-sky’s “The Dybbuk”, directed by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and at the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, where he succeeded Marc Chagall, he designed “Uriel Acosta” (premiere 9 April 1922) and “The Doctor” after Sholem Aleichem. In 1923 “The Jewish Graphic Art of Nathan Altman”, with a text by Max Osborn, was published in Berlin. His joint work with Alexei Granovsky, Solomon Mikhoels and the composer Lev Pulver grew into the film “Jewish Luck”, after Sholem Aleichem, with intertitles by Isaac Babel. In 1925, at Altman’s suggestion, the location scenes were shot in Vinnytsia, in the old district of Ierusalimka.

That same year, 1925, together with Alexandra Exter, Vadim Meller and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, he took part in the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, and in 1926 his first solo exhibition was held in Leningrad.

In the spring of 1928 Altman went on the European tour of GOSET and stayed on in Paris until 1935. There he designed productions for the “Theatre of International Action” founded by Henri Barbusse (1932), exhibited with the society “Young Europe” and with the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, and illustrated French books: Daudet’s “Letters from My Windmill” (1932) and Marcel Aymé’s tales for Gallimard (1934–1941).

Back in Leningrad he almost gave up easel painting. He made designs for postage stamps, illustrated Gogol’s “Petersburg Tales” (1937) and worked a great deal for the theatre: Čapek’s “The Mother” at the Pushkin Drama Theatre (1939), “King Lear” at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre (1941), the ballet “Gayane” at the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre (1942). He spent the war in evacuation, in Molotov (Perm) and Novosibirsk, in 1941–1944. Later came “Othello” (1944) and “Hamlet” (1954) at the Pushkin Drama Theatre, “Prince Igor” (1954), and Lope de Vega’s “Night in Toledo” at the Comedy Theatre (1960). In 1968 he was made Honoured Artist of the RSFSR, and at the same time a retrospective of his work was being prepared in Leningrad.

Nathan Altman died on 12 December 1970 in Leningrad and was buried in the cemetery at Komarovo.