Olga Bogaevskaya

Biography

Olga Bogaevskaya’s diploma work is called “Meeting of a Friend”. It was painted in 1940 in Alexander Osmerkin’s studio and is kept in the museum of the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg.

Bogaevskaya was born in Petrograd into the family of Boris Lvovich Bogaevsky, an archaeologist and art historian. Sources give her date of birth differently: most often 25 October 1915, but 1914 and 27 October (9 November, Old Style) also occur. Here 1915 is adopted. She began to study art early. In 1931–1932 she attended the Art and Industry College, where Dmitry Zagoskin taught her. In 1934 she entered the painting department of the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (according to other sources, in 1933). Her teachers are named as Sergei Priselkov, Mikhail Fyodorov, Mikhail Bernshtein, Genrikh Pavlovsky and Osmerkin, under whom she took her diploma. In 1940 she married a fellow student, the artist Gleb Savinov. In 1940–1941 she taught painting at the Secondary Art School attached to her institute.

From the late 1940s Bogaevskaya took part regularly in exhibitions of Leningrad artists. Her main subjects were the child’s portrait and the still life, with flowers, fruit and crockery standing in a room at one time and carried out into the garden or the dacha at another. A good colourist, she became known above all for her work of the 1950s and 1960s, and in those decades she was named among the leading Leningrad painters.

The titles of her pictures show how narrow and consistent her range of subjects was. Early ones: “Breakfast” and “Cadets” (both 1947), “Young Naturalists” (1948), “Peaceful Sleep” (1951), “To School” (1953). From the middle of the 1950s and the 1960s: “Still Life with Strawberries” and “Girls” (1956), “Girl with Dolls” and “A Hot Day” (1957), “Apples”, “Guests” and “Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter” (1960), “Portrait of the Artist’s Son” and “Still Life with Oranges” (1962), “Still Life with a Mandolin” (1965). Later came “Wedding” (1967), “Still Life with Skewers” (1969), “Roses” and “At the Dacha” (1972), “Fedya” (1973), “By the Sea” (1975), “Katya with a Doll” (1976), “Children’s Holiday” (1980), “Jars in the Sun” (1981), “Spring” and “Under the Awning” (both 1990). Among the earlier works is also “The Ulyanov Brothers” (1950), the only title on the list with a historical subject.

In 1989–1992 her works were shown in France at exhibitions and auctions of Russian painting, “L’École de Leningrad”. She was a member of the Union of Artists in Leningrad; since 1992 that organisation has been called the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists. The exact year she joined is given differently, and I would not repeat that date without checking the archives.

Bogaevskaya died on 30 November 2000 in Saint Petersburg. Her pictures are held in the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and in museums and private collections in Russia, France, Britain, Japan, China, Finland and other countries.