Pyotr Konchalovsky

Biography

In 1910 father-in-law and son-in-law, Vasily Surikov and Pyotr Konchalovsky, travelled together to France to paint studies, and from there to Spain. Konchalovsky was thirty-four, and, judging by his pictures, it was there that he stopped searching for himself. He called his Spanish impressions “a poem of black and white”. In “Bullfight”, “Matador”, “Spanish Dance” and “Room in Spain” the forms are simplified, the contours hard, and the dark masses are cut through by flashes of scarlet.

That same year in Moscow, together with Aleksandr Kuprin, Ilya Mashkov and Vasily Rozhdestvensky, he founded the Knave of Diamonds society and became the first chairman of its board. From the end of 1910 until his death he worked in a studio at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, in the same entrance where Mikhail Bulgakov later lived.

He was born on 9 (21) February 1876 in Slavyansk, Kharkov province. His father, also Pyotr Petrovich, was a man of letters, a translator and a publisher. In 1889 the family moved to Moscow, and Serov, Korovin, Vrubel and Surikov came to the house. As a gymnasium pupil Konchalovsky attended evening classes at the Stroganov School, and in 1895, at the French Art and Industrial Exhibition in Moscow, he saw the Impressionists for the first time. In 1896, on Korovin’s advice, he went to Paris, to the Académie Julian, where one of his drawings won an award and was hung on the studio wall as a model. Back in Russia in 1898, he spent the autumn painting studies in Venetsianov’s surviving studio in Tver province, and then studied for almost ten years at the Higher Art School of the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. His first study in the Impressionist manner, “Little Garden near Rome. Peaches in Blossom”, was painted in Italy in 1904.

A style of his own came hard. Konchalovsky was dissatisfied with himself and often destroyed canvases he had only just finished. He himself dated the start of his independent work to the summer of 1907, spent with his family at the Bugry farmstead of the doctor and collector I. I. Troyanovsky. He was married to Olga Vasilyevna, Surikov’s daughter; their daughter Natalya was born in 1903 and their son Mikhail in 1906. In the autumn of 1907 the Konchalovskys left for Berlin, and from December to January 1909 they lived in France. That was when the main discovery came: Cézanne and Van Gogh. He went to Arles for a week for the express purpose of understanding Van Gogh more deeply, and painted a series of southern landscapes there and “Woman of Arles”.

The “Family Portrait” of 1911 was made straight after Spain: the palette is reduced to a contrast of black and white, and the figures of his wife and children are turned into flat, almost poster-like silhouettes. Konchalovsky was then absorbed in lubok prints and shop signs, and brought them into his landscapes. In 1912 the family lived in Italy; in Siena he studied the frescoes of the old masters and painted a second, “Sienese” family portrait. That same year he designed Rubinstein’s opera “The Merchant Kalashnikov” at Zimin’s theatre.

From 1914 to 1917 he served in the artillery, rising to the rank of ensign. After the revolution his manner grew calmer and closer to nature. “The Violinist” (1918) was, in the artist’s own words, his first portrait in motion. In 1918–1921 he taught at the Free Art Studios, which later became Vkhutemas, and in 1926–1929 he was a professor at Vkhutein. His first solo exhibition was held at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1922. In the summers of 1922 and 1923, at Krylatskoye outside Moscow, came his first genre pictures, “Harvest” and “Reapers”, and in 1925–1928 he spent long periods near Novgorod, painting the Detinets, spring floods, haystacks and “Returning from the Fair” (1926). There, too, he painted Abbot Vissarion twice: at a church service and at home, mending shoes. It seems to me that this pair of portraits holds the whole of the late Konchalovsky, with his trust in simple things. In 1926–1927 he finished a large family portrait in the studio, entitled “Misha, Go and Get Some Beer!”.

In 1932 he bought the Bugry estate from A. I. Troyanovskaya, the very place where he had made his start in 1907. Every summer he painted lilac there, more than forty canvases in all; “Lilac in a Basket” (1933) was later reproduced in Soviet school textbooks. He was a passionate hunter and kept pointers and borzois.

His best-known late portraits are very different from one another. Vsevolod Meyerhold (1938) is shown in his flat against a brightly patterned carpet, motionless and as if constrained; the portrait was painted when the director’s theatre had been closed. “A. N. Tolstoy Visiting the Artist” (1940–1941) was painted at Bugry, at a festive table. Konchalovsky refused to paint Stalin, explaining that as a realist he could not work from a photograph. In 1941–1943 he worked on the picture “Lermontov in the Caucasus”, and in 1945 he designed “Carmen” at the Bolshoi Theatre. He received the Stalin Prize, first class, in 1943 and the title of People’s Artist of the RSFSR in 1946, and from 1947 he was a full member of the USSR Academy of Arts. His last exhibition in his lifetime, his fifteenth solo show, opened in 1951.

Konchalovsky died in Moscow on 2 February 1956 and is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery.