Serge Ivanoff

Biography

In the winter of 1922 Serge Ivanoff left Russia on foot. The road led through Finland, and on the way he stopped at Kuokkala, at the dacha of Ilya Repin, who received him in person. Then came England and, finally, Paris, where his wife and two children had already been living for two years.

He was born in Moscow on 25 December 1893 (13 December, Old Style) into a merchant family. The date of birth is given differently in the sources: one names 12 December, the others 25 December, and I accept the latter. His father, by one version, was an illegitimate son of the poet Afanasy Fet, but this is hard to verify. Ivanoff began to draw early: at twelve he was already attending classes at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Later, when the family moved to St Petersburg, he studied in the natural sciences faculty of the university and attended lectures on anatomy; this knowledge later proved useful in his drawing. In his youth he travelled to Switzerland and Norway. The First World War found him in the artillery.

After demobilisation in 1917 he entered the Academy of Arts. He studied under Vladimir Kozlinsky, felt the influence of Osip Braz, moved in 1920 to the class of Dmitry Kardovsky, and in 1922 finished the course with the title of painter. In the summer of that year he travelled through the villages of the Volga region and made a series of drawings of famine and devastation. In Paris it came out as a book, “La famine en Russie bolchévique” (1924), with twenty-eight drawings in the text and three separate plates.

In France he first had to earn a living with advertising, stage sets and costume designs. He painted portraits and nudes and illustrated books. In 1925, for Barbey d’Aurevilly’s “Les Diaboliques”, he made nineteen etchings in the manner of Symbolist erotic graphics. Later he illustrated Baudelaire’s “Petits poèmes en prose” (1933), Ivan Bunin’s story “The Elagin Affair” for L’Illustration (1934) and Jules Verne’s “Michel Strogoff” (1962). From 1930 he worked with L’Illustration, and this took him around Europe and South America: he made drawn reportages, including series on the Hôtel Drouot and the cathedrals of France. The Musée Carnavalet bought some of these sheets in 1988. He drew for Plaisir de France and for the fashion houses of Molyneux, Schiaparelli and Paquin. He exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries, the Salon d’Automne and the Salon of the Société nationale des beaux-arts.

In 1937 the magazine commissioned him to make a reportage on the papal apartments in the Vatican. In Rome he met the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov and painted his portrait; conversations with him, it is thought, helped the artist find his own path. It was then that portraits of church figures began, among them Pius XI at Castel Gandolfo.

His portrait gallery is large: Alexandre Benois, Zinaida Serebriakova (who painted him in return), Natalia Goncharova, Olga Boznańska, Boris Zaytsev, Paul Valéry, the composer Arthur Honegger, the actress Edwige Feuillère, dancers of the Paris Opera, Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich. At the Opera he made many sketches from life, and some of them are kept in the library-museum of the theatre.

From 1942 Ivanoff took part in the exhibitions of the Salon des Indépendants. Solo shows were held in Paris (1942, 1945), at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chartres (1943), and in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires (1947). In 1946 the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen invited him to design the ballet “The Golden Calf”.

In 1950 he went to the United States and soon received the title of honorary citizen. For more than ten years he travelled through North and South America and carried out portrait commissions, including painting Eleanor Roosevelt on the spot at a United Nations conference at Lake Success.

By the end of the 1960s he had returned to Paris for good, to a studio at 80 Rue Taitbout, and was a member of the Salon des Indépendants. For a large painting, “Menaces”, he was given a gold medal; the award was presented by the Minister of Culture, André Malraux. The sources give different years: 1965 or 1966. The painting is now in the collection of the Russian Embassy in France.

Ivanoff died on 8 February 1983 in the 9th arrondissement of Paris and was buried in the Batignolles cemetery. His last commissioned portrait, of the actress Myriam Colombi, was painted in 1982.