Zinaida Serebriakova

Biography

In August 1924 Zinaida Serebriakova left Petrograd for Paris. She thought she was going for a short time: a commission for a large decorative panel, the hope of putting on an exhibition and earning some money. At home she left her mother and four children. She never managed to return.

Before that departure there had been a whole life, and it had begun very happily.

Zinaida was born on 28 November (10 December) 1884 on the Neskuchnoye estate in Kharkov province. Her father, the sculptor Yevgeny Lanceray, died before she was two. Her mother, Yekaterina Nikolayevna, née Benois, was the sister of Alexandre Benois, and her elder brother Yevgeny Lanceray also became an artist. Her childhood was divided between Neskuchnoye and the Benois house in St Petersburg, where everybody drew, and that, I think, explains more about her than any school.

There were schools all the same. After the gymnasium, in 1900, she entered Princess Tenisheva’s art school; in 1902–1903 she travelled in Italy, then spent two years studying with the portraitist Osip Braz, and in 1905–1906 attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. In 1905 she married her cousin, the student Boris Serebriakov; the Church did not encourage marriages between close relatives. Four children were born: Yevgeny, Alexander, Tatiana and Yekaterina. All of them would appear on her canvases again and again.

The self-portrait “At the Dressing Table” (1909) is probably known to everyone: a young woman in a white chemise combs her hair before a mirror and smiles at her reflection. The picture was shown in 1910, the Tretyakov Gallery soon bought it, and people began talking about Serebriakova.

In 1911 she joined the World of Art, but even there she kept a little apart: she liked simple subjects and calm, large forms. The peasant women of Neskuchnoye in “Harvest” (1915) and “Bleaching Linen” (1917) stand over the field like statues, with the horizon set very low. They call to mind both Venetsianov and Italian frescoes. She is sometimes called an Impressionist. I would argue with that: there is little vibration of light in her work, and the outline and composition are almost classical.

In 1914 Alexandre Benois received a commission to decorate the restaurant of the Kazansky railway station in Moscow and invited Yevgeny Lanceray, Boris Kustodiev, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and his niece to work on it. The murals were to develop the overall theme of the station: Russia joining Europe and Asia. Serebriakova made sketches for a series of panels on the peoples of the East, in which India, Japan, Turkey and Siam appear as nude odalisques.

Then everything collapsed. In 1919 Boris Serebriakov died of typhus, and the estate was looted. Zinaida, with her mother and the children, lived in Kharkov with almost no money, making drawings of exhibits for the archaeological museum. Oil paints were out of reach, and she had to switch to charcoal and pencil. From that time come “On the Terrace in Kharkov” and “House of Cards”: four children in black building a house of cards that is about to fall. She refused to take up the Futurist idiom then in fashion or to draw commissars.

In 1920 the family moved to Petrograd, into the Benois family’s former flat. Tatiana was studying ballet, and her mother began drawing backstage at the Mariinsky Theatre. Hence the series of ballet dressing rooms: powder, tutus, tired girls after rehearsal, the warm light of the lamps. In 1923 “Sleeping Girl on a Red Blanket” was a success with the public.

And then came that departure of 1924. Her son Alexander and her daughter Yekaterina were later brought out to join her in France; Yevgeny and Tatiana stayed in the USSR. She lived on a Nansen passport and received French citizenship only in 1947. She painted portraits to commission, still lifes, landscapes, a cycle about the fishermen of Brittany. In 1928–1929 and 1932 she travelled to Morocco and brought back the Atlas Mountains, Arab women, people in bright turbans. These Moroccan sheets, quick and very exact, seem to me the best of what she did in emigration.

Only under Khrushchev did the Soviet authorities allow contact with her. In 1960, after thirty-six years apart, her daughter Tatiana, by then a stage designer at the Moscow Art Theatre, came to Paris. In 1965–1966 large Serebriakova exhibitions were held in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Novosibirsk, and albums of her work began to come out in enormous print runs. She herself died in Paris on 19 September 1967 and is buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.