As the heiress of the French aristocrats, she defended besieged Leningrad and painted sketches on the virgin lands: Irina Vitman

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The fate of the Soviet artist Irina Vitman is full of contrasts. Childhood spent in bohemian Paris - and the defense of besieged Leningrad. Dreams of conquering the Arctic, traveling the world - and twenty years of a happy life in a deep province. And also - constant artistic experiments behind the screen of socialist realism. Irina Vitman did not rebel, did not go underground and did not create a new Soviet avant-garde, just as she was not a "socialist realist" artist. She just lived by painting …

Irina Vitman was born in Moscow in 1916. Her father was from Latvia, her mother came from a family of French nobles who fled to Russia after the French Revolution. At the age of nine, Irina came with her mother to Paris, where she was immersed in the artistic life of France. Exhibitions, meetings, variegated colors, experimental painting, new and new names, trends, styles … Acquaintance with Annenkov, a significant meeting with Zinaida Serebryakova. It is not known how Wittmann's life would have turned out if it had not been for these three Parisian years. But in 1928, Irina returned to Russia with a clear conviction: she will be an artist! Or a polar explorer. Traveling attracted Irina almost as much as painting. And although later Vitman wrote: "A person can be born a scientist or an artist - this is his destiny," for some time she seriously thought about a profession that allows her to explore the world, and even studied for two years at the Oceanographic College.

At a polygraphic college in Leningrad, Vitman met her future husband, Alexei Sokolov, together, on the recommendation of Isaac Brodsky (the very artist who became famous for his portraits of Lenin), they continued their studies at the All-Russian Academy of Arts … Summer days are especially loved by painters for the opportunity to paint outdoors. In June 1941, Vitman and Sokolov were in the open air in Alushta. The war found them with brushes in their hands, near the primed canvases, at that moment when, it seemed, life was especially beautiful … Alexey went to the front as a volunteer. Irina remained in Leningrad. But she could not, did not know how to simply and patiently wait, survive and hope for the best. During the siege, the artist Irina Vitman, an intelligent girl fascinated by Vlaminck and Picasso, served in the fire brigade, together with other students of the academy, saving the houses of her beloved city from the consequences of the bombings. For her self-affirmed work, Vitman received the title "Hero of the Fire Service" and the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad".

In 1942, Irina was evacuated to Samarkand. At that time, the cities of Central Asia became a haven for many people of the arts; art universities and theaters from Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov were evacuated there. The years of the Central Asian evacuation are described in different ways - someone recalls hunger and poverty (the artist Robert Falk, for example, was forced to eat literally pasture - which is not so much in Central Asia), the inability to get paints and canvases, someone talks about stormy creative life of Samarkand and Tashkent. Irina Vitman, after the horror of besieged Leningrad, Samarkand seemed like a true earthly paradise. With delight, Irina painted the bright sky and colorful clothes of local residents, their calm, serene faces, villages and camels … Southern nature allowed Vitman's artistic talent to open up wider and brighter, to gain the courage to write not as it should be (and these were the years of socialist realism), but the way the heart sees.

Irina and Aleksey did not join the gloomy list of artists whose lives were taken by the war. They were destined for many more years of love and painting. All the same, together they were transferred to the Moscow State Art Institute, where Vitman wrote her first significant works - “Metro. Escalator”and“Pushkin-Lyceum”. Immediately after graduation, she was admitted to the Union of Artists.

In the 50s, Irina Vitman, like a considerable part of Soviet youth, set out to “conquer virgin lands” - but as an artist. Her passion for exploring uncharted lands, her childhood dream of traveling to distant lands, was embodied here. There was a completely new world in the virgin lands. Construction sites in the middle of the steppe, weddings, songs - and young cheerful mothers breastfeeding babies right under the tents and in tents.

The image of a nursing mother "in the pose of the eternal Madonna" - an island of tranquility in the seething ocean of "construction of the century" - increasingly begins to appear in Vitman's painting. She herself was soon to become a mother - and the founder of an artistic dynasty. Her daughter Marina will become a famous theater artist, and her granddaughter, Ekaterina Leventhal, will become a fresco artist.

Since the early 60s, Whitman has finally realized his long-held dream of traveling. Crimea, Siberia, Central Asia, Estonia, Lithuania, Vietnam, Romania, Bulgaria, France, Italy … Not content with the methods of "socialist realism", Vitman experiments a lot, her works are becoming brighter, more decorative and abstract, the image, color and composition are becoming more important "Ideological" content. And on the virgin lands, she was not interested in the heroism of the Soviet man, but in those wide artistic opportunities that the environment provided - color, dynamics, the heightened individuality of the image.

And, finally, after many fascinating travels, she and her husband will settle on the Oka, near Murom - where nature inspired to pick up brushes almost every second.

Irina Vitman did not make a revolution in painting, she never rebelled and did not belong to the underground avant-garde movements of Soviet painting. But Robert Falk wrote about her Russian still lifes and Samarkand Madonnas: "her work is covered with French charm." Whitman surprisingly fit into the artistic life of her time - always, whatever the official course and her own searches. And at the same time, she went her own way.

Vitman lived a little less than a century - she died in 2012, and until the last days the artist actively participated in exhibitions. Her works are kept in the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum and in many private collections in Russia and abroad.