Lot 120 : Il'ia Efimovich Repin (1844-1930)

Ilya Repin - 1844-1930

Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2005
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Artist or Maker:

Il'ia Efimovich Repin (1844-1930)

Title:

Portrait of Nikolai Evreinov (1879-1953)

Description:

Portrait of Nikolai Evreinov (1879-1953)
signed in Cyrillic and dated 'Il Repin 1915' (lower right)
oil on canvas
25 1/2 x 20 1/2 in. (65 x 51.6 cm.)

Exhibited:

Moscow, 44th Exhibition of the Wanderers, 1915 - 10 January 1916, no. 153.
Petrograd, 44th Exhibition of the Wanderers, 19 February - 3 April 1916, no. 153.

Published:

S. Ernst, Il'ia Efimovich Repin, Leningrad, 1927, p. 72.

Notes:

Nikolai Nikolaevich Evreinov (1879-1953) was a prominent Russian playwright, theatre director, writer and composer. He was one of the founders of Starinnyi Theatre and Komissarzhevskii Theatre in St. Petersburg. Throughout 1910-1917 he was a director of The Distorting Mirror Theatre (Krivoe zerkalo teatr), where he directed more than one hundred plays including his own. Evreinov worked with Russian Futurists and was involved in designing the Triangle exhibition in 1910, which also included his stage designs. His theatre career continued to flourish when he emigrated to Paris in 1925 and many of his plays were translated and performed throughout Europe and America.
Evreinov also wrote a series of widely acclaimed theoretical works on theatre including Theatre as it is (Teatr kak takovoi), Theatre for oneself (Teatr dlia sebia), and Origins of Drama (Proiskhozhdenie dramy).

Repin painted this portrait in Kuokkala, a small Karelian resort town in Finland, where he settled permanently after the Revolution of 1917. Repin's dacha in Kuokkala, known among his friends as Penaty, was the place where the famous Repin Wednesday gatherings (Repinskie Sredy) took place. They attracted many leading Russian cultural and social figures, including Kornei Chukovskii, Fedor Chaliapin, Maxim Gorkii, the Academician Pavlov and Vladimir Stasov as well as a younger generation of Russian avant-garde art figures, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii, Yuri Annenkov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Ivan Puni and David Burliuk.
Evreinov was one of the regular guests in Penaty, especially during 1914-1916 when he lived in Kuokkala. His extravagant personality and behavior made him a recognised star of any social gathering. 'There was no ending to his improvisations, striking in their variety and originality, paradoxes and tricks - indeed, what a charmer and magician of salon parties. No wonder he was an apostle of Theatre for oneself' wrote David Burliuk in his memoirs (D. Burliuk, 'Extracts from Memoirs' in I. Grabar and I. Zilbershtein, ed., Repin, vol. II, Moscow, 1949, p. 297). 'He always behaved as if he was on stage. Whenever he appeared in my house I could quietly step aside and become a viewer of his endless oddities', wrote famous writer Kornei Chukovsky, who also lived in Kuokkala at that time (Chukokkala. Manuscripted Almanac of Kornei Chukovsky, Moscow, 1979, p. 34).

In Kuokkala, Repin created a number of portraits of leading cultural figures of the time, including portraits of Chukovsky, Solov'ev, Andreev, Bekhterev and Korolenko. The portraits of this period, including that depicting Evreinov, bear stylistic similarities and are characteristic of Repin's later work, when his style became generally more expressive.
We are greatful to Alexandra Petrovna Smirnova for assisting us in cataloguing the present painting.

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