FAR EAST,
A WESTERN LOOK

ALEXANDRE IACOVLEFF (1887-1938)

Born in 1887 in Saint Petersburg, Alexandre Iacovleff came from a bourgeois and cultured family: his father, an engineer, was the inventor of the Russian internal combustion engine and the founder of the first Russian gas and oil engine factory, but he died when Alexandre was only eleven years old; her mother was the first female doctor of mathematics in Russia. After classical studies, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in 1905 at the same time as the one who would be his faithful friend throughout his life, Vassili Choukhaieff. He trained with the Master Dmitri Kardovski who taught him the art of theater decor, the techniques of tempera painting and red chalk and charcoal drawing which have been the main marks of his work. He participated in the avant-garde movement of Russian artists of the time, Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art) led by Serge Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois. From 1908, he became a regular cartoonist for the magazines Strekoza and Novi Satyricon. In 1910 he married the actress and singer Bella Chencheva, with whom he had a son, who died at a young age.

In 1913, Iacovleff obtained a scholarship from his Academy to undertake a study trip to Spain and Italy where he discovered the painters of the Renaissance, studying more specifically the works of Greco, Mantegna and Piero de la Francesca. Back in Saint Petersburg, he exhibited his first works there, including a curious Don Quixote portrait of the famous singer Fiodor Chaliapin.

His first great and long journey was the fruit of merit – he was once again a scholarship holder of his Academy in Saint Petersburg – but also of luck because he left Russia in the autumn of 1917, a few days before the outbreak of the revolution in October, which prevented him from returning to his country to which, nevertheless, he remained deeply rooted. He had already passed his thirties but arrived in China with a youthful curiosity. He watched the day-to-day lives of the people around him, giving them life and dignity in portraits that bore always his unrivaled mark. In mid-1918, he traveled through Mongolia on horseback for two months with a former Cossack attached to the Russian delegation and had accepted to be his guide and interpreter. Back in Beijing, he assiduously frequented the theatres, studying and reproducing the fabulous characters of the Peking Opera, a show which combines music, acrobatic dance, theater and flamboyant costumes and which retraces the history and folklore of China for the great joy of a delighted and knowledgeable public. In 1919, he spent six months in Japan, where there too he became passionate about Kabuki theatre, an epic spectacle that he translated into drawings of skillfully made-up actors practicing a spectacular and codified game. Before returning to Europe, he made a long stay on the island of Oshima, off the coast of Tokyo, and there he painted one of his most beautiful canvases, Les pécheurs d’algues. Nearly 40 years later, Paul Jacoulet created his admirable print, Les graines de camélias, in the same place. Iacovleff and Jacoulet appear today, obviously, as the best painter-ethnographers of Asia in the 20th century.

A large number of the works drawn from these trips are accessible thanks to the publication of three exceptional works : Dessins et peintures d’Extrême-Orient published in Paris in 1920 by Lucien Vogel ; Le théâtre chinois published in 1922 by Maurice de Brunhoff ; and Le théâtre japonais (Kabuki), in collaboration with the great orientalist Serge Elisseeff, which was only published in 1933 by Jules Meynial.

Leaving Asia in 1920, he decided to settle in Paris like many other Russian artists fleeing the disorders in Russia. He managed to bring there several members of his family, including his mother, who ended her life in 1939, a year after Alexandre's death, and his sister Sacha (Alexandra) who was trying to overcome her hardships (her husband , an imperial army officer, was killed by revolutionary sailors and her daughter Sofia died in their escape before arriving in Paris) and starting a new life : a former singer of the Saint Petersburg Opera, she joined the troupe of the Russian Opera in Paris created and directed by Aleksei Tsereteli and performed several major roles with the great Chaliapin as a partner. She lived in Paris until 1979.

Iacovleff quickly became known to Parisian artistic circles after a first exhibition of his drawings and paintings brought back from the Far East at Paul Poiret's Barbazanges gallery and then at the Grafton Galleries in London. In 1921, he participated with his friend Choukhaieff in the Paris Autumn Salon and exhibited at the La Boétie gallery. The same year, he exhibited in the United States, in Detroit and Chicago. He also produced the murals decorating the famous Montmartre restaurant La Biche.

André Citroën and Georges-Marie Haardt (leader of the expedition) chose him to be the official painter of the Black Expedition which, from October 1924 to June 1925, crossed the African continent from Algeria to Madagascar and caused a media phenomenon unprecedented. Iacovleff produced during and at the end of the trip 300 drawings, 15 albums of pastel and watercolour sketches and around a hundred canvases, some of which were exhibited at the 1925 Autumn Salon, then reproduced in a prestigious publication : Dessins et peintures d’Afrique, croquis et notes de voyage (Jules Meynal, Paris, 1927).

Decorated with the Legion of Honour, Alexandre Iacovleff set up his studio in Paris at 10 rue Jean-Baptiste Say in the 10th arrondissement and from then on multiplied his exhibitions : at the Charpentier gallery in Paris, at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire, then at the Palais des Beaux-Arts from Brussels, in New York and finally, a glorious return to the sources, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad. He occupied a place of choice in the circle of illustrious Russian artists settled in Paris after the revolution who contributed greatly to the golden years of a globalized French culture : the musicians Prokofiev and Stravinsky, the painters Boris Grigoriev, Savely Sorine, Pavel Tchelitchev, the creator of the Russian ballets Serge Diaghilev, the choreographer and dancer Ida Rubinstein, the sculptor Seraphin Soudbinine, the art historian Bernard Berenson, the orientalists Victor Golubev and Serge Elisseeff, and still others, all were his friends.

But the passion for travel did not leave him : in 1928, he traveled through Abyssinia in the company of the entrepreneur-philanthropist Henri de Rothschild and brought back new testimonial portraits of the men and women he met ; then he stayed in Tunisia and finally in Italy where he studied the frescoes of Pompeii and was inspired by them to create several painted works of mythological inspiration.

In 1931, he was once again chosen by André Citroën to take part in a second mad automobile trip, the Yellow Expedition, which had to link Beirut to Beijing via the Afghan mountains, the Himalayan passes and the Gobi desert. Again led by Georges-Marie Haardt, assisted by Louis Audouin-Dubreuil and Victor Point, the expedition included several scholars, artists, doctors, engineers, mechanics, including the archaeologist Joseph Hackin, the Jesuit geologist Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the writer Georges Le Fèvre. Leaving in April 1931, the group reached Beijing on February 12, 1932 after many incredible adventures. Georges-Marie Haardt died of exhaustion a month later in Hong Kong following pneumonia. On the way back, Iacovleff made a stopover in Indochina, bringing back an additional harvest of drawings and paintings. The return to France of the expedition gave rise to several ceremonies and events, notably around a film retracing the trip, an exhibition of the works of Alexandre Iacovleff at the Charpentier gallery and the edition in 1934 of his best drawings in a magnificent new publication by Jules Meynial : Dessins et peintures d'Asie. Exécutés au cours de l'Expédition Citroën Centre-Asie. Troisième mission G.-M. Haardt - L. Audouin-Dubreuil.

He created the set for Semiramis, a ballet staged on May 11, 1934 at the Paris Opera by Ida Rubinstein to a libretto by Paul Valéry, with choreography by Michel Fokine and music by Arthur Honegger. The same year, he was offered the post of Director of the School of Drawings and Paintings of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and thus undertook an American stay like several other great artists from Russia. Exhibitions of his works multiplied in Washington, New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Dayton, Minneapolis and his painting Bain de nymphes was chosen to adorn the grand salon of the Paquebot Normandie when it was launched in 1935.

Returning to Paris in 1937, he set up his studio in Montparnasse, rue Campagne Première, a meeting place for famous artists and intellectuals of the time. Unfortunately, he suffered from stomach cancer and died on May 12, 1938.

Throughout his life, Alexandre Iacovleff moved from drawing to pastel and painting, satisfying his thirst for creation born in the last years of the brilliant Russian civilization of Saint Petersburg. Perfectly aware of the upheavals experienced by the painting of his time, kneaded by impressionism, cubism, fauvism and the destructuring that had follow, he always maintained a realistic course but transcended it by following two axes of research : the Space of an enlarged world, which goes from his native Russia to the four corners of the world; and Time deepened by the notion of eternity which transpires from his models crossed along the roads. He is, among painter-travellers, the undisputed Master of the portraits of the multitude of men and women he has met, in the Sahara or Gobi deserts, on the Silk Road or African trails, in Ethiopian churches or Tibetan temples or on Chinese or Japanese theater stages. He is not the colonial painter that certain narrow minds think he was but, on the contrary, the discoverer of human diversity, of the “Other” as the French writer Victor Segalen spoke of it, with a piercing gaze marked by accuracy, discernment, empathy, respect, that of a humanist in search of universal values. Joseph Kessel, who was one of his closest friends, had met him for the first time on a train in North China in 1918. He spoke of his physical and moral clarity, his exceptional loyalty, an exquisite kindness and a good sense of humor in all circumstances. "Besides affection, common features brought us closer together: curiosity, a passion for landscapes and beings, and the need for escape in life as in art".

We would have liked to know him.

The collection

Without exception, the works presented above are plates taken from the four books devoted by Alexandre Iacovleff to Asia, China and Japan.