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French, 20th century, male.

Born 10 February 1944, in Rocroi (Ardennes).

Painter (including gouache), draughtsman, decorative designer. Stage costumes and sets.

Aballain graduated from the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1965.

He designed the stage sets and costumes for A Season in Hell...

Italian, 20th century, male.

Born 1900, in Marciana Marina (Livorno); died 1971, in Milan.

Painter, ceramicist, illustrator, scenographer, writer. Stage costumes.

Futurism.

Giovanni Acquaviva studied philosophy and law at the University of Pisa, while devoting himself to illustration at the same time. He founded the Futurist group ...

French, 20th century, male.

Born 1904, in Paris; died 27 August 1967, in Perros-Guirec (Côtes-d'Armor).

Sculptor (including bronze), engraver (burin). Monuments, designs for tapestries, stage costumes and sets.

Henri Adam's father, a goldsmith and jeweller, taught him the rudiments of the trade while he was studying at the Collège Lavoisier. He also took classes in drawing, first at the École Germain-Pillon and subsequently at the Atelier de la Ville de Paris in Montparnasse, before moving to the École des Beaux-Arts. He exhibited various paintings between ...

(b Wairoa, Hawke’s Bay, NZ, Aug 27, 1939).

Maori painter, carver, weaver, costume and stage designer. His involvement with art began at Te Aute Maori Boys’ College (1954–7), Hawke’s Bay, Waipawa County, and continued with formal art training at Ardmore Teachers’ College (1958–9) and at Dunedin Teachers’ College (1960), where he trained as an art specialist. He subsequently worked for the Department of Education as an arts and crafts adviser and served on committees for national art education policies, the Historic Places Trust (with particular reference to Maori sites), art museums and tribal committees (dealing with traditional and customary art forms and architecture). He helped to promote contemporary developments in Maori arts for community buildings, meeting houses, churches and public sites, serving on private and governmental commissions. In his own work he maintains a balance between the conservation of older traditional materials and forms of Maori arts and the experimental use of new materials, such as composite chipboard, synthetic dyes, plastic-coated basketry fibres and composite, laminated board. His painted and woven-fibre works are notable for their rich but subtle colours and controlled sense of line. They vary in size from complex architectural installations or stage designs for the Royal New Zealand Ballet to designs for postage stamps. At Te Huki Meeting House (...

Belgian, 20th century, female.

Born 1903.

Painter. Stage costumes.

Primarily a dancer, Akarova was married to the painter Marcel Louis Baugniet, and it was probably under his influence as an artist of the Avant-Garde that she too emerged as a painter. Some exhibitions held in Belgium in the 1990s acknowledged her contribution to the art of the early 20th century....

(Pavlovich)

(b Kharkiv, April 16, 1901; d Moscow, Sept 6, 1968).

Russian stage designer, director, painter and graphic artist of Ukranian birth. He studied in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) from 1915 to 1919 in an artists’ workshop under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Aleksandr Yakovlev and Vasily Shukhayev. From 1920 to 1922 he worked as a stage designer in Khar’kov (now Kharkiv). In 1923 he returned to Petrograd, where he worked as a book illustrator and stage designer at the Theatre of Musical Comedy, the Theatre of Drama and the Gor’ky Bol’shoy Theatre of Drama; he also worked in Moscow, at the Theatre of the Revolution, the Vakhtangov Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT). From 1929 he worked as a director, designing his own productions. He was the Art Director of the Leningrad Theatre of Comedy (1935–49), where the most notable productions he directed and designed were Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1938), Lope de Vega’s Dog in the Manger and ...

Russian, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 1754, in St Petersburg; died 1824, in St Petersburg.

Painter, watercolourist. Urban landscapes, architectural views, still-lifes. Stage sets (?).

The son of a retired soldier employed as a custodian at the fine arts academy in St Petersburg, Alekseev trained there ...

Romanian, 20th century, male.

Born in Bucharest.

Painter. Stage costumes.

Alkar Alexandresco was important as a theatrical costume designer and exhibited as such in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants in 1927. Assyrian Idol is quoted in a private collection.

French, 20th century, female.

Painter, illustrator. Figures, fruit. Stage costumes and sets.

A graduate of the École des Arts appliqués, Géraldine Allier started out as a graphic illustrator in the advertising and publishing industries. With the help of Louis Bercut, with whom she worked for several years, she then started making her own sets and costumes: ...

German, 20th century, male.

Active in France from 1960.

Born 1934, in Bad Bellingen.

Painter (including gouache), performance artist, watercolourist, engraver (etching), monotype artist, draughtsman. Stage sets, artists' books, posters.

Hermann Amann is very active. He has published written works and given numerous lectures on painting. As a painter, he produces very colourful, very musical works, with a dynamic rhythm, made up of geometric figures in thick lines or black rings, biomorphic forms and graphic signs. He also produces engravings (etchings and monotypes), artists' books ( ...

(Galaktionovych) [Petritsky, Anatoly Galaktyonovich]

(b Kiev, Feb 12, 1895; d Kiev, March 6, 1964).

Ukrainian painter, stage designer and draughtsman. He studied at the art school in Kiev (1910–18) and at Vkhutemas (the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops) in Moscow (1922–4). He was influenced by the tradition of Ukrainian national art and later, in his work for the theatre, by Constructivism. His work of the mid-1920s combined contemporary national and foreign Expressionism with the Realist tradition, as in Invalids (1924; Kiev, Mus. Ukrain. A.), an assertion of humanist and high moral ideals. A synthesis of Ukrainian artistic traditions with an experience of contemporary avant-garde artistic trends also underpinned Petrits’ky’s work in the 1930s to 1960s, for example Kharkiv Street in Winter (1934), Peonies (1945) and Not a Garden—a Kiev Street (1961; all Kiev, Mus. Ukrain. A.)

Petrits’ky’s stage designs of the 1920s were bright and original pictorial solutions (e.g. for productions of the operas ...

(Andreyevich)

(b Moscow, Oct 14, 1873; d Moscow, Dec 24, 1932).

Russian sculptor, graphic artist and stage designer. He trained at the Stroganov School in Moscow (1883–91) before entering the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he studied under the sculptor Sergey Volnukhin (1859–1921). He graduated in 1900 before joining the Wanderers in 1902.

Andreyev was well aware of contemporary European trends in sculpture, especially the work of Emile-Antoine Bourdelle and Auguste Rodin, which he saw during a stay in Paris in 1900. However, he remained strongly attached to the 19th-century academic tradition, an allegiance that perhaps facilitated his acceptance of many official commissions both before and after the October Revolution of 1917. For example, he was responsible for the figure and pedestal of the monument to Nikolay Gogol’ on the Boulevard Ring in Moscow (1909; now at Suvorovsky Boulevard, 7) and for the bronze and granite monument to Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1929) in front of the Maly Theatre, Moscow. Andreyev was a principal contributor to Lenin’s Monumental Propaganda Plan from ...

(Izrailevich)

(b Beltsy, Bessarabia [now in Moldova], Oct 14, 1879; d Waterford, CT, Dec 4, 1973).

Russian painter and stage designer. He was a Symbolist artist who, like many of his colleagues in the World of Art group, made his foremost contribution to the development of Russian art in the fields of graphic art and stage design. He first studied at the Drawing School of the Odessa Society of Fine Arts (1895–1900) and then at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts (1901–9), where his tutors included Dmitry Kardovsky and Il’ya Repin. His participation in exhibitions included the World of Art (St Petersburg and Moscow, 1906–18), the Union of Russian Artists (Moscow and St Petersburg, 1906–10), the Salon d’Automne (Paris, 1906), Wreath (St Petersburg, 1908) and the Izdebsky International Salon (Kiev and Odessa, 1909–10). His painting attracted considerable critical acclaim for its exotic themes and colouring. Simultaneously, he worked as a caricaturist, creating grotesque and fantastic images for satirical magazines as well as executing wall paintings for houses in St Petersburg. His prolific career as a stage designer began in ...

Russian, 20th century, male.

Born 1879, in Beltsy; died 1973, in Stonington (Connecticut).

Painter (gouache), draughtsman. Scenes with figures. Stage costumes and sets.

Symbolism.

Boris Anisfeld studied at the academy of fine art in St Petersburg. He spent some time in the south of France working on the Spanish border around 1913 and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, of which he became a member. He then returned to work in Petrograd, only to leave again in 1917. From 1918 to 1920, he took part in a touring exhibition in the United States: Brooklyn Museum in New York, Allbright Knox Museum in Buffalo, Chicago Art Institute, Museum of Art in St Louis and in San Francisco....

Russian, 20th century, male.

Also active in France.

Born 11 July 1889, in Petropavlosk (Kamchatka); died 1974, in Paris.

Painter, collage artist, sculptor, illustrator, draughtsman. Stage costumes and sets, film sets.

The son of a political exile in Kamchatka, Yuri Annenkov was able to go to St Petersburg in 1898 and study at the school of fine art and at several artists’ workshops between 1908 and 1911, developing a passion for the theatre and theatrical production. He went to Paris in 1911 and studied with Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton and then went to Switzerland in 1913. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1912 and 1913 and then returned to Russia where he joined the...

[Georges] (Pavlovich)

(b Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, July 23, 1889; d Paris, July 18, 1974).

Russian painter, draughtsman and stage designer. He studied at the University of St Petersburg (later Petrograd) in 1908 and in the private studio of Savely Zeidenberg (1862–1924). In 1909–10 he attended the studio of Yan Tsyonglinsky (1850–1914) in St Petersburg, where he became acquainted with the avant-garde artists Yelena Guro (1877–1913), Mikhail Matyushin and Matvey Vol’demar (1878–1914). In 1911–12 he worked in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton in Paris, then in Switzerland (1913) before returning to St Petersburg. As a painter he was a modernist, and his work developed rapidly towards abstraction, although he did not adhere to any particular branch of it. His works of the time use various devices of stylization and decorativeness, and some of them echo the free associations of Marc Chagall, but fundamentally they remain geometrically based compositions. In 1919–20 he made a series of abstract sculptural assemblages and a great number of abstract collages....

French, 20th century, male.

Born 1926, in Frémery (Moselle).

Painter, sculptor, decorative designer. Figure compositions, religious subjects, landscapes. Murals, church decoration, designs for mosaics and stained-glass windows, stage sets, stage costumes.

Arcabas studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and also had a degree. He was a friend of the painter Dimitri Varbanesco. He exhibited in numerous towns in France and abroad. From ...

(b Madrid, Feb 26, 1937).

Spanish painter, sculptor, potter, printmaker and stage designer. As a painter he was mainly self-taught. After working as a journalist in 1957, he left Spain in 1958 to avoid military service, settling in Paris. There he continued to work both as a journalist and painter. From 1968 to 1972 he lived in Milan, returning to Paris in 1973. His work developed from expressionism to realism (Nueva figurina), which reflected on the pictorial language and function of painting and the artist’s role in society. He manipulated ready-made images, words and elements derived from commercial art and the work of other painters. His pieces formed series whose titles referred to the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the contemporary political situation to help make their critical point. His work frequently provoked controversy, for example his series Arcole Bridge and St Bernard’s Pass (1962–6) was based on the theme of Napoleon Bonaparte as a symbol of imperialism (e.g. ...

[Antoine Marie Joseph]

(b Marseille, Sept 4, 1896; d Ivry-sur-Seine, March 4, 1948).

French writer, draughtsman, stage designer, actor and director. He learnt to draw and paint in 1918–19 while staying in an establishment near Neuchâtel where he had been sent suffering from a nervous complaint that had begun in 1914. There he was prescribed opium in May 1919. He arrived in Paris in the spring of 1920 and visited salons, galleries and studios, produced art criticism (see Oeuvres complètes, ii), continued to sketch small portraits of himself or his family and composed poems. In the atelier of Charles Dullin (1885–1949), where he trained as an actor, he was asked to design the costumes for several performances. Nevertheless, after an attempt in 1923 to paint the portrait of a young friend and her father, he abandoned painting and drawing. Through the painter Elie Lascaux (b 1888), whom he knew from Max Jacob’s circle, he met the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and the artists of his gallery. He became a friend of André Masson in particular and soon became a regular visitor at Masson’s studio in the Rue Blomet, then also frequented by other painters such as Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Malkine and visited by writers Robert Desnos (...

French, 20th century, male.

Born February 1903, in Tunis; died 24 January 1978, in Aix-en-Provence.

Painter, architect, decorative designer, designer, poster artist. Wall decorations, stage costumes and sets, furniture, advertising art.

Art et Lumière.

Félix Tahar Marie Aublet was the son of the Orientalist painter Albert Aublet. He was brought up both in Neuilly, France, and in a Moorish palace in Tunis, where the family spent six months of the year. His second forename, Tahar, means 'blessed one' in Arabic. In ...