Andrey Avinoff | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 14 February 1884 |
| Died | 16 July 1949(1949-07-16) (aged 65) New York City, US |
| Resting place | Locust Valley Cemetery,Locust Valley, New York, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Pittsburgh |
| Occupation | Museum Director (Carnegie Museum of Natural History) |
| Known for | |
| Relatives | Elizabeth Shoumatoff (sister),Alex Shoumatoff (grandnephew) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
Andrey Avinoff (14 February 1884 – 16 July 1949) was an internationally-known artist,lepidopterist,museum director, professor, bibliophile andiconographer, who served as the director of theCarnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh from 1926 to 1945.
Throughout his life he engaged with prominent thinkers, explorers, authors, scientists, and educators throughout the world. Perhaps more than any otherRussian émigré of his period, he epitomized the cultural sophistication ofpre-revolutionary Russia. He has been firmly established by curatorial experts as one of the most important artists in America from the Russian Silver Age of Art,Mir iskusstva (World of Art).[1][2][3] In an age of specialization, Avinoff brought an interdisciplinary approach to a broad range of fields, demonstrating the connections between culture, nature, spirituality, and art history.
Avinoff amassed the largest collection of Asiatic butterflies in the world discovering and naming several new species of butterflies inCentral Asia, including several variations of the genusParnassius found in the Himalayan regions. He won the coveted Gold Medal of the Imperial Geographical Society for his work and published seven articles in three languages about his discoveries.[4]
Avinoff was a generation older than the famed Russian-born novelistVladimir Nabokov, himself a distinguished lepidopterist. In his novelDar ("The Gift"), Nabokov based the character Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev, his formidable Central Asian butterfly collector, partially on Avinoff. According to Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates's bookNabokov's Blues (1999), Avinoff was one of the first people Nabokov contacted when he came to the United States.[5]
Lecturing as an adjunct professor in the departments of fine arts and biology at theUniversity of Pittsburgh, Avinoff was renowned as an expert on decorative arts,Persian art, nature motifs, and Russianiconography. His book collection, the largest compendium of Russian decorative arts volumes outside of Russia, is now housed at theHillwood Museum in Washington, D.C. It provided the basis for 'The Icon and the Axe' (1966), a comprehensive study of Russian culture byJames H. Billington, thenLibrarian of Congress.
Avinoff became known as the leading botanical painter of the day. He illustrated numerous books and folios and was called "one of the greatest American flower painters of the 20th century" byJohn Walker, then director of theNational Gallery of Art inWashington, D.C. Walker acquired two of Avinoff's watercolor paintings for the National Gallery collection,Emergence (c. 1948, watercolor, ink, and pencil on paperboard) andTulips (Disintegration) (c. 1949, watercolor and pencil on paperboard).
From 1947 on Avinoff maintained a close friendship with the biologist and sex researcherAlfred Kinsey, based in part on their similar entomological interests; Kinsey's early scientific work was withgall wasps. Until Avinoff's death, the two collaborated on several projects, including an unpublished study on the sexuality of individuals in the arts.
Andrey Avinoff was born inTulchyn in what is nowUkraine, (then calledLittle Russia), into an aristocratic Russian family going back to theboyars ofNovgorod. He was the grandson of Admiral Alexander Avinoff, who fought at theBattle of Trafalgar (1805), and a great-grandson of Vladimir Panaieff (Panayev), minister of the Imperial Court during the reign (1825–1855) ofTsar Nicholas I, under whom Panaeff acquired art for theHermitage Museum and what became the New Hermitage Museum collection in 1852.
Andrey, his sisterElizabeth Shoumatoff, and brother Nicholas Avinov were taught perfect English, French, and German by governesses and tutors.[6] After graduating fromMoscow State University with a degree in law (1905), Avinoff was appointed assistant secretary general of theGoverning Senate, and in 1911 was named gentleman-in-waiting to the court ofTsar Nicholas II, serving in the Diplomatic Corps as director of ceremonies.
In 1915, during World War I, Avinoff went toNew York as an emissary of theZemsky Union, an organization similar to theRed Cross, on a mission to purchase military supplies for theImperial Army during World War I.[7] He was back in New York on a second mission, representing theProvisional Government, when theOctober Revolution of 1917 broke out. Avinoff telegraphed his family to leave Russia immediately. Except for his older brother, Nicholas, and Nicholas' wife Marie Avinov, the entire family, including governesses, took the lastTrans-Siberian Railway train eastward across Russia and crossed the Pacific by steamer to embark upon a new life in the United States.[8] Nicholas Avinoff was then serving as the Assistant Minister of Interior Affairs in theKerensky Provisional Government. He was subsequently imprisoned a number of times and finally executed by the secret police during theYezhov Purge of 1937. He is described inR. H. Bruce Lockhart'sMemoirs of a British Agent (1932). Marie Avinov was one of the few Russian aristocrats to survive the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin'sGreat Purge, and the German invasion during World War II; she recounted her ordeal inMarie Avinov: Pilgrimage through Hell (1968).
Left only with what they had been able to carry with them,[9] Avinoff's family initially purchased a farm inPine Bush, New York. Avinoff's brief, none-too-successful farming career came to an end in late 1918 when he was summoned byPrince Georgy Lvov to translate for him, first in Washington, DC, at Lvov's meeting withPresident Woodrow Wilson, and then at Versailles, where Avinoff helped negotiate theTreaty of Versailles for theRussian Provisional Government at theParis Peace Conference.[10][11]
In February 1919, Avinoff returned to Pine Bush, where his family had become frequent visitors at nearby Yama Farms Inn, a fashionable Catskills resort that attractedThomas Edison,Harvey Firestone,Henry Ford, andJohn D. Rockefeller as well as famous writers, musicians and philosophers.[12][13] Frank Seaman, the advertising mogul who established the Inn, helped launch Avinoff's career as a commercial artist. Avinoff rendered advertising illustrations for the products of many major companies of the day, includingColgate-Palmolive'sCashmere Bouquet, and the first modern typewriter for theUnderwood Typewriter Company.[14]
Seaman also helped inaugurate the portrait-painting career of Avinoff's sister,Elizabeth Shoumatoff, by arranging for her to paint many of his wealthy clients.[15][16] The family sold the farm in 1920 but remained in the vicinity, living in a colonial mansion inNapanoch until 1926, when they moved toMerrick, Long Island.Avinoff's sister, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, would become the renowned portrait painter of theUnfinished Portrait ofFranklin Delano Roosevelt rendered at his death in 1945. She painted over 3,000 portraits of industrialists, international leaders and members of some of the most celebrated society families in the United States. Elizabeth's husband, Leo Shoumatoff, had become the business manager forIgor Sikorsky's airplane company. Avinoff designed the "Winged S," the first logo forSikorsky Aircraft, and other early promotional artwork for the then-fledgling company.[17]
His reputation as a lepidopterist had drawn the attention of the zoologistDr. William J. Holland, who headed up both theCarnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and theUniversity of Pittsburgh. In 1923 Holland offered Avinoff a curatorial position in the entomology department of the Carnegie Institute's Museum of Natural History. He did not accept at first but occasionally worked for the department while continuing his successful career as a commercial artist.[18]
Within two years, however, in 1926, Avinoff became the director of the museum where he remained until his retirement in 1945. His accomplishments included acquisitions, such as the museum'sTyrannosaurus rex, and significant contributions in the fields ofbotany,entomology, and biology.[19] He guided the museum through the Great Depression and World War II while helping to developmuseology as a field.[15][20][21][22]
He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1927.[23] Avinoff's research associates at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Natural History includedChilds Frick and thelepidopterist Cyril F. dos Passos, andVladimir Nabokov, whose father he had known in Russia. Avinoff became an American citizen in 1928.[24][25]
In Russia, Avinoff sponsored more than 40 butterfly collecting expeditions in Central Asia. He personally traveled on arduous expeditions in 1908 toRussian Turkestan and thePamir, in 1912 through India andKashmir over theKarakoram Pass toLadakh and "Chinese Turkestan" (theTarim Basin), before these regions were open to explorers.[26] Prior to the political upheavals of 1917, he was awarded theImperial Russian Geographical Society's prestigious gold medal.[27] When he left Russia for the last time in September 1917, Avinoff had to abandon his voluminous personal collection of over 80,000 specimens, the largest collection of Asiatic butterflies in the world, including his beloved Parnassus species. He named five variations of this rare high altitude butterfly including: Parnassius Autocrator, Parnassius Hannyngtoni, Parnassius Jacobson, Parnassius Kiritshenkoi, Parnassius Maharaja and the 'Avinoff Hairstreak' was named after him.
The Avinoff butterfly collection was nationalized by the Bolsheviks and is now housed in the Zoological Science Museum in St. Petersburg.,[28] which became government property. In the 1930s Soviet authorities allowed him to catalog the collection; specimens were shipped to him in Pittsburgh in groups and then returned by him.[29] Following World War II, theMellon family offered to retrieve the collection but were refused by the Soviet government.[30]
In America, by financing of butterfly expeditions, Avinoff managed to build up a near-duplicate collection of Asiatic butterflies which he donated to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Between 1926 and 1940, he made six collecting trips toJamaica, which he described as a "dream land of tropical splendor."
[31][32] Accompanying him on five of those trips was his nephew Nicholas Shoumatoff (the son of his sister, Elizabeth), for whom Avinoff served as a father figure after the death of Leo Shoumatoff in 1928.[33][34] The two caught more than fourteen thousand "bots," as butterflies and moths are known in Jamaican patois, doubling the number of known species on the island to more than a thousand.[35][36] Avinoff's collection may be seen at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Avinoff was a prominent member of theEntomological Society of America, of which he became a fellow in 1939.[37]
The Avinoff's early research on the effects of geographical location on butterflyspeciation was considered seminal in the field at the time.[38] His groundbreaking work on thebiogeography of speciation showed how members of the genusKaranasa evolved into new, separate species in isolated mountain valleys in the Pamir Range. He collaborated with his colleague Walter Sweadner, a curator of entomology at the museum, onThe Karanasa Butterflies, A Study in Evolution. This influential monograph was completed by Sweadner and published in 1951, after both Avinoff's and Sweadner's deaths.[29]
Avinoff applied equal[39] versatility to his work as an artist, bringing his expertise as a polymath in both art and zoology to bear on the exhibits, publications, and drawings at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History during his tenure there. After hours, he painted, often through the night.[40] The artist in Avinoff seemed to flow from the scientist, as he believed that art and science are inextricably intertwined. Dr. Walter Read Hovey, head of the University of Pittsburgh's Fine Arts Department, wrote in the introduction to the exhibition catalog for the Carnegie Institute's retrospective of Avinoff's work mounted in 1953, "For him art was a reflection of nature." Hovey also noted, "The genius of Dr. Avinoff [reflects] the whole range of man's experience. ... Like the masters of the Renaissance, he was skilled in many ways, a distinguished scientist, artist,museum specialist,mystic, and popular friend of many."[21]
Avinoff's artistic output was prodigious. Pastels, florals, landscapes,etchings,folios, scientific drawings, and illustrations all seemed to appear effortlessly.[28] Although he worked in numerous media, he was a master of watercolor.[41][42][43] His art works are remarkable for their precision, exquisite execution, and unparalleled elegance, qualities abundantly demonstrated in the 450 botanical illustrations he painted from live specimens for O. E. Jennings'sWild Flowers of Western Pennsylvania and the Upper Ohio Basin, published in two volumes by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1953. Most of Avinoff's illustrations for this monumental work were created between 1941 and 1943.[44]
His other works from nature range from arrangements of tulips and roses to bouquets in the Dutch manner. His orchid paintings from live specimens at Planting Fields inLong Island, New York, became a folio. Avinoff sold his Dutch Manner paintings to prominent families to raise funds to re-collect his Asiatic butterfly collection. Of these paintings he said, "I have turned my flowers into butterflies!"
His expertise on Persian decorative art was expressed in paintings reminiscent of Persian miniatures. And ever present, flitting through his paintings, were his butterflies, perhaps representing his own irrepressible spirit and fascination with both the beauty of nature and the ephemeral nature of human existence.[45]
Also known for his visual exploration of metaphysical realms, Avinoff created fantastical works withmystical qualities andsymbolism. Angels, terrifying demons and ominous apocalyptic imagery were frequently depicted in his work. His series of illustrations for Lermontov's poem, "The Demon," tell of a fallen angel's passionate and doomed love of the beautiful Tamara.
One of Avinoff's most famous series of illustrations, was created (c. 1935–1938) forThe Fall of Atlantis (1938), a long poem in Russian published in the United States by George V. Golokhvastoff. In 1944 Avinoff published these illustrations, originally rendered in charcoal, chalk, brush, pen, spattering, and scraping on paper, in a limited folio edition ofphotogravures. Best known is the last, no. 17,The Death of the High Priest. Out of the catastrophic destruction ofAtlantis, with the backdrop of fuming smoke and burningziggurat, the withered hand of the high priest emerges from the swirling tidal waves. It is reaching upward, toward a constellation of stars forming anankh, symbolic of rebirth out of the cataclysmic devastation of an arrogant culture.[46]
In unpublished portions of an essay about her great-uncle written for the exhibition catalogAndrey Avinoff: In Pursuit of Beauty (2011), Antonia Shoumatoff remarks that Avinoff "intuited that the symbolism of Atlantis and theapocalypse were metaphorically relevant to modern civilization as symbolic of destruction and rebirth. ... [He] chooses to illustrate the themes of birth and death with vivid images of angels, demons and ghosts trying to pierce through the veils of life and death, often actually including a swathe of clouds, separating the seen and the unseen worlds."[47]
Avinoff's work was exhibited in the 1940s and 1950s, notably inFlower Paintings by A. Avinoff, a 1947 exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York City, andAn Exhibition of Andrey Avinoff: The Man of Science, Religion, Mysticism, Nature, Society and Fantasy, a 1953 retrospective at the Carnegie Institute. After he retired in 1945, he entered his most prolific period of painting, producing work for five one-man shows, a folio of 120 orchid botanicals, and innumerable other paintings.
In an age of specialization, Avinoff brought an interdisciplinary approach to a broad range of fields, demonstrating the connections between culture, nature, science and art. In every area of his expertise, Avinoff invoked an expansive and inspiring approach, which drew standing-room-only audiences to the talks that he gave in the lecture halls of theUniversity of Pittsburgh. He was a sought-after speaker, and his talks were broadcast over the radio in Pittsburgh.[39] Lecturing as an adjunct professor in the departments of fine arts and biology, Avinoff was renowned as an expert on decorative arts, Persian art, plant and animal motifs, and Russian iconography. His book collection, the largest compendium of Russian decorative arts volumes outside of Russia, is now housed at the Hillwood Museum in Washington, DC. The collection was purchased in the 1930s from the New York book dealersSimeon Bolan andIsrael Perlstein.[48] It provided the basis for The Icon and the Axe (1966),[49] a comprehensive study of Russian culture by James H. Billington, then Librarian of Congress.[43][50]
Avinoff was profiled byGeoffrey T. Hellman in The New Yorker[51] in 1948, and he had been photographed for the cover story of aLife magazine issue slated to appear in fall 1949 when he died in July of that year.[52] Igor Sikorsky delivered his eulogy.
Since Avinoff's death, his art has been rediscovered, and his status as one of the most important émigré Russian artists of the 20th century has been firmly established. The exhibition[1], (2005), at theKinsey Institute at theIndiana University in Bloomington, placed Avinoff as an important émigré painter in relation to other Russian artists, some also homosexual.[53] He has continued to receive growing recognition as a homosexual artist and advocate, "an aspect of his life that he never publicized" during his lifetime.[54]
Andrey Avinoff: In Pursuit of Beauty, a 2011 retrospective exhibition of Avinoff's work at the Carnegie Museum of Art, garnered international attention for his work. Curator Louise Lippincott summarized Avinoff's legacy as part of theMir Iskusstva (Russian Silver Age of Art) in the exhibition catalog: "Avinoff should rightfully be considered one of the most important survivors of the Russian Silver Age of Art to reach the United States... Not only did he embody Silver Age ideals and practices [in] his life and work, he instilled them in the next generation of New York-based artists and intellectuals who would turn that city into the next great center of international modernist culture."[55]
In April–May 1982 Avinoff and his family were profiled inThe New Yorker magazine in a two-part series written by his grandnephew Alex Shoumatoff (excerpted from his 1982 book Russian Blood).[56] Avinoff's archive is housed at the University of Pittsburgh's Hillman Library's Archives & Special Collections and is available for serious researchers and authors. In 1964 the university recognized Avinoff's enduring scientific contributions with the establishment of the Andrey Avinoff Professorship of Biology (the Avinoff Chair).[57]
Catalog no. 183
