Concerts Opera Dance Theater Gigs Exhibits

	Tretyakov Gallery Modigliani features most prominently in this 1962 homage to the artists who defined Marevna's youth.

Memories of Paris

Surrounded by the lights of the avant-garde, one Russian-born artist continued painting them for the rest of her life.

By Romilly Eveleigh
Published: October 22, 2004

Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Marie Vorobieff's move from Moscow to Paris in 1912 landed her squarely in the famed studios of pre-war Montparnasse, where Pablo Picasso and friends were developing Cubism, and where the international head-count of groundbreaking artists had never been higher.

Born in 1892, and known to friends simply as Marevna, the young Russian became part of a circle of artists and writers in the French capital that counted Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Fernand Leger and Ilya Ehrenburg in their ranks. Exhibiting in the Paris Salons alongside the leading lights of the European avant-garde, she even embarked on a tempestuous six-year affair with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

Despite possessing the sort of biography upon which any cultural historian would pounce, Marevna remained practically unknown in her native country right up to her death in 1984. Last week, the Russian emigre returned to her homeland, in spirit at least, with the opening of a retrospective of her work at the Tretyakov Gallery.

Marevna's only solo exhibition here to date, the display includes over 50 paintings and graphics from her Modernist-inspired output of the early teens through her evocative late canvases of the 1970s. Many of the pictures have been borrowed from private collections and have never been publicly displayed before, while others are on loan from Geneva's Petit Palais Museum.

The first pictures on show reveal that Marevna was not only willing to tackle contemporary style head-on, but that she did so in a way that made it her own. Particularly influenced by the color palette and angular simplification of Paris Cubism, "Georgian Dance," from 1913, shows a soldier and a woman sharing an amorous embrace. Judging from other sketches and photographs of the time, in which Marevna appears similarly rustically dressed with long, curly locks of hair, it is safe to call the painting an unabashed self-portrait.

By the beginning of the 1920s, however, Marevna had toned down her methods, combining elements of Cubism -- or "Dimensionalism," as she called it -- with a muted form of Pointillism, which blends dots of paint into still-lifes, genre scenes and portraits. One such picture shows a cigarette-smoking Picasso in a blue-and-white striped bathing suit, a quote from his painting "Two Women Running on a Beach" in the background.

Long after those days were gone, Marevna continued to reminisce. Her biggest homage to her youth came in a series of four mural-sized paintings, each showing a roll-call of the various artists she befriended in Paris. Two are on show at the Tretyakov, with the grandest of the lot depicting the dashing figure of the Italian portraitist Modigliani at its center. While Marevna chose not to date these murals herself, it turns out that they were executed in the 1960s -- 40 years after Modigliani died, and a full decade after Marevna left Paris for London.

Indeed, the last decades spent in the leafy suburb of Ealing seem to have been the most productive stage of Marevna's career. The artist's recollections of early 20th-century Paris evoke those heady times with gusto, whether in depicting the children and landscapes around her or experimenting freely with Parisian style. And her earlier work serves as a reminder that the legacy of Russia's avant-garde could be found abroad as well as at home.

"Marevna" runs to Nov. 9 in the Engineer Wing of the Tretyakov Gallery, located at 10/12 Lavrushinsky Pereulok. Metro Tretyakovskaya. Tel. 230-7788, 951-1362, 238-1378.

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