En toute intimité
The Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired in 2018 a gorgeous Cubist painting by Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) - currently on display in their C 20th Galleries re-hang. I had to find out more!
A young woman, smartly dressed in a patterned black dress, sits on the knee of a returned French infantryman, who wearily rests his head on her chest. A superposition of flat geometric planes and strong diagonal lines lends a three-dimensional quality to the niche in which the couple is cocooned, its irregular outlines contained by large white contours. The figures themselves, whilst remaining easily legible, have also been distilled into a collection of flat, opaque planes imbricated in dynamic patterns of triangles and curved forms. A confident and sophisticated expression of mathematical Cubist principles, this painting1, a self-portrait, was created by one of the first female practitioners of the style, Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska, an émigré artist from modern-day Georgia, who integrated the artistic community in Montparnasse in 1912. She lived and worked in the famed La Ruche (the beehive), a tumble-down artists’ residence in the 15e arrondissement, alongside luminaries of the École de Paris: Amadeo Modigliani (Modi), Chaïm Soutine, Moise Kisling, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Guillaume Apollinaire and Diego Riviera.
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Although female artists such as Natalia Gontcharova, Alexandra Exeter and later Sonia Delaunay, Suzanne Valadon, Marie Laurencin, and Tamara de Lempika, enjoyed at the time great fame, Vorobieff-Stebelska has until now largely remained on the periphery of the critical reception of female avant-garde painters of the early 20th Century. 2 Vorobieff-Stebelska was known as “Marevna” (daughter of the sea), a mythical name bestowed upon her by Russian writer Maxim Gorky, whom the young artist had met in Capri in 1911. She had just completed training at Stroganovka, Moscow's oldest state school for decorative arts, however, it was her later proximity to pioneering artists of cubism in La Ruche that inspired her early adoption of avant-garde techniques.
Living in London in the 1970s, Marevna wrote a memoir, in which she recalled the crucible of Cubist theory that was found at Diego Riviera’s studio, a stone’s throw from La Ruche. “I soon formed the habit of visiting Rivera's studio in the rue du Départ, a habit shared by a good many others: Modi, Soutine, Picasso, Cocteau, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Larionov, Gontcharova, Blanchard, Matisse, Juan Gris, Lhote, Friesz were some of those who came. We came to talk about painting, especially about Cubism, construction and Cézanne, whose work Rivera had a passion for.” 3 From 1915, Marevna listened avidly to these discussions so that she could employ these theories in her own work. 4At this time, about the same time Riviera and Marevna began a fiery relationship, producing a daughter, Marika, in 1919 before Riviera left for Mexico in 1921). Riviera painted a severe Cubist portrait of Marevna, now held in the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Although painted at this peak of their relationship, the man in Intimité does not appear to be Riviera. Dressed in the khakis and pointed bonnet de police of the late WWI French infantry, the figure bears a closer resemblance to Guillaume Apollinaire, who had returned home wounded from the front in 1916. Both pictures display an assured use of synthetic Cubist theory, championed by Apollinaire and which would be theorised by Albert Gleizes in 1923 in La Peinture et Ses Lois. Both Riviera and Marevna applied to their paintings directional lines structured around the golden ratio and constructed their scenes with rotated flat planes of colour to suggest spatial recession and rhythm. While both Riviera and Marevna exhibited their paintings in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne during the war years, the latter’s work was rarely singled out for comment or discussion and was consistently overshadowed by her male peers.
In recent years, happily, Marevna’s work has appeared in major survey exhibitions of Parisian modernist paintings such as Pionnieres: Artistes dans le Paris des Annees Folles (Musee du Luxembourg, March 2022) and Modern Paris, 1905 - 1925 (Petit Palais, November 2023). In both cases, Marevna’s most well-known painting, Death and the Woman, 1917 was exhibited front and centre, a painting held in the collection of the Petit Palais, Geneva, site of Marevna’s only large retrospective, held over fifty years ago, in 1971. In this large flattened tableau, a young woman, incongruously wearing a brightly coloured dress, fishnet stockings and a gas mask, sits opposite a grinning skeletal French soldier with prosthetic hands and feet, decorated with medals for valour. A grim caricature of the lived experience of World War One, it is tempting to read this painting as the tragic aftermath of Intimité, the couple now irrevocably separated.
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Maria Vorobieff - Stebelska (Marevna), Deux Personnages Assis, Intimité, c.1915 - 1917, collection Art Gallery of New South Wales, acquired in 2018 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/579.2018/
Perry, G., Women artists and the Parisian avant-garde : modernism and feminine art, 1900 to the late 1920s, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 2
Marevna, Life with the Painters of La Ruche, Constable, London, 1972, p. 64
Ibid, p. 95