ArtistAvinoff, Andrey Nikolaevich

Artist Years1884-1948

Artist NationalityAmerican, Russian

TitleThe Birth of the Solar Cult

Year1944

MediumPrint > Heliogravure

DimensionsComposition: 14 X 10.5 inches
Sheet: 21 X 16.5 inches

NotesAndrey Avinoff (14 February 1884 – 16 July 1949); was an internationally-known artist, lepidopterist, museum director, professor, bibliophile and iconographer, who served as the director of the Carnegie 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 other Russian émigré of his period, he epitomized the cultural sophistication of pre-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). 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 several new species of butterflies in Central Asia, including one named after him, the Parnassius maharaja Avinoff. Avinoff was a generation older than the famed Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov, himself a distinguished lepidopterist. In his novel Dar ("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 book Nabokov's Blues (1999), Avinoff was one of the first people Nabokov contacted when he came to the United States.

Lecturing as an adjunct professor in the departments of fine arts and biology at the University of Pittsburgh, Avinoff was renowned as an expert on decorative arts, Persian art, nature 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, D.C. It provided the basis for 'The Icon and the Axe' (1966), a comprehensive study of Russian culture by James H. Billington, then Librarian 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" by John Walker, then director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Walker acquired two of Avinoff's watercolor paintings for the National Gallery collection, Emergence (c. 1948, watercolor, ink, and pencil on paperboard) and Tulips (Disintegration) (c. 1949, watercolor and pencil on paperboard).

From 1947 on Avinoff maintained a close friendship with the biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, based in part on their similar entomological interests; Kinsey's early scientific work was with gall 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 in Tulchyn in what is now Ukraine, (then called Little Russia), into an aristocratic Russian family going back to the boyars of Novgorod. He was the grandson of Admiral Alexander Avinoff, who fought at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), and a great-grandson of Vladimir Panaieff (Panayev), minister of the Imperial Court during the reign (1825–1855) of Tsar Nicholas I, under whom Panaeff acquired art for the Hermitage Museum and what became the New Hermitage Museum collection in 1852.

Andrey, his sister Elizabeth, and brother Nicholas Avinov were taught perfect English, French, and German by governesses and tutors. After graduating from Moscow State University with a degree in law (1905), Avinoff was appointed assistant secretary general of the Governing Senate, and in 1911 was named gentleman-in-waiting to the court of Tsar Nicholas II, serving in the Diplomatic Corps as director of ceremonies.

In 1915, during World War I, Avinoff went to New York as an emissary of the Zemsky Union, an organization similar to the Red Cross, on a mission to purchase military supplies for the Imperial Army during World War I. He was back in New York on a second mission, representing the Provisional Government, when the October 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 last Trans-Siberian Railway train eastward across Russia and crossed the Pacific by steamer to embark upon a new life in the United States. Nicholas Avinoff was then serving as the Assistant Minister of Interior Affairs in the Kerensky Provisional Government. He was subsequently imprisoned a number of times and finally executed by the secret police during the Yezhov Purge of 1937. He is described in R. H. Bruce Lockhart's Memoirs of a British Agent (1932). Marie Avinov was one of the few Russian aristocrats to survive the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin's Great Purge, and the German invasion during World War II; she recounted her ordeal in Marie Avinov: Pilgrimage through Hell (1968).

Left only with what they had been able to carry with them, Avinoff's family initially purchased a farm in Pine Bush, New York. Avinoff's brief, none-too-successful farming career came to an end in late 1918 when he was summoned by Prince Georgy Lvov to translate for him, first in Washington, DC, at Lvov's meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, and then at Versailles, where Avinoff helped negotiate the Treaty of Versailles for the Russian Provisional Government at the Paris Peace Conference.

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 attracted Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller as well as famous writers, musicians and philosophers. 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, including Colgate-Palmolive's Cashmere Bouquet, and the first modern typewriter for the Underwood Typewriter Company. 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. The family sold the farm in 1920 but remained in the vicinity, living in a colonial mansion in Napanoch until 1926, when they moved to Merrick, Long Island.

Avinoff's sister, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, would become the renowned portrait painter of the Unfinished Portrait of Franklin 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 for Igor Sikorsky's airplane company. Avinoff designed the "Winged S," the first logo for Sikorsky Aircraft, and other early promotional artwork for the then-fledgling company.

His reputation as a lepidopterist had drawn the attention of the zoologist Dr. William J. Holland, who headed up both the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and the University 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.

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's Tyrannosaurus rex, and significant contributions in the fields of botany, entomology, and biology. He guided the museum through the Great Depression and World War II while helping to develop museology as a field.

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 included Childs Frick and the lepidopterist Cyril F. dos Passos, and Vladimir Nabokov, whose father he had known in Russia. Avinoff became an American citizen in 1928.
(source: wikipedia.org)

Price $625.00

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