Nadezhda Andreyevna Udaltsova

Nadezhda Andreyevna Udaltsova (born Dec. 29 [Jan. 10, New Style], 1886, Oryol, western Russia—died Jan. 25, 1961, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) was one of the leading figures of the pre-Revolutionary Russian avant-garde. Of her Russian peers, she was the most influenced by French Cubism. But personal misfortunes and the social conditions of the Stalinist era led her to withdraw to her studio, turning her into a marginal figure in Soviet art.

Udaltsova was born into a military officer’s family. The decisive moment of her turning to new art was her introduction to contemporary French painting in 1908 at the home of the renowned art collector Sergey Shchukin. Udaltsova was particularly drawn to Post-Impressionism. She read the letters of Vincent van Gogh and studied the biography of Paul Cézanne and, somewhat later, the art of Henri Matisse. During this period, Udaltsova began moving in Moscow’s avant-garde circles, and in 1912 she traveled to Paris with her friend the painter Lyubov Popova. While in Paris she studied at the Académie de la Palette with Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger. These two French artists, who had written a noted book on Cubism, counted Udaltsova as their foremost Russian student. She effectively adapted the lessons of classical Cubism (as in the work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso), using it as a point of departure for an original style of her own, softening Cubism’s rational scheme with an uncommon wealth of shade and nuance of colour and a certain rationality that was more characteristic of Russian art. Returning to Moscow in 1913, she became a leading figure in the Russian avant-garde. Both she and Popova made their debuts at the fourth Jack of Diamonds exhibition in 1914, and in 1915 Udaltsova exhibited eight Cubist works at the exhibition “Tram V.” Her best works of that period (and probably her best work in any period) are New (1914–15), At the Piano (1915), Restaurant (1915), and Kitchen (1915). In 1916–17, after joining Kazimir Malevich’s group, Supremus, she painted several purely geometric Suprematist compositions.

In 1917–19 Udaltsova was active in cultural politics of Revolutionary Russia, organizing the Left Federation of Moscow Artists. Like her colleagues, she taught art at leading art schools, but unlike her avant-garde comrades-in-arms, Udaltsova did not abandon painting for design and actively opposed this trend by resigning in 1921 from the Institute of Artistic Culture. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Udaltsova experienced a fresh creative surge, during which she painted a series of landscapes of the Altai Mountain region, which she traveled to with her husband, the painter Aleksandr Drevin, in 1929–32. These landscapes, which she painted in an Expressionistic style clearly influenced by Drevin, were Udaltsova’s last major success. In January 1938 Drevin was arrested on political charges and was executed shortly after. (Her father, a retired general, had been executed by Bolsheviks in 1918.) Only after Drevin’s official rehabilitation in 1956—18 years after his death—did Udaltsova find out the truth about her husband’s end.

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During World War II, Udaltsova painted a series of portraits of fighter pilots. Her last personal exhibition was mounted in 1945 in Moscow. Denounced as a formalist, Udaltsova was forced to relinquish her teaching posts. The rest of her artistic life was spent in the confines of her studio. She painted mainly still lifes and landscapes, in which her efforts to move toward realism reveal a marked weakening in the quality of her painting.