Magda Nachman in Russia

Magda Nachman was born on July 20, 1889, in Pavlovsk, a suburb of Saint Petersburg, into the large and prosperous family of the attorney Maximilian Yulianovich Nachman and his wife, Klara Alexandrovna (née von Roeder).

Magda studied at the Annenschule, a Saint Petersburg gymnasium, at the time of its greatest renown. She passed all her examinations with high marks and graduated in 1906 with the award of a silver medal, which qualified her to work as a private tutor or governess without further certification or to teach at a progymnasium (a school that prepared pupils for gymnasium after primary school). A year later, she submitted an application to audit courses at the history–philology faculty at Saint Petersburg Imperial University (women could not enroll as regular students, but her high-school diploma allowed her to enroll as an auditor). But Magda's greatest interests and talents were artistic, and so she began attending art classes at the Mutual Aid Society of Russian Artists even before completing her high-school exams. There she met other aspiring artists, some of whom became her closest friends, among them Julia Obolenskaya, Natalia Grekova, and, a bit later, Varya Klimovich-Toper. They formed a tightly knit group, calling themselves "our quartet," and they remained together for many years, until circumstances separated them.

In 1907, all four enrolled in the Zvantseva Art Academy as students of the great artist and teacher Léon Bakst as well as of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and after 1910, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Magda had embarked on her serious artistic preparation.

Magda's life was tightly connected with the school: it gave her excellent teachers and beloved friends. The first art exhibition of work of Bakst's students was mounted in the exhibition space of the arts journal Apollon, opening on April 20, 1910. Magda made a sketch of the exhibition in which she depicted herself spying on the few visitors. This sketch is the only record of the works exhibited. In the spirit of collectivism, the students did not sign their paintings, which were identified only by numbers. However, we know the creators of many of the works because someone annotated Magda's drawing at a later date.

At the same time, Magda drew caricatures of the participants. With a few strokes outlining the figures, she made them fully recognizable:

Following the 1910 show, Magda continued to participate in exhibitions. She remained at school until the spring of 1913.

At the end of the school year, most of the Zvantseva Academy students would leave the city for Crimea or dachas in Finland, or they would travel to their famililes' estates in the countryside. In 1912, looking forward to her departure from Saint Petersburg, Magda drew a postcard and sent it to her friend Julia, who had already left for the summer, signing it, "View from my window on a rainy St. Petersburg day," in which a monochromatic misty cityscape contrasts with a lush summer landscape full of color and sunlight. She spent summer of 1913 in Koktebel, Crimea, at the dacha of the poet Maximilian Voloshin.

In Koktebel, Magda and her closest friend, Julia Obolenskaya, kept a sketchbook (now in the archive of the State Literary Museum, in Moscow). Magda also produced several oil paintings, including a portrait of Maximilian Voloshin's mother, Elena Ottobaldovna Kiriyenko-Voloshina.

In Koktebel, Magda met the poet Marina Tsvetaeva; her husband, Sergey Efron; and his sisters Elizabeth and Vera. Little has been preserved of the many sketches, drawings, and paintings of that summer. Magda's portrait of Marina Tsvetaeva is the only oil portrait done during the poet's lifetime.

The viewer's attention is drawn to Tsvetaeva's face by the contrast between the softness of the background colors and the bright cobalt-blue dress that

emphasizes the color of her skin, lips, and eyes. The asymmetry of the pose is a strong expression of the poet's character: the round lyricism of the left shoulder contrasts with the straight line of the right shoulder and arm that support the figure. Although there is a soft cushion or chair back behind her, Tsvetaeva is not reclining on it. She enters the picture at an angle: an unusual and fleeting pose. And she does not look at the viewer. Rather, her eyes are looking within herself. It is a portrait of a strong, independent, and lonely person who does not rely on anything or anyone but herself. Magda caught the essence of her sitter.

Among the surviving works of that summer is a pencil portrait of Sergei Efron, a study for a later large-scale portrait that was finished in the fall of 1916. Magda had been working on the portrait for several months (Tsvetaeva complained of Magda's slow pace: "Now Magda is painting his portrait, driving him crazy with her tortoise-like pace").1 The whereabouts of the portrait are unknown—it was preserved only in a photograph of Anastasia Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, the poet's sister, taken in her room shortly before her arrest in 1937 during Stalin's purges. Anastasia Ivanovna described the moment when she first saw Sergei's portrait:

We are in Marina's room. Alya is snuggling up to her mother. Across from the small door, a bit to the right, over the magnificent spartan bed—nothing more than a box spring. There Seryozha's portrait, almost in natural size, is hanging on a wooden frame covered in rust-colored sackcloth.

—Oh, Magda has finished (I, stepping aside to take it in better)—good … her wondrous brush. And very like him.

Seryozha, lying on a chaise longue, was looking at us, and there was in his glance a certain quietness.2

In the summer of 1913, in Koktebel, Magda met Konstantin Vasilyevich Kandaurov, the "Moscow Diaghilev," as Maximilian Voloshin introduced him. The sketchbook contains a pencil portrait of Kandaurov by Magda.

Magda spent almost every summer from 1913 to 1917 in Crimea, most often in Bakhchisarai, sometimes visiting Koktebel. Many landscapes were painted during those years:

In the spring of 1916, Magda moved from Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) to Moscow. One of the few surviving paintings of this period is Peasant Woman (1916).

Magda painted this picture around 1916. It was exhibited in a Moscow art show and bought by a collector. In 1920, it became a part of the State Museum of Fine Arts collection in Kazan. Its fate at the time was typical of many works that after the October Revolution were being sent to museums far and wide with the goal of acquainting the working classes, to whom it now belonged, with high art. The painting hung in the Kazan museum until 1946, when along with many other works of art it was condemned by the authorities as a product of formalism, and therefore alien to the Soviet people and to the goals of socialist realism. It was ordered to be destroyed.

One of the museum's curators, Sagadat Ishmuratova, risking her freedom, took several condemned canvases—Magda's among them—out of their frames, rolled them up, and hid them in various obscure corners of the museum. In the 1960s, shortly before her death, she revealed what she had done to a curator who had just joined the museum's staff and had expressed interest in art beyond the confines of socialist realism. At the first opportunity, the young man took the canvases home and kept them hidden until the 1990s, when the danger of harboring forbidden art had passed. They are now back in the museum's collection.3

In this picture, in the artist's formal approach to color, composition, and perspective, one can see the influence of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Magda's earlier works—her Crimean landscapes and portrait of Tsvetaeva, as well as paintings of her Indian period—are executed in a completely different manner. Magda considered herself first and foremost a student of Bakst, not of Petrov-Vodkin.

The time of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War was difficult and discouraging for Magda. She could not afford to live in Moscow—there was no work, and it became impossible to support herself. But to be far from Moscow, from friends, from everything for which she had lived—was also unbearable. Magda spent several months with a sister near Vladimir, worked as a bookkeeper in a forestry office, and for some time covered railroad cars with propaganda paintings. For a whole year, from autumn 1919 to autumn 1920, she and Elizaveta Efron stayed in the village of Ust′-Dolyssy, near Nevel. Efron became the director of the Village People's Theater, and Nachman worked as a scene and costume designer and makeup artist. Here is how Elizaveta Efron described this time in a letter of 1923 to her brother:

I became an actress because of hunger. I would never have gone on stage, but that's how it happened: either die, or act and lie that you are an experienced actress. I became an actress and … a Khlestakov. In the newspapers, they

wrote about me as an actress of the Art Theater. This is my unbelievable epic. I was at once director, heroine, and comic old woman. Magda was the stage designer.4

Magda painted portraits of the Ust′-Dolyssy residents in exchange for food. Unfortunately, these works were destroyed by fire during World War II in the bombing of the village. By the fall of 1920, funding for the theater had ended; supplies of paints, canvas, and paper dwindled. In November 1920, Magda returned to Moscow.

Within two years of Magda's departure from Ust′-Dolyssy, in 1922, she had married the Indian Brahmin and nationalist M.P.T. Acharya, with whom she left Russia, never to return. Before her departure, Magda painted a portrait of her mother, Klara Alexandrovna, which she took with her into exile. At present, the portrait is in London with the great-granddaughter of Klara Alexandrovna, Sophie Seifalian.

M.P.T. Acharya had arrived in Bolshevik Russia with a group of Indian comrades in search of ideological partners in their struggle to drive the British out of their country and give birth to an independent India. In their youth, nothing even remotely foreshadowed the possibility of Magda and Acharya's meeting—"fantastic," according to Magda herself.

However, Acharya's work with the Comintern and his experience of the Soviet methods of conquest and subjugation of colonized peoples led to his thoroughgoing disenchantment with Soviet Russia and the Comintern. He began engaging more seriously with ideas of anarchism, describing himself thereafter as an anarcho-syndicalist. From a militant fighter, he had become a pacifist.

To leave Russia in those years was not easy even for a foreigner. Acharya believed that it was a combination of luck and vigilance that had allowed him and Magda to emigrate.

1 From Marina's letter to Lilya. Marina Tsvetaeva. The Unpublished. Family: History in Letters, ed. E. Korkina, Moscow: Ellis Lak, 2012, 227–229.
2 Anastasia Tsvetaeva, "Marinin dom," in Neischerpaemoe, Moscow: Motherland, 1992, 141.
3 See Nataliia Gerasimova, "Magda Nachman i sud′ba ee kartiny" in Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin i ego shkola, in two volumes, ed. Ildar Galeev, Moscow: Galeev-Gallery, 2015 vol. 1, 200–203.
4 Tsvetaeva, Neizdannoe, 300. Khlestakov, a character from Nikolai Gogol's play The Inspector-General, is an incorrigible liar.