Magda Nachman was born in 1889. In 1907, she enrolled in the Saint Petersburg art academy of Elizaveta Nikolaevna Zvantseva, where she studied with Léon Bakst, and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and later with Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.

In Zvantseva Academy (not later than 1910).
Magda Nachman—front-center. Second row, from left to right: M. Neiteller (?), Boris Takke (1889–1951), Alexander Ziloti (1887–1950), Boris Romberg (1882–1935). First row, from left to right: Varya Klimovich-Toper (188?–1914), Julia Timoreva-Popova (?–?), Nadezhda Lubavina (1889–1951). Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875–1957) is seated on the left. From the Nikolai Tyrsa family archive.

The beginning of Magda Nachman's artistic career coincided with the First World War, which was followed by the two Russian Revolutions and Civil War. During this tumultuous time, Magda was forced to move from place to place in search of shelter and livelihood. She painted propaganda posters on railroad cars, was a bookkeeper in a forestry management near Vladimir, and worked as a stage designer at a people's theater in the village of Ust-Dolyssy, in Vitebsk province. In 1920, Magda returned to Moscow, where she had moved from Saint Petersburg (called Petrograd in those years) back in 1916. There she met the prominent Indian nationalist M.P.T. Acharya, who 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 1922, Magda and Acharya married and emigrated to Berlin. With the rise of Hitler and increasing difficulties for refugees to reside in Europe, the Acharyas managed to move to India. They settled in

Bombay, where soon Magda became a member of the Bombay Art Society and began to exhibit. She found herself surrounded by a group of young Indian artists, later called the "Progressive Artists," for whom she became a generous teacher and friend. In the Indian press, she was often called the "Great little lady of the art world of Bombay." Magda had become recognized as an Indian artist.

Magda Nachman is familiar to many Russians as the author of the only oil portrait (1913) of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva painted from life. In recent years, her portrait of Vladimir Nabokov has become known in Russia (the original is lost, and only a photograph survives). Only one work by Magda is now in a Russian museum. The painting "Peasant Woman" (1916) entered the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan in Kazan in 1920 and was exhibited in 2016 at the exhibition "Around Petrov-Vodkin" in the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. No other works by Magda are known in Russia, with the exception of several small drawings in the collections of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Tsvetaeva Museum, and State Literature Museum. However, in India they still remember her and preserve her paintings.

Magda Nachman story is that of a woman forced to flee from revolution, civil war, and Nazism while remaining an artist in spite of everything. In recent years, art exhibitions in Russia have brought to light many forgotten artists, including students of the Zvantseva Academy, in which Magda had studied. Exhibitions of Léon Bakst's students Nikolai Tyrsa, Julia Obolenskaya, Nadezhda Lermontova and many students of Petrov-Vodkin, as well as large exhibitions of the work of Bakst himself, the first teacher of the academy, were recently mounted in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

This exhibition of the work of Magda Nachman restores the name of an undeservedly forgotten artist.