Prof. Hélène Menegaldo (Еле́на Менегальдо), is a French Slavic scholar of Russian origin. Honorary professor at the University of Poitiers in France, she is an expert on the Russian diaspora and the poet Boris Poplavski. We are delighted to post the following article. It was originally written in French and has been kindly translated in English by Prof. Gilles Menegaldo for the Mintchine Society. The article will also be included in the biographic section of the website.
“Unveiling something invisible to our dead eyes …” – such is, according to the poet and critic Boris Poplavski, the immense merit of the work of Abraham Mintchine who, “by a completely unusual union of realism and fantasy, […] has managed to paint Parisian sunsets or even unreal night lights such as the angels he loved to draw, his demons, dolls, harlequins and clowns, themselves were born from the radiation and movement of the atmosphere of his paintings, above all and specifically unusually realistic.”
In these paintings angels share the life of men, appear to them in their dreams, keep watch over the sleeping children. Heavenly ships, weaving invisible links between earth and sky, they participate in the nature of the two universes. Mintchine was one of those “lost angels” who vibrated at the impalpable presence of the supra-sensitive at the heart of everyday life. Hence the extraordinary achievement of the painter: Everything is alive in these interiors. For Mintchine, there were no inanimate objects, chairs, lamps, dolls and bouquets – in his work everything lives, moves, breathes, as if he were releasing all the spirits and angels locked in objects.
In his work everything lives, moves, breathes, as if he were releasing all the spirits and angels locked in objects
It was in Paris, in this too short period of time granted him by fate that the painter was to create his work, because the “métèque” artists found there a freedom unknown in their fatherland as well as great brotherliness: Montparnasse became the ark of Russian culture, a second homeland for these uprooted people driven out of their country by pogroms, civil war or border changes.
Abraham Mintchine was born in 1898 in Kiev. He was bound apprentice at the age of thirteen in the shop of a goldsmith and lost his health there, but learned to work gold, a precious material, a symbol of the Spirit, which he craftfully handled, soaking up its light which will later illuminate his paintings. This training accounts for accuracy and speed of execution in his work, underlined by his friend the poet and art critic Boris Poplavski: “He could, in a minute, change the lighting and general meaning of a large canvas. This great ease, however, did not spoil the essence of his painting, because it was constantly supported and nourished by his extraordinarily serious conception, one could say a really tragic one, of the calling of art”.
Noted for his ability to draw, Mintchine entered the School of Fine Arts in Kiev in 1914 thanks to the recommendation of the poet Samuel Marchak. Kiev, a southern city open to the influences of the East, was then the cradle of literary and pictorial futurism, a locus for travelling artistic exhibitions, a meeting place for artists of all kinds wishing to create an original culture reconciling modernism and national heritage (Ukrainian folk art, Jewish sacred art and folklore. Despite the ambient anti-Semitism, literature, plastic arts (with Lyssizky, Rybak, Tyschler, Schifrin…) and the Jewish theatre flourished in the city thanks to the Kulturligue (Center for Jewish Culture) which operated there from 1917 to 1920, the year of the definitive establishment of Soviet power. The workshop of Alexandra Exter, a pioneer in 20th century art, was one of the salons of the city’s intellectual elite. At the end of 1918, Exter opened, with the painter Isaac Rabinovitch, a decorative art workshop where scenography was also taught. The following year, with a group of artists (Rabinovitch, Tychler, Schifrin), Exter adorned the city with banners ornated with abstract motifs: the street became a museum of living art.
While it cannot be argued that Mintchine was Alexandra Exter’s disciple, the artistic atmosphere of the Ukrainian capital certainly played a role in his training. The painter then went through the terrible years of civil war and famine that devastated Ukraine and in 1923, like many Russian refugees, he took the Polish route to join Berlin in the company of his wife Sonia, a lyrical artist. Berlin, the third Russian capital between 1922 and 1925, saw the confrontation of all the pictorial trends of the time: German expressionism, but also cubo-futurism, suprematism and constructivism, imported by Russian artists fleeing the Soviet regime or, on the contrary, wishing to promote its achievements. The German capital then has 70,000 Russian nationals.
The painter then went through the terrible years of civil war and famine that devastated Ukraine
Chagall stated: “In my life, I never saw as many beautiful rabbis and constructivists as in Berlin in 1922”. A first step on the road to exile, Berlin also attracts, because of its low cost of living, artists already settled in Paris like sculptor Alexandre Archipenko, painters Constantin Terechkovitch and Serge Charchoune, but also writers, poets and journalists. All used to meet at the House of Arts, chaired by the symbolist poet Minski. This was where, coming from Soviet Russia, Maïakovski and Essénine used to perform their poetic evenings, this was where representatives of the diaspora and the metropolis could meet thanks to the relative opening of borders due to NEP. Ivan Pougny’s lecture on modern art triggered fierce controversy between A. Archipenko, Natan Altman, Naoum Gabo, El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenbourg. The artists of the two sides of the border ran exhibitions together as part of the Grosse Berliner Kunstauustellung, created in 1919.
In 1923, Lissitsky organized his Proouns room there, Charchoune, Jawlensky and Pougny exhibited their work in the section of November, the leftist group. The painters joined up in the workshop of the Pougny couple, located near the Nollendorfplatz, a meeting place for the Russian and German intelligentsia, and in the workshop of the painter Nicolas Zaretski, frequented, among others, by Mintchine, Terechkovitch as well as by Larionov and Gontcharova: the couple, settled in Europe since 1916, came to supervise the staging of the ballet L’écharpe de Colombine, at Boris Romanov’s Russian Romantic Theatre. This was undoubtedly where Mintchine and Poplavski first met: their common friend, the poet Vadim Andreev, reported their presence at the same time. Both painters worked in Berlin and to earn a living. Mintchine drew costumes and sets for the Jewish Theatre and painted, in a cubist style, canvases of which only one is known.
In November 1922 the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung held the first exhibition of Russian art in the West. This major artistic event presents at the Van Diemen Gallery one hundred and fifty artists, from the19th century Ambulants to the avant-garde (Malevitch, Gabo, Pevsner, Lissitsky …). The year 1922 represented the apex of the Russian presence in Berlin: during the winter of 1923-1924, the German atmosphere became “heavy and catastrophic”, according to philosopher Berdiaev. In addition, deflation no longer allowed a favourable exchange rate, the foreign currency and securities brought from Russia were spent up. Publishers, newspapers and magazines, theatres and cabarets closed one after the other – everything that provided a livelihood for diaspora artists and intellectuals was gone.
He knew how to avoid the orgy of colours and the taste for decorum
In 1925, Mintchine had an exhibition in Berlin; on the following year, he reached Paris where his art, rid of the “childhood disease of painting” that is cubism, was to experience a rapid evolution: characters and objects, freed from the black line which surrounded and imprisoned them, shone with an aura of light which transfigured them; the painter gave up dull shades, the grey and brown tones of his beginnings were erased from his palette in favour of a solar range associating red with yellow-gold, and his colours acquired this fluidity that René Gimpel would later greet. However, he knew how to avoid the orgy of colours and the taste for decorum which the painters of the Russian school of Paris readily yielded to. His search for unexpected and complex combinations of colours, the power and expressiveness of his portraits, such as The Man with the Red Pullover, brought him much closer to Soutine, while the spirituality and harmony that emanated from his paintings distinguished them from the tormented art of his elder, both artists being comparable in terms of their talent.
“Working tirelessly, burning with a constant flame”, according to the word of his friend Poplavski, he was quickly to reach the fullness of his talent, despite suffering terrible misery: he earned a living by painting scarves, decorating plates and probably, as a street musician, according to the self-portraits where he stands with a mandolin or a violin (an excellent musician, he played the piano and the violin). He lived on the fringes of the bohemian life of Montparnasse cafes that were the haunts of his colleagues who arrived with the first waves of emigration (1907-1911, then 1920), devoting all his available time to his painting and his home where some close friends came to seek some peace of mind: “I spent the whole day with the Mintchines”, notes his friend Poplavski in his journal. “The clock ticking, the stove purred, the piano cut out its crystal notes, and Sonia, like a caged bird, sang ancient songs”. After the passing of her husband, Sonia gave a concert at the private hotel of René Gimpel (16/02/1933), with the participation of the French singer Tosca Marmor, and in 1934 played Mozart, Schumann, Handel, at the Hôtel Majestic.
Mintchine was sensitive to the magic of Paris: “One of his favourite themes was evening in Paris, with the extraordinary difficulty of its lights and the first shadows of the streets, as well as interiors illuminated by scintillating clouds and the translucent gleam from a table lamp”. As Poplavski noted, Mintchine had studied with the “old masters, in particular Rembrandt, El Greco and Claude Lorrain, [and] absolutely did not fear these “difficult” lights that to-day young painters strive hard to avoid”. Even though there were reminiscences of biblical themes, each painting condensed the sparks of the divine scattered in nature and, according to Kabbalah, “brings up the sparks” so that they unite with infinite light: Mintchine did not paint the themes, but the very soul of Hassidism. This is how his quest to apprehend the deeper “secrets of plastic magic”, as Poplavski notes, resulted in the redemption of the “nature” of the painting by means of its “soul”, leading to rare, extremely sensitive works of art.
These paintings, displayed at the Salon des Tuileries, Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, attracted the attention of collectors and critics. In 1928, Mintchine exhibited at the Margaret Henry Gallery, rue de Seine, with Alekseï Arapov, Moïse Bloume (Maurice Blond) and Boris Poplavski (catalogue prefaced by Serge Romov, editor of the journal Oudar). Three of his works appeared in the Russian section of the French Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The same year, his daughter Irene was born. He painted her in her cradle, watched over by an angel. Robert Falk, painter of the group Le Valet de Carreau who worked alongside Mintchine, of whom he was to leave a portrait, will write: “With his fiery temper, his enormous love of art, he was bound to become a remarkable artist. […] It was very beneficial to me to live with an artist like him, whose thoughts and feelings were turned towards art.”
Mintchine did not paint the themes, but the very soul of Hassidism
The following year saw the first Parisian exhibition of Mintchine, at Alice Manteau’s, then at Zborowski’s. The famous art dealer René Gimpel bought many paintings, which allowed him to go to Provence to try and restore his health — he had a heart condition and suffered from tuberculosis and he had been operated on for a kidney — undermined by a life of deprivation. The contract signed with René Gimpel in 1930 protected him from need and allowed him to devote himself entirely to painting. In contact with Provence nature, he made prodigious progress and wonderfully assimilated the landscape, according to the testimony of his friend the painter André Favory, who noted: “A frantic ardour urged him to do three painting sessions a day as if he sensed the brevity of his passage on earth”. Leaving urban themes, he made, during this fruitful period, large paintings like La Joute Provençale or his magnificent Portrait of a Travelling Merchant. For the first time, thanks to the contact with air and water, blue tones helped expand a chromatic range which offered an extraordinary variety of reds and ochres.
In January 1930, a large exhibition of Russian painters organized by the Zak gallery enabled Mintchine to appear on the picture rails alongside, among others, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Gontcharova, André Lanskoy, Ivan Pougny, Paul Mansourov, Natan Altman…. That same year marked the birth of the journal Tchisla, a young generation platform that gave a large place to the cultural and artistic events of the School of Paris. Its ten issues offered reproductions of works by forty-one painters: Chagall, Gontcharova, Larionov, Pascin … and Mintchine, whose talent was paid tribute to in the journal.
Tchisla set up several remarkable exhibitions at The L’Époque gallery, eight in all. The first, which took place from March 23 to April 9, 1931, displayed two paintings by Mintchine. In a letter to Alice Manteau, he regretted that he was unable to attend this exhibition and asked his friends to share their impressions with him. On April 25, the painter died of ruptured aneurysm in La Garde, near Toulon, leaving sorrowful relatives and friends. With him, it was one of the great masters of painting of the beginning of the 20th century who disappeared, “a genius died in the prime of life”, according to René Gimpel’s words, taken up by his Russian friends and critics.
On the following year, the Salon des Indépendants offered a retrospective bringing together ten paintings by the departed painter, whose canvases also appeared in Le Visage Humain exhibition, mounted by Tchisla. In the article he then gave to the Russian journal, Maximilien Gauthier noted that these retrospectives allow a better appreciation of the loss suffered. “Even in his least fantastic paintings, where the supernatural does not show openly,” the critic wrote, “it manages to convey an atmosphere which leads to meditate on the mysteries that surround us”. Noting what Mintchine’s visionary art owes to his mastery of the profession and his refusal of easy effects, he underlines the quality of the pictorial material, the texture of the painting, the felicitous mingling of pure colours. He prophesizes: “In the history of the Paris School, the name of Mintchine shall appear alongside those of Modigliani, Chagall and Soutine.”
The Union of Jewish Artists put up a Mintchine retrospective in 1938 and in July 1939, his paintings were still displayed at an exhibition by Russian painters at the Galerie Le Cadran. Then war came, together with the ransacking of workshops, the closure of galleries, the disappearance in the death camps of many representatives of the Paris School. His untimely death, then the scattering of his works deprived Mintchine of a recognition that his friends – Gontcharova, Larionov, Soutine, Lanskoy and others will experience, albeit belatedly.
Massimo Di Veroli who discovered the paintings of the Parisian painter displayed at the Lorenzelli Gallery in Bergamo in 1969, devoted his life to repairing this injustice, bringing together the works, organizing exhibitions, publishing catalogues: let him be thanked here on behalf of all those for whom he has made it possible to discover and love this truly inspired painting.
Hélène Menegaldo
University of Poitiers
Translated from French, first published in 2009