Yelena Polenova

The names of Yelena Dmitrievna Polenova and Maria Vasilievna Yakunchikova-Weber are closely connected in the history of Russian art, and are linked to the origin and rise of the modernist style. A search for new experience brought the two women artists together. Their companionship, reflected in their correspondence, helped each to develop as an artist and was mutually enriching. Their letters show how this bonding gradually grew in importance. Reserved by nature, Yelena expressed her concern pithily: “It has been long since I last heard from Masha — I wrote to her already several times and received only one letter in reply”. Maria wrote: “I feel you intimately, and deeply and humbly hope to hear from you sometime”.

November 27 2010 marked the 160th anniversary of the birth of the remarkable Russian artist Yelena Dmitrievna Polenova (1850-1898), the sister of the famous landscape painter Vasily Polenov. To mark the artist’s anniversary, the Tretyakov Gallery prepared the exhibition titled “She lived in the magical world of the fairy tale”, which presented the most original and innovative of Polenova’s works, alongside archive documents, memorial photographs, books and magazines which revealed the artist’s singular social and artistic efforts.

The life story of Isaac Levitan as an artist is in many respects similar to the life stories of other graduates of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Most of them offspring of peasants or bankrupt merchants, and very few from noble families, they usually came to Moscow from the remote provinces practically penniless, and often, after the loss of parents, like Levitan.