Olga Sacharoff (1881-1967). A RECORD OF AN INVESTIGATION INTO HER LIFE AND WORK

On the 140th Anniversary of Olga Sacharoff

In place of a foreword

I am not sure whether to classify Olga Sacharoff as one of our own artists or as a foreign artist - in her case, it is difficult to avoid ethnographic picturesqueness. “Isn’t she Russian?” is what everyone says, but I always want to answer: “I’m not sure.” It’s very likely that she herself isn’t sure. Indeed, how could one possibly state with confidence “She’s Russian and that’s all there is to it”? The thing is, she moved to Barcelona during the Great War. The thing is, no one has managed to better express in painting the essential quintessence not simply of the Catalonian soul, but specifically the soul of Barcelona, than this woman who, if I may so express myself, can hardly be said to speak any of the Western European languages.

Eugenio d’Ors[1]

The year 2021 marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of the remarkable Russian and Catalan artist Olga Sacharoff.

OLGA SACHAROFF. Self-portrait. 1932.
Oil on canvas. 70 × 59 cm. Courtesy of Museu de Valls

Sacharoff was born and raised in the Caucasus, in the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire. She first set on eyes on Catalonia, on Barcelona, during the First World War, and spent the last 30 years of her long life living there. In late 2017, on the anniversary of her death, a memorial board was installed on the building where she lived with her husband, the artist and photographer Otho Lloyd (at the address 3, Carrer de Manacor, in the El Putget neighbourhood of Barcelona), and a large retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Museu d’Art de Girona. Accompanied by a series of soirees in memory of the artist and lectures on her life and work, later published in Catalan and English by Elina Norandi, the exhibition made an unmistakeable contribution to the advancement of Sacharoff’s profile internationally.[2]

Indeed, until recent years the artist’s work had never received the recognition it deserves. It has been poorly studied and is not well known beyond the borders of Spain, and Catalonia in particular, despite the considerable time Sacharoff spent in Paris.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist’s fine Impressionist language was remote to the artistic interests of the day and seemed - even to Sacharoff herself - to belong to a distant figurative past that had outlived its usefulness. “I am outside of contemporaneity, as though I had gone out of fashion”[3] was her comment in one interview from the early 1960s. Her pool of admirers did not dry up, however: until the end of her days, she worked a lot on commissions, developing the genre of the chamber family portrait, which she was able to imbue with an unusual freshness. With the approach of the 1970s, Sacharoff’s work began to be seen by Catalan art critics in an historical light, and her name began to appear regularly in serious general works on the history of Catalan art.[4]

A Russian emigree living in Spain with an English passport (thanks to her husband), Sacharoff managed to become a Catalan painter and receive official Catalan prizes even in the Francoist era - for example, the silver medal of the city of Barcelona for her contribution to the development of Catalan art in the years 1964-1966.[5]

One can find many reasons for the recognition Sacharoff enjoyed in contemporary Catalonia, as well as a number of coincidences brought about by the collision of various circumstances. However, one of the main reasons for this Russian artist’s creative fate must be located in her own singular talents and in the closeness of her creative pursuits with those of Catalan art in the 20th century, a general cultural phenomenon usually known as the noucentisme catala,[6] which continued to develop the Neoclassical and Primitivist tendencies of the early years of the century. The inner link between Sacharoff’s art and the postmodernist aesthetic of the Catalan noucento was noted by Eugenio d’Ors - an exceptional Spanish and Catalan art critic, philosopher, writer and art historian specialising in the art of the first half of the 20th century, who also occupied the post of head of the Directorate General of Fine Arts from 1923 to 1939.7 An understanding of the artistic processes under way in the 1920s as “the beginning of a new cycle of eternal classicism” is, according to d’Ors, inseparable within the aesthetic of the noucento from conceptualisations of Catalan art as part of the general European cultural landscape. D’Ors was not the only one struck by Sacharoff - Josep Maria Sert, Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Ortega y Gasset and many other prominent figures in the early 20th century blossoming of Spanish and Catalan art also took notice of the Russian Parisienne from Montparnasse.

Sacharoff’s remarkable talent, her unique vision and the power of her creative nature allowed her to stand out in the 1940s too, when d’Ors organised the famous Salones de los Once[8] in Madrid’s Biosca Gallery. Along with the outstanding female painters Maria Blanchard and Rosario de Velasco, Sacharoff was invited by d’Ors to participate in the first Salon in 1943.

In recent years, researchers have begun to study Sacharoff’s oeuvre in terms of its role in the development of Dadaism and, more generally, the activity of a group of artists of the Parisian Avant-garde who moved to Barcelona during the First World War.[9] In 1990s Barcelona, the Jardines de Olga Sacharoffwere added to the list of the Las Cortes district’s many squares, the Jardines' greenery strewn with white marble cubes in reference to the artist’s Cubist past.[10]

With the appearance of an art market in Russia in the 1990s to the 2000s, Sacharoff’s painting reappeared on the radar of international art connoisseurs and collectors,[11] although not, it must be noted, for the first time. Her work had formed part of important international collections in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the celebrated collection of Pierre Regnault (a large part of which he left on loan at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum[12]), and as such was successfully exhibited in Paris,[13] Venice,[14] London,[15] New York,[16] and even as far afield as Jakarta.[17] However, the active inclusion of Sacharoff’s work in international exhibitions before the Second World War gave way in the postwar years to modest participation in European exhibitions.[18]

Sacharoff stands alongside the most outstanding artists of the 1920s and 1930s, a person who managed to forge her own path, artistically and personally. Sacharoff never forgot her past, like other artists of her generation belonging to the Russian diaspora - Chagall, Sciltian or Marevna (Marie Vorobieff).

It is only recently that important details of the artist’s early biography have been brought to light. Olga Sacharoff was born on May 29 (on the Julian calendar, June 11 on the Gregorian), 1881, in Tiflis (modern Tbilisi) to a Russian family settled in the Caucasus. A record of her birth has been preserved in the parish register of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Tiflis, reading “The daughter of the late Titular Councillor Glotov, the maiden Elisaveta, confessing the Orthodox faith, gave birth on the 29 May 1881 to a daughter, Olga.” Two years later, in March 1883, the child was christened in the Didube Church of Our Lady in Tiflis with her paternal grandfather, the military doctor Aleksei Sacharoff, acting as godfather.[19] It was by virtue of this that the child received the surname Sacharoff. Her parents, Nikolai Sacharoff and Elisaveta Glotova, were married the following year.

Sacharoff’s father was Nikolai Sacharoff (1852-1927) - a doctor and prominent microbiologist,[20] and her mother was Elisaveta Glotova (1855-?), the daughter of the customs officer Georgy Glotov and Martha Nergadze. In her father’s family, her uncle Alexander Sacharoff (18571920) was a well-known military painter,[21] and her aunt Claudia Severina (1850-after 1918) was the head of the Batumi Charitable Society.[22] The young Olga Sacharoff grew up in the milieu of the Russian aristocratic intelligentsia.

There is a lack of information about the beginning of Sacharoff’s pursuit of painting and there is no documentary evidence for her having studied in the Tiflis School of Art. In Batumi, she may have studied drawing with the artist Sergei Grositsky,[23] who taught at the city’s Mariinsky Gymnasium at the end of the 19th century. There are also no sources for her having studied painting in St. Petersburg, where she moved in 1905 and remained, as far as we are aware, until 1909.

Olga Sacharoff was then 25 and living in St. Petersburg during the peak of the Russian Art Nouveau, a time when Russian culture reached its apex of sophistication, its Silver Age. One can just about make out a certain knowledge of Russian Art Nouveau and in particular of the “MirIskusstva” (“World of Art”) movement, in certain of her better-known early works. Unfortunately, Sacharoff rarely dated her works and, if we consider also that the majority of her work is held in private collections, unavailable to the public and as yet little studied, then the difficulties presented by the study of her work become obvious.

Another mystery linked with Olga’s biography is the exact year she left St. Petersburg for Europe. There is a theory that she studied painting in Munich in 1910. It has recently been discovered that, while staying at her cousin Lydia Hoffman’s house in St. Petersburg, she met for the first time Lydia’s brother-in-law, Vsevolod Hoffman (1879-after 1941), a military engineer and music enthusiast whom she married in June 1907[24]. At that time, her brother Nikolai Sacharoff was also in the city, studying mathematics at St. Petersburg University. The very existence of this first marriage was hitherto unknown to researchers of her life and work.

Her second husband was Otho Lloyd. Was she in Munich at all in those years? The transcription of her surname as Sacharoff, spelled with a “c” rather than a “k” (Sakharoff), as it would have been according to the French manner, makes one wonder. This may have been the German transliteration of her surname, or the way it was written in her Russian passport. Admittedly, it is more likely than not that “Hoffman” was the surname in her passport, as it was in the certificate of her marriage to Otho Lloyd in Barcelona in 1917.[25]

Did Sacharoff study in Munich? Her painting certainly contained elements of German Expressionism and an obvious knowledge of the artistic grouping “Der Blaue Reiter” (“The Blue Rider”) can undoubtedly be felt in her work. The paintings of Franz Marc and August Macke clearly made a strong impression on Sacharoff, as did the development of their theory of “objective colour” and a colour spectrum, the correspondence of the rhythms of nature, the animal kingdom and the cosmos. It must be said, however, that Sacharoff’s art was not based on the theorising of the schools through or by which she passed, but was based largely on feelings, impressions, imagination and intuition, on an inner dialogue with the surrounding world and the expression of her personal “I”.

It is safe to suppose that Sacharoff was in Munich in 1911 and saw the Der Blaue Reiter group’s first exhibition. As is commonly known, this was a comparatively small exhibition, which mainly included works by Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc and August Macke. The Russian contingent represented also included the Burliuk brothers, whom Kandinsky had met in Odessa not long before. Russian icons and lubok prints from Kandinsky’s own collection were also displayed, along with some examples of Bavarian ex-voto art and naive paintings on wood and glass that reflected the artistic circle’s attraction to naive “folk” art.[26] Most important of all, however, was the selection of Henri Rousseau’s paintings on display, also drawn from Kandinsky’s collection, another tribute to Le Douanier (who had died in 1910[27]) along with the monograph written by Wilhelm Uhde.[28] Kandinsky venerated Rousseau’s art: in his letters to Franz Marc and in Der Blaue Reiter group’s almanac of 1912, he described Rousseau as an expression of “the highest simplicity”, as the father of “the highest realism”, as “the root” of “a new reality.”[29] The young Sacharoff was undoubtedly of the same opinion. From then on, and for the rest of her life, she strove to be true to the “highest” lessons of Rousseau’s art. She borrowed his significant formalistic approach to the creation of space, the flawless rhythm of repeating lines of trees, the communication of depth by means of a confident juxtaposition of planes. Her explorations led her in various directions, but, in each of them, she strove to achieve that “new reality”, the “highest simplicity”, the highest truth that reverberated through Rousseau’s approach to the depiction of people and nature. Sacharoff could also, of course, see a greater quantity of even more significant works by Rousseau at his personal exhibition held at the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1911, labelled a triumph by Guillaume Apollinaire.[30]

It is certain that, by 1912, Sacharoff was no longer in Munich. The works of “Mademoiselle Sacharoff” first appeared in Paris’s Salon d’Automne of 1912. This was the famous 10th Salon d’automne, where the vast canvases of Francis Picabia, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger hung in the sensational 11th hall, demonstrating the triumph of cubism. Sacharoff’s paintings hung in the same hall as those of Matisse and Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac and were written about by Louis Vauxcelles in his reviews of the Salon for “Gil Blas”[31], and her ‘pots’ were much to the taste of Guillaume Apollinaire.[32] At this point, she was still relatively unknown, but beginning to attract the attention of critics, starting to approach something like fame. Sacharoff studied under Jean Metzinger at the Academie de La Palette, frequented the workshops of Matisse and Dunoyer de Segonzac, visited the Russian Academy from time to time with the artist Marie Vassilieff (1884-1957) and copied the works of the Old Masters at the Louvre. Her parents witnessed their daughter’s success on a visit to Paris in 1912, when they met, among a varied selection of the city’s artistic and literary elite, Eugenio d’Ors, who was, in the future, to play an important role in the recognition and evaluation of Sacharoff’s art in Spain and Catalonia.

The majority of Sacharoff’s Parisian friends were also Russian emigrants: Chana Orloff, Sonia Delaunay, Serge Charchoune, Chaïm Soutine, Marie Vassilieff, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. To their ranks may be added Francis Picabia, Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire, Gleizes, Metzinger and Picasso... and, as we shall see, Otho Lloyd. This was an astounding, one-of-a-kind international artistic brotherhood, imbued with the spirit of internationalism and artistic cosmopolitanism that was born in and flourished in Paris, in Montparnasse, in the years of Sacharoff’s youth, and which she was beginning to feel a part of.

Varied roots, varied sources and even varied art movements are intertwined in Sacharoff’s creative work and her complex destiny. Her painting is the best source for her life. Personal, deeply intimate emotions are transformed in the artist’s poetic vision of the world and burst onto the canvas with great simplicity and power.

Very few works have survived from her early period, between 1912 and 1920, but even they speak of the depth her art had already attained. In those years, the artist was interested by structure, perspective and the Cubist construction of space, while simultaneously developing her attention to the depiction of lighting, to the problem of light, the balance between light and objects. One gets the impression that pure colour was just not of interest to her in this period. Most surprising of all, however, was that her still-lifes of simple bottles, pots, and jars depicted in a dark grey, almost monochrome gamut, which so pleased Apollinaire, were remarkably similar to the paintings of the Caucasus school. Once again, we are faced with questions about the beginnings of Sacharoff’s art. To what extent in her youth could she have been aware of contemporary painters working in Tiflis and across Georgia? Who could have taught her painting in Georgia at the start of the century? And, once in Paris in the 1920s, did she encounter Georgian artists such David Kakabadze, Elene Akhvlediani, Lado Gudiashvili, and Vera Pagava, who also spent time in Paris while continuing to develop specifically Caucasian characteristics in their art?

In the 1910s, Sacharoff’s interests were focused mainly in the area of Cézannism and Cubism. The portraits of Otho Lloyd (of which three are known to researchers, all painted between 1915 and 1917 and currently in private collections, and all of which show the subject with a book, reading) represent the most Cézannesque of the artist’s work, although some researchers are inclined to interpret them as a tribute to the artist’s enthusiasm for Amedeo Modigliani.[33] We remind our readers that Otho St. Clair Lloyd[34] (1885-1979) was an English aristocrat, artist and photographer, as well as the nephew of Constance Lloyd, the wife of Oscar Wilde. Handsome, unmarried and highly educated, Otho Lloyd was surrounded by admirers and romantic interests while in no way lagging in the extravagance for which his brother, Arthur Cravan[35], was known. It is not surprising that such a figure proved attractive to Sacharoff who combined within herself a personality at once complex and serious, passionate and romantic, a believer in true love.

Considering art to be his calling from his early years, Lloyd studied at art schools in Switzerland, in Munich (19051907), in Rome (1908) and, later, in Paris (from 1909) under Matisse and Dunoyer de Segonzac. He used to visit the Russian Academy and was acquainted with many Russian artists in Paris, particularly the Delaunays. On learning of the outbreak of war, Sacharoff and Lloyd returned to an unrecognisable and suddenly changed Paris, instead of heading for the safety of Switzerland as suggested by Lloyd’s parents.[36]

In 1915, Sacharoff and Lloyd (seeking, like many Parisian bohemians of the time, to put some distance between themselves and the war) settled first in Mallorca, then in Céret in the South of France, thanks to the help of the sculptor Manuel Hugue, before finally reaching Barcelona, which was to host a circle of Avant-garde artist-emigrants, including in its ranks some of the most significant of the Cubists linked with Dadaism. Apart from Lloyd and Sacharoff, these included Francis Picabia, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Serge Charchoune, Arthur Cravan, Helene Grunhoff, Jean Metzinger, and the Delaunays, who were spending the summer by the sea in Tossa de Mar near Barcelona. Many photos taken during summers among the sand and rocks by the sea at Tossa have been preserved in private archives. In all of them, the tall, beautiful form of Sacharoff stands out, stately and full-figured. Thanks to the patronage of d’Ors, a link was forged between this circle and the gallery of the artist and art dealer Josep Dalmau, which was to become a crucible of the ‘new’ art. It was here that Picabia founded his famous journal “391”, the first published print ‘spokesperson’ for Dadaism, issued by Dalmau from 1917 to 1924. In 1917, Olga and Otho participated in the creation of the first issues of the journal, along with Joan Miró, Marie Laurencin and Apollinaire - Olga working on the preparation of mock-ups and Otho on the graphic design. Nonetheless, Sacharoff’s link with the Dadaists was one of friendship rather than creativity. She paid tribute to the elegant, synthetic Cubism and collage which, for all that, was clearly not capable of satisfying her fully, failing to correspond with her strivings for a “new reality” and her loyalty to the human image. Obviously, Sacharoff was hesitating in this period between a synthetic Cubism on the one hand and, essentially, a Constructivist abstraction on the other, all the while feeling the pull of the Cézannesque tradition. A significant role was played by her communication with the circle of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Barcelona, and with Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, all of which re-awoke her passion for naive art and piqued her interest in the discovery of colour.

Sacharoff also discovered contemporary Catalan painting, including the Courbet grouping, which based itself on the realistic traditions of the 19th century. It included followers of Cezanne, incredible artists such as Joaquim Sunyer, Josep Aragay, Josep de Togores and Miguel Villá. From as early as the end of the 19th century, many Catalan and Spanish artists lived and worked in Paris: Montmartre was home to the workshops of Anglada Camarasa, Zuloaga, Sorolla, Ramon Casas and Ricard Canals. The link between Catalan, Spanish and Parisian artists created a fruitful tradition, which was to be continued not only by the outstanding Avant-garde artists Picasso, Dali, Miró and Tàpies, but also by many representatives of “Catalan Mediterraneanism” - Torné Esquius, Josep Hurtuna - who worked in a Post-Impressionist and Post-Fauvist style. Interestingly, there were almost no Primitivist artists working in Catalonia at this time, although there was a certain attraction to primitive, “archetypal” art. This attraction intensified with the world’s discovery of Catalan Romanticism and medieval Catalan art, many outstanding examples of which were preserved and transferred to Barcelona’s Citadel in 1919-1923 under the guidance of the art historian and architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch.[37] “A seeking out of the naive, the primitive, the exposed ... a yearning for entrancing innocence - this is an affliction characteristic to only very complex civilisations,” wrote Eugenio d’Ors.[38]

By the early 1920s, Sacharoff was begi nning to be perceived as one of the first artists to introduce into Catalan art not only the principles of Cubism, but also a striving after modern Primitivism, whose roots went back to Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau, as well as early Kandinsky, Marc and Macke. “A Catalan Landscape” (about 1917-1920,[39] in the collection of T & G. Khatsenkov, Monaco) bears witness to her mastery of the figurative form. This landscape can be traced back to the most widespread traditions of Cezanne’s followers - to depict the materiality of the world using colour, to express this materiality via the juxtaposition of complementary colours, applied with broad strokes. At the same time, the way the composition is put together - on the basis of strong chromatic contrasts between selected natural fragments: the black crenelations of a cliff soaring above a peaceful valley or a pink tree trunk above a leaden river - gives the landscape a special, almost tragic expression. Here we see how colour pours triumphantly into the artist’s beloved monochrome gamut. This piece ranks among those of her works that demonstrate an original interpretation and remaking of the chromatic explorations of German Expressionism (how can one fail to think of the fiery-lilac mountains of Macke here?) and the paintings of Gauguin through the prism of Cezanne and French Cubism.

Olga and Otho took on a burden, the weight of which they perhaps did not suspect at the beginning - to live in two separate houses, to sacrifice much in their intimate lives for the sake of Olga’s art. “Barcelona acts on me as a narcotic,” Sacharoff wrote in a letter to her husband from Paris in 1923. “But it was important for me and my painting to come here, to Paris.”[40] Lloyd, the superlative master of applied graphics, capable of combining exquisite taste and deep professionalism, could count on a certain income in his area. However, his placards, posters and advertisements, which so delighted his mother,[41] and which were indeed refined, witty, and confident things of beauty (take even his advertisement for soap for the magazine “La Union Ilustrada”, which was as wonderful in its artistic as in its conceptual sense, with its two swans, the triumph of the white swan over the black), were not enough.

Sacharoff entered a circle of artists of the Parisian school, based in Montparnasse. Her closest friend in Paris was Chana Orloff (1888-1968)[42], a wonderful and distinguished sculptor. Sacharoff painted portraits of her and of her family while Orloff, in turn, created a sculptural portrait of Sacharoff.[43] Both artists were united by their interest in solid, massive, synthetic forms.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Sacharoff drew close to the artist Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), a former friend of Apollinaire. It is difficult to imagine two persons of the artistic Paris of those years who could be more opposite in nature than Sacharoff and Laurencin. Nor can one compare the powerful, penetrating art of Sacharoff with the sugary, embellished and repetitive images of Marie Laurencin, although the latter’s work is not without a certain zest and flavour. The female image with an “unseeing” gaze, expressing a special relation to the world, which was first discovered by Marie Vassilieff, went on to be interpreted in both the art of Sacharoff and the painting of Laurencin. Certain of Sacharoff’s pieces are close to Laurencin’s art. Such a piece is “Consuelo” (about 1924; collection of N. Kournikova, Moscow), a portrait of a golden-haired girl with a cat emerging from a melting, glowing grey background, which has been created by transitions between dark and light tones, a feature that imbues the image with a special, perturbing mysteriousness.

To our regret, these are the last lines written by Ksenia Muratova.

In place of an afterward

Olga Sacharoff nearly never gave interviews about herself, which is why it is so important that, in 1964, she took up the proposal of the young journalist Luis Permanyer to undergo the “Proust Questionnaire”[44].

“The light-blue eyes, the high-coloured face, the green tinge of the golden hair and the rounded features of the face call to mind the wonderful freshness of hydrangea. In her sensitivity, the calm posture of her hands, her mysterious silence, in every aspect of her appearance, there is something reminiscent of flowers; she loves flowers, they fill her house, and are inevitably - either as a main theme or decoration - present in her paintings. Without them, Olga Sacharoff would not be Olga Sacharoff.”

The principal aspect of my personality?
Fear of everything. Dread of everything.

The qualities I most value in a man?
Faithfulness.

The qualities I most value in a woman?
Modesty.

What I most value in friends?
Kindness.

My greatest fault?
Laziness.

My favourite occupation?
To abstract.

The dream of my life?
To be loved.

What would be my greatest misfortune?
If I were to be forgotten.

What should I like to be?
That which I have not yet been.

Where should I like to live?
The place where I do live.

My favourite colour?
All colours.

My favourite flowers?
All flowers.

My favourite bird?
Swallow.

My favourite writers?
Dostoyevsky, Gogol.

My favourite poets?
Pushkin.

My favourite literary heroes?
Don Quixote.

My favourite literary heroines?
Scheherazade.

My favourite composers?
The authors of folk songs.

My favourite artists?
The Primitivists.

My favourite real-life heroes?
The first cosmonauts.

What I hate most of all?
Violence.

What reforms do I prize most of all?
Useful ones.

The ability which I would like to have?
Eloquence.

How would I like to die?
I would not like to die.

My spiritual state at the current moment in time?
Anxiety.

To which deeds do I feel the most indulgence?
To those of passion.

My motto?
To go on and on, until you get where you are going.

1. Eugenio d'Ors. Mis Salones. Madrid, 1945. P. 110.
2. Olga Sacharoff. Pintura, poesia, emancipacio. Museu d’Art de Girona. Exhibition from November 25 to April 2, 2018 (the catalogue was written and compiled by Elina Norandi).
3. Interview with Lolita Sanchez, December 23, 1962, for the newspaper La Prensa.
4. Cirici Pellicer A. L'art català contemporan. Barcelona, 1970. p. 143-150; Ainaud de Lasarte J. La peinture catalane. XIXe et XXe siècles. Geneva, 1992. P. 14.
5. File located in the archive of: Ayuntamiento de Barcelona. Seccion de Gobernacion. Subseccion de cultura. Expediente otogracion de la medalla de plata al merito artistico a D-a Olga Sacharoff De Lloyd. 1964-1966. [Barcelona City Council, Department of Governance, Office of Cultural Affairs. Record of awarding Mrs. Olga Sacharoff de Lloyd with a silver medal for artistic merit in art.]
6. Castellanos J. El noucentisme: ideologia y estetica. //El Noucentisme. Cicle de conferencies feta la Institucio cultural del CIC de Terrassa curs 19841985. Publicacions de l’Albadia de Monserrat, Barcelona, 1987; Vallcorba J. Noucentisme, Mediterraneisme i Classicisme: apunts per a la història d'una estètica, 1994; Gonzalez Calleja E., Bleton C. “Noucentisme, catalanisme et arc latin” // La Pensée de Midi, 2000/1, n.1. P. 44-51.
7. Ruis M. D'Ors filosofo. Valencia, 2014; Varela J. Eugenio d'Ors 1881-1954. Madrid, 2017.
8. Exposicion conmemorativa del Primer Salon de los Once (1943-1973), Gale- ria Biosca, Madrid, 1973.
9. De la Fuente V. Chronique de I'avant- garde artistique parisienne en exil en Catalogne pendant la Grande Guerre, Ceret 2001] A. Mitrani (ed.), Utopies de l'origen. Avantguardes figuratives a Catalunya. 1946-1960. Barcelona, 2006, 2009 (cat. exp.)
10. The creation of “Jardines de Olga Sacharoff” took place in 1994. Designed by: Marta Gabàs and Carles Ceramon.
11. Muratova, K. Unknown Russia. Russian Art in the First Half of the 20th Century Milan, 2015. p. 160-169] Muratova X. La Russie inconnue. Art russe de la première moitié du XXe siecle. Milano, 2015. p. 160-170.
12. Collection de tableaux modernes des écoles contemporaines française, italienne, belge et hollandaise de feu P. A. Regnault. Vente à Amsterdam des 22 et 23 octobre 1958. Lots 104, 105, 106. Amsterdam, 1958.
13. Salon dAutomne (1912, 1921-1929), Salon des Indépendants (1913, 19221923), Salon de l’Arainée (1923-1927, 1930), Salon des Tuileries (1924-1932), 2-e exposition Lyre et Palette (1917), Salon du Franc (1926), galerie Mantelet (1926-1927), galerie Zak (1929); personal exhibitions in the galleries Druet (1928, 1931), Bernheim-Jeune (1929), Zak (1933).
14. XVI Esposizione internazionale d’arte della Citta de Venezia, 1928.
15. Personal exhibition at the Claridge Gallery. May 17-June 5, 1928. Evening Standard, May 17, 1928] The Times, May 19, 1928.
16. Sacharoff took part in a collective exhibition at the Perls Galleries in 1938] in 1939, the same gallery hosted a personal exhibition of Sacharoff and Lloyd.
17. Exhibitions of Regnault’s collection were held in 1935 and 1936 in Jakarta, where paint production facilities belonging to Pierre Regnault were located.
18. Sacharoff took part in an exhibition of Spanish drawing (publishing house Rosa Vera), which took place in Toulouse, Agen, Narbonne, Montpellier, and Perpignan in 1952, in Paris in 1959 (Musée Galliera) and in London (O'Hara Gallery) in 1960.
19. Sacharoff’s grandfather, the military doctor Aleksei Sacharoff (1818-1884), a descendant of freemen from the city of Voronezh, was a senior doctor at the Piatigorsky Military Hospital. He was married to Varvara Khudyakov (?-1894), daughter of an aristocratic family from the Kiev Governate, and sister of Lieutenant General of Artillery Vladimir Khud- yakov (1832-1908), commander of the 4th rifle brigade, also known as the ‘iron’ brigade.
20. Nikolai Sacharoff (1852-1927) was born into the family of the military doctor Aleksei Sacharoff. He was brought up and home educated by the well-known researcher and founder of the Lagodekhi National Park, Ludwik Mfokosiewicz (1831-1909). On finishing studies at the 2nd Moscow Gymnasium, he entered the Imperial Academy of Transport Engineers in St. Petersburg, before transferring to the medical faculty of St. Vladimir Imperial Kiev University. He served in the South Caucasus as a military doctor before becoming the head doctor of the South Caucasus Railway. He was one of the leading contemporary specialists on the epidemiology of malaria. See: S. S. Abuladze. On the merit due to Nikolai Sacharoff for his study of the parasitology and epidemiology of malaria in relation to the achievements of Russian scientists of the 19th century: Dissertation, Tbilisi. 1953
21. It is reasonable to speculate that Sacharoff’s uncle may have had an influence on the formation of the young artist’s personality - Alexander Sacharoff (1857-1920) was a painter and student of Ivan Aivazovsky, served in the Russo-Turkish War (1878-1879), and on General Mikhail Skobelev’s Akhal-Tekke expedition to Central Asia (1880), decorated for his military service in the Caucasus. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, and was the creator of the painting “Derailment of the Imperial Train”, painted immediately after the crash involving the train of Alexander III near Borki station in October 1888 (about which his wife, Elisaveta Sacharoff (nee Markova, 1857-after 1940), an actress with the Korsh Theatre, wrote to Anton Chekhov in a letter), as well as the canvas “The Defence of Blagoveshchensk, 1900” (Novikov-Daursky Amur Regional Museum, Blagoveshchensk). He worked much in the Amur region, in the South of Russia, in the Caucasus and in the Crimea. He was shot by the Red Army in Feodosia in 1920.
22. Sacharoff's aunt, Claudia Severina (1850-after 1918), née Sacharoff, was also a member of the supervisory board of the Batumi Mariinsky Girls Gymnasium. In this period in Batumi, orphanages and hospices were opened, charity performances were organised and free meals were prepared for those in need. Her husband, Casimir Severin (1835-1901), was a military doctor and a member of the Batumi City Duma. On his death in 1901, his considerable personal library of medical books was donated to the Caucasus Medical Society.
23. Sergei Grositsky is known for his sketches of the appearance of Halley’s Comet in the sky above Armavir in 1910. (See: Belyaev N. A., Churyumov K. I. Halley’s Comet and Observations of It. Moscow, 1985). Sergei Grositsky is also known as one of Russia’s earliest radio enthusiasts.
24. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Vladimir Hoffman for his kindness in providing information on his family and, in particular, on his uncle, Vsevolod Hoffman.
25. In the certificate of her marriage with Otho Lloyd, issued in the British Consulate General in Barcelona on December 21, 1917, the bride is named: “Olga Nikolaievna Hoffman, formerly Sacharoff”.
26. Der Blaue Reiter. Kunstmuseum Bern; Katalog der Ausstellung, November 21, 1986 - February 15, 1987. p. 108-112.
27. The nickname of Henri Rousseau.
28. Uhde W., Henri Rousseau. Paris, 1911.
29. Der Blaue Reiter. Op. cit. p. 138-139.
30. Apollinaire. “Les Indépendants.” April 20. Chroniques d'art. 1902-1918. Paris, 1960. p. 206.
31. Vauxcelles L. Le Salon d'Automne, Gil Blas, September 30, 1912.
32. Tricot L. “Les gens de Paris.” La Belique artistique et littéraire, Bruxelles, n.87, November 1, 1912, p. 218.
33. De la Fuente V., op. cit.
34. G. Boschi Portell. Olga Sacharoff& Otto Lloyd, Vic, 1993; De la Fuente V., op. cit.
35. Arthur Cravan (Fabian Avenarius Lloyd) (1887-1918) was a famous adventurer, poet, boxer, anarchist and publisher of the journal “Main- tenant!” (1912-1915), who also managed to travel the world in the most adventurous manner. He was also one of the most outstanding predecessors of Dadaism and Surrealism, a “pure genius of life” in the words of André Breton and a friend of Pica- bia, Duchamp and van Dongen. The literature on Cravan, in whose figure and behaviour was combined scandal and purity, absolute freedom and shameless insolence, is extremely wide. (See, for example: Salmon A. Souvenirs sans fin. Paris, 1956; Borras M.L. Cravan. Une stratégie du scandale. Paris, 1992; Lacarelle B. Arthur Cravan, précipité. Paris, 2010; Dossier «Arthur Cravan est vivant!», dir. Lacarelle B. Paris, 2013.) Cravan’s work is collected in: Cravan A. Oeuvres, рoèmes, articles, lettres. Paris, 1992.
36. Ibid.
37. The temporary museum in the Citadel was later transformed into the Museum of Catalan Art, opened in 1934 in the building of the Palau Nacional, which in turn was erected by Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867-1956) for the international exhibition held in Barcelona in 1929.
38. Eugenio d'Ors. Du Baroque. Paris, 1935. P. 45.
39. There is an inscription on the reverse of the canvas, which was made by Lloyd after Sacharoff’s death, confirming the origin of the painting and its dating to 1920. Nevertheless, Lloyd’s datings, made many decades after the paintings were created, are largely of an approximate nature.
40. Letter from O. N. Sacharoff to O. Lloyd, Paris, 1923 // Private archive.
41. For example, see the many letters from Lloyd’s mother, Nellie St. Clair Lloyd, to her son in 1916 or the 1930s. Paris, 1900-2000.
42. The friendship between the two artists was a lifelong one. A wide-ranging correspondence between the two has survived, as have many photographs; the last letters are dated to 1962. A photograph from 1928 is especially well known: it shows Chana Orloff, Olga Sacharoff and Chaim Soutine, all extravagantly dressed, in Orloff’s mansion in Paris (from the collection of Ariane Tamir, the granddaughter of Chana Orloff, Paris).
43. Portraits of Chana Orloff and her fiance, Andree Justman, painted by Sacharoff have been preserved by the family of Ariane Tamir in Paris, along with a sculpture of Olga Sacharoff by Chana Orloff.
44. Permanyer L. Luis Permanyer presenta a: Olga Sacharoff a través del cuestionario “Marcel Proust” // Destino. 1405. Barcelona, 1964. P. 30.

    “Teenage girls used to have albums in which they asked friends to leave drawings and messages. Antoinette-Félix Faure, daughter of the President of the French Republic (Félix Faure (1841-1899)), used to set friends these questions and ask them to answer them instead. The great writer Marcel Proust, in the period before he became famous, also agreed to answer the questionnaire, a circumstance to which the questionnaire owed both its fame and its name. There is a precedent: Karl Marx’s daughters asked their father to answer a similar, although shorter, questionnaire when he was living in London. France’s most renowned literary journal renewed this tradition in about 1955 and used it in interviews with the most famous writers of the time. I was aware of this and had the idea to do the same for the magazine ‘Destino’, starting from 1962. That was the first time it had been done in Spain, and the questionnaire is still used in the American magazine ‘Variety’.”

The authors would like to express their thanks to Luis Permanyer for his kindness in providing details of his interview with Olga Sacharoff.