Mashkov

The Tretyakov Gallery holds a portrait of Yevgenia Ivanovna Kirkaldi (“Lady and a Chinese Woman”) made by Ilya Mashkov in 1910. One of Mashkov’s most beautiful works, it has featured at numerous exhibitions, appearing first at a show of the “Jack of Diamonds” group in St. Petersburg in 1910, and is well known to both the general public and to art experts. However, next to nothing was known about the sitter. Today, thanks to Kirkaldi’s granddaughter Anna Kirillovna Bystrova (nee Snesareva) we have photographs and biographical information about the female student of Mashkov, who for a time was also one of his favourite models. The origin of Yevgenia’s surname is of special interest. “Kirkaldi” in fact owes its “Italian” style to the peculiar spelling of its English original: Yevgenia Kirkaldi’s ancestors came from Scotland (where a town has a similarly sounding name, Kircaldy). They were pious, Godfearing people who visited church often, and their life style gave birth to their family name — it originally sounded like “Church all day”, the root of which is the Scottish word for church, “kirk”. Later the family moved to Germany and the pronunciation changed.

This phrase happened to be the title of a fruitful debate held in 1913. Short though it was, it represented one of the most acute problems in early avant-garde art. Painters, poets and art critics - those who created new Russian art and those who were against it - paid written attention to the subject in those days. It was not the first time that the Russian innovators faced the problem of self-identification. It had been a concern for a few years already, but before it had been expressed in the stylistics and choice of themes of their pictures only, rather than in the theoretical conclusions or statements. The complexity of the situation stemmed from the fact that the young artists traced their artistic roots back both to the French painting tradition and to the national, popular folk culture which they believed to have originated in the East. This combination allowed different trends to exist simultaneously in their painting: the primitive co-existed with Postimpressionism and Fauvism, “quotations” from Henri Matisse could be found next to the “lubok” (popular woodblock prints), while “quotations” from Paul Cezanne could be seen alongside the devices of shop-sign painting. Natalia Goncharova, one of the most notable figures of the movement, insisted that “it is necessary to blend the 'alien' art with the native one”. But what was to be considered “alien” or pure Russian at that point? Some of the works of the members of the “Knave of Diamonds” group of the end of the 1900s and through the 1910s can be interpreted as part of their dialogue with the French painters, as well as their reflection on their own roots.