Anisfeld Boris

Summer landscape 82x64 cm, oil on board

Anisfeld Boris Izrailevich (1878 (79) – 1973) was one of the most inventive and unusual artists of the first half of the 20th century. His artistic technique, specific color sensation significantly affected a whole generation of artists and stage designers.

B. Anisfeld was born in the town of Balti, Bessarabian province in a petty bourgeois family. Parents wanted him to become a violinist. However, in 1895, B. Anisfeld entered the Odessa Drawing School without special training, where he studied under G.A. Ladyzhensky and K.K. Kostandi, who graduated among the best students. In1901, he was admitted without exams to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he studied in the class of battle painting of Professor P.O. Kovalevsky, in the workshops of I.E. Repin and D.N. Kardovsky. The artist was a member and exhibitor of the associations: Autumn Salon in Paris (1906), the Union of Russian Artists (1906-1910), The World of Art (1911-1917, 1921), the Jewish Society for the Promotion of Arts ( 1915-1917) and others. Since 1906, B. Anisfeld taught at the Art School of E.N. Zvantseva in St. Petersburg, collaborated with the magazines Zhupel, Hell’s Post, Satyricon.

The artist was widely known for his picturesque images of fairy tales and extravaganza (“Eastern Legend”, 1905, Tretyakov Gallery; “Magic Lake”, 1914, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). A huge layer of the artist’s work is dedicated to the theater. His debut as a stage designer took place in 1906, when he designed the play “The Wedding of Zobeide” by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal for the theater of V.F. Komissarzhevskaya. From that time B. Anisfeld worked a lot for “Russian Ballet” by SP Diaghilev, performing the scenery based on sketches of L.S.Bakst and other masters of scenography.

In 1917, B. Anisfeld received an invitation from the Brooklyn Museum of New York with a proposal to arrange an exhibition. In the autumn of 1917, shortly before the October events, having received the permission of the Academy of Arts Commissariat, the artist and his whole family traveled through Siberia and the Far East to Japan. Since 1918, the family settled in New York. The artist’s first solo exhibition was held at the Brooklyn Museum thanks to the well-known American critic Christian Brinton, a great admirer of Russian art and work of B. Anisfeld in particular. The exhibits were about two hundred works brought from Russia. Living in America, B. Anisfeld often participated in group exhibitions: Russian artists in Paris (1921); at exhibitions in New York (1923), Pittsburgh (1925), Philadelphia (1926, received a gold medal), in London (1935) and many others. In addition, the artist fruitfully collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera, and since 1921 with the Chicago Opera, for which he designed many performances, ballets and operas. In 1928, having moved to Chicago, B. Anisfeld, until 1957, taught at the local Art Institute. In the same years, the artist actively worked as an easel painter, creating canvases in the spirit of decorative lyrical expressionism, and in the 1940-1950s he performed a cycle of paintings on gospel themes.

In his painting task, the artist strove for a special, surreal color reproduction. The master himself has repeatedly said: “I always see an object, primarily in color, then I give the plan to ripen, and I develop and deepen my plan later.” The master himself claimed that in the summer he writes only from nature and tries to express his impressions of nature in all its manifestations, in accordance with his feelings at any given moment. B. Anisfeld always noted that nature gave him true inspiration, and that, first of all, when working on a painting, he has a color image, and he writes what he feels, and not what he sees.

Read more about the author Collapse