SLAV CULTURAL MEMORY, NOSTALGIA AND HUMOURIN THE OEUVRE OF DANILA VASSILIEFF (1897-1958), RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉ ARTIST IN AUSTRALIA

Abstract

Danila Vassilieff(1897–1958) was a Russian émigré artist who lived and worked in Australia. By far the largest and most significant part of his painterly and sculptural oeuvre Vassilieff executed on Australian soil, in the states of New South Wales and Victoria.This article explores Vassilieff’s visual arts ideas and idiom created within the parameters of his Russian and Slav cultural memory and characterised by his émigré experience. It argues that Vassilieff’s art was fully formed only after the artist’s experiencing anexistence of a permanentémigré in Australia and that both his ideas andhis idiom flourished in opposition to the cultural traditions of his new environment.Vassilieff’s relationship with his Russian and Slav cultural heritage was traced in the monograph Imaginary homelands, the art of Danila Vassilieff(Bojic2007). This essaycomplements the extant research by examiningVassilieff’s relationship with his Australian environment as reflected in his work. Vassilieff’s experience of a permanent émigré formed his visual arts idiom and provided for the large pool of themes and topics in his work. Much of his oeuvrebridgedthe varied cultural traditions of his Russian homeland and the hardshiphe experienced living in a barren Australian land. There weretwo reasonsfor this. One was the artist’s positionof being an émigré; the other was that of being an artist. His initial alone-ness in a new Australian environment allowed for his one-ness and thus contributed to the uniqueness of his expression and his oeuvre, recognised as such later on by his Australian peers. Thechronic trauma of being a permanentémigré was a continualfeature of Vassilieff’slife and of his work. Hisdeep feelings ofnostalgiawerean essential quality of his existence in exile.The artist himself would attempt to counterbalance 19this with his all-pervasive energetic good will and his refined sense of humour and sweet ironyon occasions leading into a sarcasm, evident in many of his works.