Famous Mark Research Articles

Pasternak in Oxford

We are extremely fortunate in being able to publish the following article on the Russian artist Leonid Pasternak by his elder daughter, Josephine. Her words provide a unique glimpse into Pasternak's later years, which he spent in Oxford. Although already 78 when he moved to the city, Pasternak's age scarcely stemmed his creativity and he continued to paint until his death in 1945. He left a rich and varied picture of Oxford during the war years. It is his portraits which remain most vividly in the memory. Tolstoy, Rilke, Lenin, Einstein, Rachmaninov and Chaliapin: all are brought to life with great sensitivity by Pasternak's art, and the Oxford works provide a fitting epilogue to an exceptionally rich career. The portraits of the great and famous mark one side of the artist's work: the other side is intimacy. The family is a constant source of inspiration for Pasternak, with his daughters Josephine and Lydia figuring prominently together with their brothers, Alexander and Boris, best known as author of Dr. Zhivago. Pasternak's route to England had been a long and tortuous one. Born in Odessa in 1862, he began to make his name in the Moscow art world in the late 1880s, having abandoned his studies in medicine and later law, which were originally undertaken at his parents' behest. His early genre work has much in common with the realist tradition associated with the Wanderer school, founded by Perov in 1870, and he was indeed a close friend of llya Repin (1844-1930) the most prominent artist of this group. Yet Pasternak developed away from these beginnings, particularly following his visit to Paris in 1889, with its revelation of the Impressionist school. His artistic growth marks a progression in Russian art away from the Wanderer tradition. His work contributes a new infusion of colour and light matched by other innovations by such contemporaries as Serov, Vroubel and Korovine. Again, some twenty years later, Pasternak was active as an innovator, helping in the foundation of the Union of Russian Artists in 1902. The Russian art-historian Levitin suggests that Pasternak's work provides a link between the Realist movement of the late nineteenth century and radical modernist currents of the post-revolutionary period. Yet, while Suprematism refines art to abstract purity Pasternak abjures such intellectualism. As an artist, he is profoundly a humanist, and it is his deep humanity which gives his works their unique quality. N. McW