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Art of the 20th Century
Zinaida Serebriakova
Zinaida Serebriakova
(b Neskuchnoye estate, Kursk province, 10 Dec 1884; d Paris, 19 Sept 1967).
Russian painter. The daughter of the sculptor Yevgeny (Aleksandrovich) Lansere (1848–86) and the sister of Yevgeny Lansere and Nikolay Lansere (see LANSERE), she studied at the Princess Tenisheva Art School in St Petersburg (1901). From 1902 to 1903 she lived in Italy. She then studied at the studio of Osip Braz (1872–1936) in St Petersburg (1903–5) and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris (1905–6). In 1910 she took part in the exhibition in St Petersburg Sovremennyy zhenskiy portret (‘The modern female portrait’) and in the seventh exhibition in Moscow and St Petersburg of paintings of the UNION OF RUSSIAN ARTISTS (Soyuz Russkikh Khudozhnikov), at which she exhibited in St Petersburg the picture At the Dressing-table: Self-portrait (1910; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.), which brought her fame. An unusual composition, it makes use of scumbling and shows an awareness of Old Masters, encouraged by her uncle Alexandre Benois and her brother, both members of the society WORLD OF ART (Mir Iskusstva). The influence of the society, with which she was closely linked from 1911, is noticeable in Pierrot (Self-portrait in a Pierrot Costume) (1911; Odessa, A. Mus.). In contrast to the older members of the society, however, Serebryakova was on the whole indifferent to Art Nouveau and to Symbolism.
