For the last few years, I have become increasingly passionate about the postcard art of the USSR, and increasingly interested in the Snihuronka figure, the Snow Maiden who is the "grand-daughter" or helper of Did Moroz, the Rus Santa Claus-like figure, Grandfather Frost.

Recently, this work has taken an informal biographical bent--I say informal because the research, such as it is, cannot be properly sourced via Internet avenues only at this time, and it is not the time to travel to Ukraine to search for letters or surviving in print resources, even if that was a possibility. But here--the beautiful Anna Gorobievskaya.

Looking at the Soviet Era images of innocent childhood and expressive fantasy that were so widely printed, traded, collected and sent, in a time when people still communicated over distance via the written word because long distance phone calls were too expensive, it is all too easy to forget the circumstances under which these were produced. Not only was the content strictly regulated. But the artists were, too.

Anna Gorobievskaya, born 1931 of mixed Polish-Ukrainian heritage, had a father, a member of the Polish Drama Company, active in Kyiv during the late 1920s-30s, who was shot in a labor camp in Siberia when Gorobievskaya was six years old--an age similar to that of the child in this picture, produced as a popular postcard in 1973, and perhaps Gorobievskaya's best known, most widely circulated on the internet, work. Her Kyiv-born mother, an artist working for the same company, who had also been arrested, was freed, and allowed to return to work,
When the Nazis invaded in the 1942, Anna, her mother, and grandmother, were transported to Hungary "for work," where Anna, just 11 years old, picked up the language quickly and worked as a translator. When the Soviets moved in in 1944, Anna, with her family members, were able to return to Kyiv. Following in her mother's footsteps, she trained to be a painter.

Her work is notable for her depictions minority children (Ukrainians included) in their traditional dress, whether Tatar sheepskin coats or Chuchki leathers, simultaneously light-hearted and serious, as children can so often be.  She also drew repeated versions of Snihuronka, the winter snow maiden, in whom regular readers of this blog might remember, I have particular interest.

The Snow Maiden is the figure in Rus folklore who helps the little birds and animals survive through the winter--birds like the bullfinch, the bright, red-breasted spark of life that appears among the frozen branches to remind us all that, despite the season of Winter's rule, something else remains.

In the last update I could find, written by her son, Anna was still living in the three bedroom apartment she had been assigned back in the 1950s, along with her son and his family. She was largely blind and, in the I assume poorly translated description I found, "tethered to her bed,"

In Kyiv,

Is she still alive? Is she still living in Kyiv, as Russians, and Russian artillary, advance?

Education
May Howard was born to a middle class couple, Floarda Howard and Sallie (Durham) Howard, in Philadelphia on September 7, 1877.

She attended J. Liberty Tadd's Art School in Philadelphia, where she was trained with "new methods in education." Tadd, the school's founder, was an educational innovator who "emphasized the importance of visual arts training" to strengthen the brain, advocating an ambidextrous teaching model and six years of early-school art education. At Tadd's school May Howard studied "drawing, designing, free-hand drawing, working designs in monochrome, modeling, wood carving, and the use of tools".[2]

She continued her art training, with the support of a full scholarship, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1895), as the first African American woman to attend PAFA,[3] studying under various known artists including the renowned American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, Paris-trained academic sculptor Charles Grafly, and John J. Boyle (who had been a student of former PAFA faculty member Thomas Eakins).[2] Her surviving work from this period expresses the Beaux-Arts aesthetic that emphasized naturalism and dynamic treatment of surface and form.[4]

Meta Warrick Fuller, Jackson's contemporary at Tadd's and PAFA[2] (like Howard, b. 1877), offered Jackson the opportunity to accompany her and study abroad in France during this time (Fuller herself had enrolled in classes at the École des Beaux Arts). Jackson declined. She would later declare she thought it unnecessary to travel to Europe to further her art.[5]

After four years of study at PAFA, Howard met and "married well," mathematics teacher and future high school principal, William Sherman Jackson.[6]

Washington, D.C. and the M Street High School
By 1902, May and William were living in Washington D.C., where William was teaching at the M Street High School, the first public high school for African Americans in the United States, and, at that time, the premier preparatory academy in the nation for students of color.[1] The faculty at M Street High School were "arguably superior to the white public schools, whose teachers typically were graduates of normal schools and teacher colleges." Many M Street teachers (William included) were the pioneering alumni of American's top academic institutions, unable, post graduation, to find employment at college institutions.

Because of these circumstances, in the first decade of the new century, the M Street High School found itself center stage for the nation's debate about the future of black education. On the one side, Booker T. Washington, former child slave, urged Black Americans to recognize that "the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands... No race can prosper until it learns that there is as much dignity in the tilling of a field as in the writing of a poem," and worked for access to the vocational training that could elevate and secure Blacks' place.in the American economy. On the other side was Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the Massachusetts born, Harvard educated leader of the New Negro Movement and a central figure in the 1908 formation of the NAACP. Du Bois's recently published book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) had catalyzed the thinking of many African Americans, countering what Du Bois saw as Washington's "cult of submission"[2] with the contention that Black Americans must enjoy the "right to vote," "civic equality," and the education of their youth "according to ability."

For the M Street School, in competition with the nearby colored vocational school for the D.C. school department's support and resources, and straining to support the nation's first college preparatory program for colored students, Du Bois's final point here would prove a particularly contentious rallying call. Washington, approved to speak at the 1904 M Street Graduation,[1] recommended that Blacks focus on gaining "common school and industrial training," first and foremost. Principal Anna J. Cooper countered this by inviting Du Bois to deliver a speech at the school in the winter of 1903, opposing vocational education as an acceptable standard for Black Americans..The D.C. director of schools accused Dr. Cooper of insubordination and disloyalty.[3]

Cooper's tenure as Principal survived the accusations, but in 1906, she stepped down from her position and was succeeded, as 'acting principal,' by Jackson's husband William. May came on as faculty to teach Latin.

William would step back from his role as Principal in 1909 but the couple's central role in maintaining the M Street High School's reputation for academic excellence through a difficult period left them with an invaluable social credential in Washington's Black community and beyond.[3]

CAREER
After Jackson's move to Washington, "she had expected to continue her studies at the art school connected with the Corcoran Art Gallery but was refused admission because of her color," a rejection that discouraged her from pursuing public work as a sculptor. She would later maintain that "It was chiefly through Dr. Du Bois's influence and urging that she again took up her work with the determination to make the most of her gifts for the encouragement it would be to her people."[1] Du Bois not only privately encouraged Jackson, but used her images to illustrate The Crisis, his newly established journal as the primary printed voice of the NAACP.

With this support, Jackson became "the first to break away from academic cosmopolitanism to frank and deliberate racialism" in her artwork.[2] This determination is evident from her best known surviving works: the dignified portrait busts she created of the period's black leaders "decent portraits of decent men", and her intimate family groupings of mothers—mixed race themselves—caressing children—their own children—of mixed racial heritage. For the next two decades, these works would be the headliners of her exhibited work.

Jackson arranged for Du Bois to sit for her in 1907. Although the sessions were discontinued before she could finish her portrait bust, Du Bois arranged for photographs to be sent from New York so she could bring the piece to successful completion.[3] Du Bois helpfully tracked her exhibitions and work in the pages of The Crisis.

Public Exhibitions

Washington Gallery Scene
In 1912, her portrait bust of Du Bois, among other works, was exhibited at the Veerhoff Gallery in Washington, DC. She received a positive review from The Washington Star commending the work's structure: "the expression is vital and good, the turn of surface, the intimation of mobility are well rendered."[2]

Exhibiting a broader collection of sculptures at the Veerhoff in 1916, her WS review was even more effusive: Jackson's "work has always shown promise, but these pieces now on exhibit indicate exceptional gift, for they are not merely well modeled, but individual and significant".[3]

Jackson exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. (1915) and the National Academy of Design, New York (1919[4]).

Segregated Exhibitions
As a woman defined by the color of her skin, finding public venues to display her work was a constant challenge. "It is not at all customary for Washington art stores to exhibit the works of colored artists," a contemporary reviewer observed, "particularly if the subjects are too colored, and the fact that Mrs. Jackson's work has been displayed, is evidence of her talent."[1] Artists like Jackson responded by pressing alternative public spaces into service, such as the "War Service and Recreation Center" of the Washington Y.M.C.A., where, in May 1919, a solo "exhibition of 25 sculptures of May Howard Johnson" was held.[2]

The M Street High School moved to new buildings and was renamed Dunbar School in 1916 for the noted African-American intellectual and poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (d. 1906) (Jackson would complete a portrait in bronze in his honor, a casting of which, in bronze, would become the property of the school). The school's expansion brought new ambitions. Dunbar formed the Tanner Art League in 1919, and an attempt was made to institute an annual show for colored artists. The first show displayed the work of artists from fifteen states and included pieces from Laura Wheeler, Julian Abele, Meta Warrick Fuller, and recent work from Jackson ("a bust and statuette").[3] The Dunbar's 1922 show included works by William Edouard Scott and William McKnight Farrow, as well as the inaugural D.C. showing of Jackson's sculpture, The Brotherhood, which had "had a prominent place in a recent exhibition of the Society of Independent Sculptors at the Waldorf Astoria," along with others of her work.[4]

Teaching
In Washington, Jackson maintained a sculpture studio in her home. Aside from portrait sculpting, she continued to teach, with two years at Howard University as an art instructor for Howard's newly implemented School of art (1922-1924). At the university she taught and influenced James Porter, who went on to write one of the first comprehensive histories of African-American art.[5] As an art historian, though, Porter was not impressed by her work and said that there was "no great originality in any of the pieces she attempted."[17]

Recognition
With legal racial segregation in force across the South since the turn of the century, topics such as racial mixing were taboo in general. Laws against miscegenation had been proposed in both federal and state legislatures as far North as Massachusetts after Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected as President in 1912.[18]

Her work appeared repeatedly in The Crisis and even on the cover as early as 1919, and was recognized with a Harmon Foundation Award in 1928. Five works were exhibited in the subsequent Harmon show, two featuring as illustration in the exhibition catalogue ("Bust of Dean Kelly Miller" and "Head of a Negro Child"). Leslie King-Hammond, an art historian, later praised Jackson's "efforts to address...without compromise and without sentimentality, the issues of race and class, especially as they affected mulattos".[5]

Despite this recognition, Jackson was dissatisfied with her progress. 1929 she wrote, "I felt no satisfaction! Only deep sense of injustice, something that has followed me and my efforts all my life."[19]

RACE 
Jackson could "pass" for Caucasian, but the racial politics of the early 20th century created an environment that pushed her in a different direction. She cooperated with pioneering African American anthropologist Caroline Bond Day, providing details (including photos) regarding the Howard family's racial background that would later be published in Day's 1932 Harvard University Master's thesis, ""A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States"[21] (the year following Jackson's death)

Her personal experiences of racism were ongoing through her life and sour: whether her rejection from Corcoran Gallery's art school (a gallery where she would later exhibit) or her experience with the National Academy of Design. After showings in 1916 and 1918, the Academy sent a representative to Jackson's home to ask if she was of "Negro blood"—and, on receiving an affirmative response, subsequently excluded her work from future exhibits.[5]

Jackson expressed a fascination with the wide variety of phenotypes among African Americans. This was expressed in "Head of a Negro Child" (1916), "Shell-Baby in Bronze" (1929), and "Mulatto Mother and Child" (1929) - the last piece in particular also an address of her own racial identity and "near Whiteness."

Her style was provocative for its time because it explored the features of America's multiracial society. As a result of not traveling in Europe, Jackson was somewhat isolated from her peers and was able to create her own vision that infused her work with a unique style.[23] This style was ignored at first because it was so different from the popular style of the time. Though she had developed her own unique style, this style still adhered to academic tradition. Many galleries were not interested in her subject matter, as she dedicated most of her work to objective portraits of children, family members, and influential African Americans.[5] It was not until the inauguration of the Harmon Foundation Awards, in 1926, for "Distinguished Negro Contributions," that there was even a National prize for Black Artists.

FINAL YEARS
The Harmon Foundation exhibits, intended to showcase the works of Black female artists in America, virtually coincided with events of the Great Depression. The period's dream of the "New Negro Woman," lost its focus, and Jackson's death, in 1931, brought a period of obscurity during which crucial early cataloguing of her work was neglected. Her "sensitive and humanistic approach to the portrayal of Black Folk types," was in some ways anathema to certain "Black art critics and historians," uncomfortable with its portrayal of racial ambiguity in a period when the "near-white" were granted privilege unavailable to the darker-skinned.[1]

LEGACY
Jackson and her husband took in William's nephew Sargent Claude Johnson at age fifteen, following his parents' deaths (father, 1897, mother 1902). Johnson was one of six siblings, several of whom chose to live as white in their adulthood.[24] Johnson, who went on to become a well-known sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance himself, was first exposed to sculpture through his aunt's work and studio.[citation needed]

Jackson died in the year 1931, and is buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.[25] W. E. B. Du Bois, a faithful supporter of May Jackson's work throughout her life, memorialized her death in his closing notes to the October 1931 issue of The Crisis: "With her sensitive soul, she needed encouragement and contacts and delicate appreciation. Instead of this, she ran into the shadows of the Color Line... In the case of May Howard Jackson the contradictions and idiotic ramifications of the Color Line tore her soul asunder."[26]
Jackson's contributions to American art were not widely appreciated until after her death, and a conclusive assessment of her work among "the Pantheon of great American Sculptors" remains to be determined. The African American Registry places her in the "annals of great American sculptors."[27]

She was an artist who pushed the boundaries of her time, unique in the body of her work and vision. Her "completely American" training, initially derided as a lost opportunity to study with European masters, is now seen as an element vital to her status as a woman, if not a sculptor, of "intense and lucid temperament."[28]

EXHIBITIONS
Public Exhibits

• The Veerhoff Gallery, Washington D.C. (1912,[23] 1916[29])
• The New York Emancipation Exhibition (1913)
• The Corcoran Art Gallery (1915)[30]
• The National Academy of Design (1916)
• May Howard Jackson: 25 Sculptures. War Service and Recreation Center, Y.M.C.A., Washington, D.C. (May 1919)
• Exhibit of Fine Arts by American Negro Artists, The Harmon Foundation, International House, New York (1929)[31]

Posthumous Group

• 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox (1996) Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia[32]

CATALOGUED WORK

• Slave boy / Portrait Bust of an African (1899) bronze, Kinsey Family Collection[33]
• Portrait Bust of Paul Lawrence Dunbar (Dunbar High School, Washington D.C.).[34]
• Portrait Bust of W. E. B. Du Bois (1912)
• Morris Heights, New York City (1912) oil on linen, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts[35]
• Portrait Bust of Dean Kelly Miller (1914) bronze, Howard University)[36]
• Head of a Negro Child (1916).[37]
• William H. Lewis (bef 1919)
• William Stanley Braitewait (bef 1919)[15]
• Portrait Bust of Reverend Francis J. Grimke (1922)[38]
• Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me (n.d.)[28]
• Bust of a Young Woman (n.d., plaster, held by Howard University)[39]
• Mulatto Mother and her Child / Mother and Child, plaster ((exhibited 1918)
• Shell-baby, bronze (exhibited 1929)[23]
• Sherman Jackson (exhibited 1929)[31]

AWARDS

• Harmon Foundation Award in the Fine Arts (1928) Bronze Medal
  

When, in 1986, I signed up for my required Literature Seminar in "English Literary Biography," I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, and imagined I would find the subject dull.   

But—it was the right topic, at the right time, with the right teacher. This class was to become an unexpected major tributary to the flow of ideas that make my intellectual life.

Gordon Turnbull (Australian, accented, florid in his incantatory recitations, and, above all, impassioned with his subject) wooed the four of us in that class—undersubscribed, of course, because I wasn't the only one who mistook the subject for boring—with every wile he had in him. And, that, for whatever complications of reasons, was the inlet I needed.

Ten years and three degrees in Literary Biography later, I fell out of academics with my own passion for the complexities of rendering a human life as a story. How to make that interesting? How to make that interesting when one's subject is an artist or the main character of a novel? Every human story faces the same end, and many human stories face decline and retirement at their end. These fascinations/challenges have never left me.

——————--

When Covid began, my household became a crowded one. I don't work well in those circumstances. I needed a project I could keep going through every sort of interruption.

I was already aware that Wikipedia was weak on visual artists of the 20th century: copyright laws make it difficult to develop articles with interesting (or even relevant!) visual references.   Yet copyright law seems to be a hindrance not at all to the stories of the dead Picassos and the living Stellas of the last hundred years. Where there's a passionate fanbase, the articles appear. But then--I had, for whatever reason, been thinking of Josef Albers's webpage.

For those not knowledgeable of the Wikipedia parlance, this introductory paragraph can best be described as "stub class."  What this means? It means that whatever algorithm put this page up there on Wikipedia, it was likely some sort of dump from a larger database--and almost certainly was "written" by someone who had no idea who Josef Albers was.

Well--about two years of work later, the Albers Wikipedia page is looking respectable. That introductino now reads:

The Josef Albers page as it currently stands is not all, or indeed largely, my own work. Once fleshed in (and yes, by me), it has attracted notice, and others have joined in.

Looking at (and reading) that page, it is the work of many hands, and sits now at the center of a sizeable and growing constellation: Josef Albers and his influence on art of the 20th century.

All this... it's by way of introduction.

I did another piece, recently. It set something going in my head, and I found I needed to share. The piece I did most recently was a stub. But I could see, somehow, the shape of what lay beneath that stub, and I knew that there was a story there that I wanted to dig out.

I did, and there was. And, yes, it's something interesting enough for its own entry here.

 A small body of work in painting tunes to something in my own body and sparks an emotional/physical response. I had that just yesterday, and, unusually (for me), it was for once easy, easy, easy to understand why that connection had sparked.

This painting by Rusu Ciobanu reminded me so strongly of my mother's work. There is the Eastern European element, for sure, and although the brushwork here is harder, or harsher, than my mom's, immediately on seeing this portrait, I knew this artist had worked this painting just as my mother would have done, in a studio with her subject in front of her, looking at and intuitively adjusting proportion and color, and winnowing away the extraneous details.

I love the marginally small, intense head, the big sensuous hands. The dead (possibly) Soviet architecture outside the window. I would love to talk to my mother about this painting, and see what she thinks. Unfortunately that conversation has no longer been an option, not since May of 2018.

Last year, Rusu Ciobanu's family still had her with them for those conversations (even though cataracts have long past cut short her painting life). There's a substantive article in the Calvert Journal (elements of which seem scrounged from this Romanian-language piece at Scena9) which touches through the major arcs of her life and art career.  I'm not surprised to feel the additional detail I've learned slotting into my mental landscape, locking down my interest in both her life and paining. This is an artist who has lived through "interesting times": A 19th century manqué Romanian rural childhood; the transition to portraiture of the Soviet collectives of the 1960s. And then, mature intellectual rebellion as she cemented her home in Chișinău, Moldova's capital city, hosted the Moldovan equivalent of a salon--a hidden, artful garden, within the concrete city--and began producing portraits of the artists and intellectuals of that grouping.

So--2020 was Valentina Rusu Ciobanu's centennial. Retired now, and living still in her secluded Chișinău home, she roused herself for the interviews and retrospective public attention of a world of art that came knocking at her door, belatedly, with a fresh world of change. What does a 100 year old person think about her art? Her "playful potraiture," as one modern reviewer described it?

A fair amount, it would seem, about a past, and a life, that was so sharply cut away from her by the geopolitics of the 1940s. "She paints like a fox," an admirer observes. Through her paintings, her harmless old lady comments twist under the weight of now long past decades of Soviet oppression. "People are all the same,” she says, on her centenary. But what really do those words mean?

Her son, Lică Sainciuc, comments that she has always been a story teller, describing the time that he, and she, spied a horse-drawn sleigh as they walked together in town. "Let's take it," she told him. "Who knows when we'll see another one."

The portrait above left, of her neighbor, was not the spontaneous moment of observation we think we see. To create this portrait, Rusu Ciobanu borrowed traditional Romanian-style clothes from a local museum. She did not stop there. Rusu Ciobabu wore the outfit herself to a Soviet-run artists' conference in Kyiv. To Rusu Ciobabu, the clothes were not museum pieces. They were part of something, in Soviet Moldova, that was at risk of vanishing. For wearing these 'historical' clothes, she was formally rebuked. 

One translation of her centenary exhibition has the title "Valentina Rusu Ciobanu - A Century of Loneliness.” Another "Valentina Rusu Ciobanu - one hundred years since birth." Can both translations be simultaneously correct? I feel the tense dance in her work between conformity to the arbitrary system that surrounded her, and her internal flight above those earthly cares. For Rusu Ciobanu, that dance was, is, a highly defined series of needles to be swiftly threaded, imposed by an authoritarian and threatening government. A folklore maiden facing the impossible tasks imposed by an wicked sorcerer could hardly have managed the task more deftly.

Rusu Coibana painted many, many interesting surrealist images, which I highly recommend taking some time looking over, if that is the work that speaks to you (I think valentinarusuciobanu.com, is the official site). For myself, at this day and time, I like, best the portrait of Dumitru Fusu.

I wonder what styles and forms will speak to me a decade from now, if I'm still here and moving forward in time on this journey of my own.

"Reverence," "Indulgence," "Sumptuous," "Entitlement"--this is the vocabulary that comes to mind when I think "John Singer Sargent."  But then there is Sargent's friend, Henry Tonks. With whom none of these words can be associated.

Tonks was not an easy man to know. A physician before he became a painter--and during World War I, he became, for a time, physician again. Appointed an official war artist in 1918, he painted a series of uncompromising portraits of wounded soldiers which I do not recommend looking up on the internet unless you want to be upset. One of Tonks's early students, from the time Tonks was teaching in London, wrote:

When I was young, my mother did a number of bad portraits of me. Or so I thought, at the time she was doing them.

My feral child self thought this one in particular was hideous, and especially was furious that she gave me yellow eyes.

Now that I am not young ... I better appreciate that my Mother was a patient painter.

​I was not a patient model.

 My mother took this photograph of me and my Dad in 2016. We were visiting the William Merritt Chase exhibition at the Boston MFA.

We got a wheelchair for my mom, so she wouldn't have to walk. She was extremely nervous about the outing. In her last years (my mother passed in 2018), she had diminished lung capacity owing to a severely dysfunctional diaphragm. We had a big argument in the car before we got to the museum.

*At* the museum, we had a wonderful, wonderful time. WMC may not have been the most original painter of the 19th century, but he is a painter's painter, with luscious brushstrokes and a sensualist's love of color. And he's one of those 19th century artists who got to spend a lot of time on beautiful beaches, and in lovely country homes, shaded by old trees. I'm glad I have this picture, to remember.

William Merritt Chase could have been another John Singer Sargent, but--he isn't. Sargent. Had something bigger or more complex going on. This said--I'd be happy to have a good WMC at home on one of my walls!

I wish Carlson all the best as she works her way through this painful episode. Hope she makes it to the other side & back to joy.

I got intrigued. The limits of the internet fascinate me.  And the more I looked for Kochergin images, the more I realized how familiar I was with his imagery.  To some extent, he has the corner on classic Russian fairytale imagery.  He owes a debt to Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942)--one of those innocent, tremendous "Golden Age of Illustration" artists who got caught up in weird Central European Nationalism (much to the detriment of their illustrations, I'd put Alphonse Mucha in this category also). But from what I can tell, Kochergin is a creature of a different generation.

I say "from what I can tell," because the internet isn't telling me anything about these next pieces, except that they are all images created by artists named, variously, "N. Kochergin," "Nikolai Kochergin," and "Nikolai Mikhailovich Kochergin," all of whom appear to have lived 1897-1974. I am pretty sure that these are all the same person. But--this is just from the internet, so maybe not.  In any case, Kochergin's images:

And then come these (POSTCARDS: 1960s. N. KOCHERGIN). Okay, I can see the Social Realism influence here, but there's a step (in history) that I'm feeling gets glossed over:

What was the progression from the young man who created the top image to the old(er) man who created these last images? I don't know if it would make a book. But it's something I'd like to know something more about.