Painting. Russian artists. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957)

Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky, a graphic artist, painter and stage designer, first studied art from 1885 to 1887 at the school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, St. Petersburg. Then he entered the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University. He graduated from it in 1898.

Unenthusiastic to give up his early interest in art, in 1899 Dobuzhinsky went to Munich to study under the supervision of Anton Azbe and Simon Hollo. There in Munich he met some Russian artists among whom was Igor Grabar', and had a chance to observe the work of German Jugendstil artists.
Dobuzhinsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1901. In 1902 he was invited by Grabar' to join the World of Art group. His first works were historical landscapes in the manner of Alexander Benois. But soon Dobuzhinsky began to depict individualised cities and suburbs.

In the Man in Glasses, of 1905-6, a portrait of the poet and art critic Konstantin Syunnerberg, factory chimneys seen through the windows contrast with the figure of the poet and his books. One of Dobuzhinsky's most impressive images, October Idyll, an illustration in the satirical journal Zhupel (1905), shows a blood-spattered wall, a doll, a single shoe and a pair of glasses to commemorate the brutal response to the political uprisings of 1905. From 1907 he was active as a stage designer, teacher, and book illustrator.

Dobuzhinsky left Russia for Lithuania, then, he lived in Europe and the USA, where he continued to work on stage designs and painted street scenes, which often focused on the new industrialised suburbs. He produced a series of drawings entitled City Dreams, of 1906-1913. There he included fantastic and sometimes menacing elements.
Although Dobuzhinsky abandoned Russia, his stage designs were often made for works of the Russian composers, such as Modest Musorgsky. Dobuzhinsky's stage designs for Musorgsky's opera Khovanshina were produced at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1950.
 

Literature: Book "Russian art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva