The collection of the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg contains about fifty works of Yevgeniya Markovna Magaril (1902–1987), a representative of the studio of spatial realism. They are mostly watercolors made during the war and in the postwar years. Unfortunately, most of the artist’s works were lost during the siege of Leningrad, so it is a great privilege to have the 1930 painting “Linden Alley” in the museum’s collection.
Yevgeniya Magaril studied art in Vitebsk, where she finished three years of the Institute of Art and Practice. During her training, she got acquainted with Marc Chagall, Kseniya Leonidovna Boguslavskaya, and Lazar Markovich Lissitzky. Her credit certificate was signed by Vera Mikhailovna Yermolayeva and Professor Kazimir Severinovich Malevich.
Yevgeniya Magaril was a member of the UNOVIS group (“The Champions of the New Art”). In 1922, she moved to Petrograd and entered the Academy of Arts, where she was taught by Professor Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin. At that time, his main areas of expertise were the theory of spatial realism (expanded vision and expanded consciousness) and the study of the laws of color harmony, which he introduced to the students.
Yevgeniya Magaril graduated from the Academy of Arts in 1926. From 1927 to 1929, she worked as a textile artist. After that, she accepted the position of a drawing teacher in Leningrad schools. At the same time, in 1930, she began taking creative trips all over the Soviet Union. She went to Soviet farms near the town of Uralsk and visited construction sites in Magnitogorsk.
In 1941, Yevgeniya Magaril became a member of the Union of Artists. During the Great Patriotic War, she was evacuated to Biysk, Altai Krai. Between 1945 and 1951, she taught at the Leningrad Art School.
In 1952, Yevgeniya Magaril was expelled from the Union for her formalism and was reinstated only in 1966. However, in 1963, she began working in the Experimental Lithographic Workshop at the Leningrad Artists’ Union. She preferred to work with the technique of color lithography. Magaril participated in municipal and all-Union exhibitions. Her works were fully represented at her personal exhibitions in Leningrad in 1974 and 1984.
