In 1924, an exhibition of artworks by Filipp Andreevich Malyavin was held with a great success at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris. One of his most famous paintings is dated the same year—the Portrait of Alexandra Balashova, a ballerina of the Bolshoi Theatre.
In 1922, Alexandra Mikhailovna Balashova (dates of life 1887–1979) emigrated from Russia, and her mansion at Prechistenka Street that hosted a ballet class was granted by the Soviet government to Isadora Duncan. It is interesting that, coincidentally, Balashova settled in the former Paris house of Duncan. She successfully toured in London and participated in the performances produced by Mikhail Mikhailovich Fokin in Paris. She contributed one of the glorious pages in the history of the ballet Russian Seasons. Being technically strong, temperamental, she danced Lisa, Kitri, Maiden Tsar, Raymonda and many other characters. She was called Russian Terpsichore. This is exactly as we see Alexandra at the portrait: a passionate, elegant ballerina at the peak of her fame.
Balashova is painted in her gala dress. The imaginative depth, decorative coloring, and temperamental brushstrokes certainly made the painting one of the best artworks of Filipp Malyavin.
Filipp Andreevich Malyavin is a Russian painter and graphic artist. He began to master the basics of painting in the Athos monastery, from where he migrated to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts to continue his study under the personal guidance of Ilya Repin. He painted mainly portraits in a manner that combined the features of impressionism, expressionism and modernism.
The artist’s life is as motley, exciting and eccentric as his paintings: being born in a poor peasant family, he made his way from the novice at the Athos monastery to a student at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, and further to a fashionable, well-known painter in Europe.
Malyavin’s paintings have an indefatigable and violent temper, they does not fit into any specific stylistic framework and impress with their scale and passion, which is expressed in the impetuous and swirl brushstrokes and the fiery red colors. Malyavin rarely took up canvas less than a square meter in size, which is why most of his artworks look massive and stately, they are filled with details and amaze the audience with their grandeur.
The portrait was granted to the Art Gallery of the Khanty-Mansiysk Generations Fund by SURGUTNEFTEGAS that purchased the painting at Sotheby’s in 2000. In 2011, it was transferred to the Khanty-Mansiysk State Museum of Fine Arts.
