The Carnegie Museum of Art Presents the First Exhibition Devoted to Andrey Avinoff

Written by Ashley Elbourne Wednesday, 15 June 2011 21:32

Pisttsburgh, PA.- The Carnegie Museum of Art presents the first exhibition in more than 50 years devoted to the visionary art of the brilliant and talented Andrey Avinoff (1884–1949), who believed that beauty would save the world. His exotic story, from the court of the Russian tsar to the mountains of Tibet, from an upstate New York dairy farm to the laboratories of Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh and to the salons of Park Avenue, has never been told in full. Best known for his scientific research on butterflies, and as director of Carnegie Museum of Natural History from 1926 to 1945, Avinoff created a rich body of fantastical, symbolist watercolor paintings that express ideas about metamorphosis, transience, and change. "Andrey Avinoff: In Pursuit of Beauty" is on view until August 28th.

Andrey Avinoff sometimes referred to as Andrej Nikolajewitsch Avinoff or Andrei Avinoff, was a Russian entomologist and painter who became Director of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. He was especially interested in Lepidoptera among many, many other interests. He was the brother of the famous portrait painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff who most-famously was painting Frankin Delano Roosevelt when he died, and was a highly skilled artist himself who usually painted images of flora or fauna, or paintings with deep meanings with themes of religious or apocalyptic nature. Avinoff, was from a wealthy Russian family with ties to nobility, and who served a diplomatic role in the Tsar's court as an "adviser to the Tzar," left Russia after the Revolution. In 1924, he was hired as an assistant curator of entomology at The Carnegie Museum; he was promoted to director of the Museum in 1926 which he remained through 1946. One of his most famous series of paintings depict The Fall of Atlantis, a poem by George V. Golokhvastoff, published in limited edition in 1938. The Birth of Atlantis, illustrated in his series of paintings, exemplifies the Art Deco style popular in the 1930s.

Whilst resident in the United States, Avinoff made six trips to Jamaica which he described as "a dreamland of tropical splendor" between 1926 and 1940, five of them with Nicholas Shoumatoff, the son of his sister Elizabeth Shoumatoff whose father had died in his arms at the age of 12 from a drowning at Jones Beach, New York, and who Avinoff largely served as a father figure for. Shoumatoff would eventually become a well-traveled engineer who may have been responsible for the development of up to 50% of the world's paper mills, and eventually became a president of the New York Entomological Society, traveled to Jamaica several times himself, and became an expert in mountainous alpine climates and mountain ranges including the Swiss Alps and the Himilayas. The two caught more than fourteen thousand bots (butterflies and moths in Jamaican patois), doubling the number of known species on the island to more than a thousand, including the Shoumatoff Hairstreak, a rare butterfly that they had discovered together.

The Carnegie Museum of Art offers a distinguished collection of contemporary art that includes film and video works. Other collections of note include works of American art from the late 19th century, French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and European and American decorative arts from the late 17th century to the present. The Heinz Architectural Center, opened as part of the museum in 1993, is dedicated to the collection, study, and exhibition of architectural drawings and models. The Hall of Architecture contains the largest collection of plaster casts of architectural masterpieces in America and one of the three largest in the world. The marble Hall of Sculpture replicates the interior of the Parthenon. While most art museums founded at the turn of the century focused on collections of old masters, Andrew Carnegie envisioned a museum collection consisting of the “Old Masters of tomorrow.” In 1896, he initiated a series of exhibitions of contemporary art and proposed that the museum’s paintings collection be formed through purchases from this series. Carnegie, thereby, founded what is arguably the first museum of modern art in the United States. Early acquisitions of works by such artists as Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, and Camille Pissarro laid the foundation for a collection that today is distinguished in American art from the mid-19th century to the present, in French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and in significant late-20th-century works.

Over the century, the museum has amplified its scope of interest to include European and American decorative arts from the late 17th century to the present. Architect-designed objects figure prominently among recent acquisitions and complement the Heinz Architectural Center. In addition, the museum’s collection includes photography, film and video,  Asian art (notably Japanese prints), and African art. In 1994, the museum completed a reinstallation of its pre-1945 American and European fine and decorative arts that combines them in a single chronological sequence. In 2003, the Scaife Galleries, home for many of the paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and decorative arts in the museum’s collection, reopened after a yearlong renovation. There is now a larger Works on Paper Gallery, and the contemporary art galleries incorporate decorative arts and works on paper along with paintings, sculpture, and film and video pieces. Some of the galleries now feature floor-to-ceiling, salon-style installations of the artwork. Resource areas and comfortable seating have also been integrated into the space. The Heinz Galleries are dedicated to the presentation of temporary changing exhibitions; they host three to five major exhibitions per year. In 2009, the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries of decorative arts and design reopened after a complete renovation. The first major reinterpretation of the decorative arts collection in two decades, the installation traces the evolution of style and design in the Western world from the mid-18th century to the present. Visit the museum's website at ... http://web.cmoa.org

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