Konstantin Bogaevsky 1872-1943

By Analia Kaufman

Konstantin Bogaevsky, Genoese Fortress, 1907, Oil on canvas, (173×80 cm), Perm State Art Gallery, Russia.

Temporarily discharged from the Imperial Academy of the Arts in Russia due to a “lack of talent” in his youth, Konstantin Bogaevsky is now considered one of Crimea’s great Symbolist landscape painters and is honoured as the namesake of a minor planet. 

Born on 24 January 1872 in the Crimean city of Feodosia (alternatively spelled Theodosia), Bogaevsky was Italian-German by birth but spent most of his life painting love letters to his Crimean home, saying once in a letter “however wonderful Italy may be, there is no place on earth like our Crimea, Feodosia or Kenegez... my sweet and wonderful Feodosia, at times like this seems like an earthly paradise”. Though he travelled periodically for exhibitions and to paint, he never left Feodosia permanently, and always returned. He began painting as early as six, but his first formal art lessons came from Ivan Aivazovsky, a Russian Romantic painter native to Feodosia who is now considered one of the greatest marine art masters. At the age of 19, he moved nearly 2,500km north to St. Petersburg to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts and, after the Academy’s reform, the Higher Art Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. One of his instructors was Arkhip Kuindzhi, an extremely popular and respected Ukrainian landscape painter who was also a member of the Peredvizhniki, a group of Russian and Ukrainian realist artists who gathered in protest of academic restrictions in art. Bogaevsky’s art was not popular at the Academy, and he was temporarily discharged from his class, citing a “lack of talent”, but Kuindzhi respected both Bogaevsky as well as his work and protected his pupil’s enrolment. Leaving the Academy in 1897, Bogaevsky participated in the Moscow Society of Art Lovers exhibitions, then travelled for two years in Italy and France where he was exposed to the works of Baroque artist Claude Lorrain, whom he declared his “true teacher”. He returned to Feodosia in 1900 and was never again gone from his childhood home for longer than a few years. 

Upon his return to his homeland Feodosia, Bogaevsky’s work became almost exclusively symbolist landscapes both of his native Crimea as well as an unreal, dreamlike world he created that was referred to by his friends as Bogaevia, or ‘land of Bogaevsky’. It is in these later works of Bogaevia that the influence of Klimt and Böcklin can be seen, with expressive skies and lighting conveyed through stains of various colours. Bogaevsky also focused a series of paintings on Cimmeria, or ancient Crimea, and said that: 

"In my compositions, I try to convey the image of this Earth - majestic and beautiful, solemn and sad. This landscape, saturated with a great historical past, with a peculiar rhythm of mountains, tense folds of hills, bearing a somewhat austere character, serves as an inexhaustible source for me..." 

His popularity grew exponentially during this time following a series of essays published by Russian poet Maximilian Voloshin, who praised Bogayevsky’s symbolism. Bogaevsky was very active in the art world, participating in the Mir iskusstva, the Union of Russian Artists, and the Zhar-Tsvet. Following a period of military service in 1906, his work began to include philosophical motifs of loneliness and the smallness of man. These works, as well as others, continued to be shown at numerous exhibitions over the next several years, and in 1912, Bogaevsky worked on three decorative panels for the Moscow residence of Stepan Ryabushinsky, a member of one of the richest families of his time. 

Bogaevsky’s artistic pursuits as well as his most productive era, were cut short in 1913 as he was sent to fight in the First World War. Returning to Feodosia after several years and following the October Revolution of 1917-1923, he retreated almost entirely into obscurity, though works such as Recollection of Mantegna (1942), Rainbow (1931), and Port of an Imaginable City (1932) are still considered some of his most popular works. In February of 1943, Bogaevsky died in his lifelong home of Feodosia. Nearly thirty years later, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh named main-belt asteroid 3839 Bogaevskij after the artist. As Voloshin wrote, 

“Bogaevsky is truly a creation of his ancient and mournful country, but his paintings relate to the earth which has inspired them, just like the spectral floods of the rivers on the horizon relate to the arid steppe, and the palm-trees of the oases on the murky oceans at midday relate to the shifting sands of the desert.” 

Bibliography

“(#22) Konstantin Fedorovich Bogaevsky - Sothebys.com.” Sotheby's. Accessed January 19, 2023. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2011/important-russian-art-l11111/lot.22.html. 

“3839 Bogaevskij.” en-academic.com. Accessed January 19, 2023. https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/9330879.   

“Artist Bogaevsky Konstantin Fedorovich.” artinvestment.ru. Accessed January 19, 2023. https://artinvestment.ru/en/auctions/632#more.  

“Konstantin Bogaevsky.” Russian Art Museum- Abrahamyan Collection. Museum of Russian Art. Accessed January 19, 2023. https://rusartmuseum.am/en/ authors/konstantin-bogaevsky/.