Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
“An epic tale of Bernstein’s passionate search for Magda Nachman, an artist whose life was an achievement on the order of her marvelous painting. Biography at its finest, Magda Nachman: An Artist in Exile draws the reader along on a gripping and rewarding saga that takes the teller from Russia to Berlin to London to Bombay, to find an artist who persevered in her art despite almost insurmountable odds...” — Mary V. Dearborn, author of Hemingway: A Biography and Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim
The political and social turmoil of the twentieth century took Magda Nachman from a privileged childhood in St. Petersburg at the close of the nineteenth century, artistic studies with Léon Bakst and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin at the Zvantseva Art Academy, and participation in the dynamic symbolist/modernist artistic ferment in pre-Revolutionary Russia to a refugee existence in the Russian countryside during the Russian Civil War followed by marriage to a prominent Indian nationalist, then with her husband to the hardships of émigré Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to Bombay, where she established herself as an important artist and a mentor to a new generation of modern Indian artists.
—Ashish Mohan Khokar, Narthaki
“A lost artist worthy of rediscovery, [Magda Nachman] is of vital interest to Bombay. … [This] riveting narrative covers continents engulfed by cataclysmic events in defining epochs. Bernstein tells a tremendous story with compassion and confidence, its research crisscrossing America, Russia, Germany, and Bombay, Pune and Baroda in India.”
—Meher Marfatia, Mid-day
“What a story! An epic tale of Bernstein’s passionate search for Magda Nachman, an artist whose life was an achievement on the order of her marvelous painting. Biography at its finest, Magda Nachman: An Artist in Exile draws the reader along on a gripping and rewarding saga that takes the teller from Russia to Berlin to London to Bombay, to find an artist who persevered in her art despite almost insurmountable odds. Beautifully written, Bernstein’s book has the immediacy of a novel.”
— Mary V. Dearborn, author of Hemingway: A Biography and Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim
Dr. Lina Bernstein taught Russian and comparative literature at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of Gogol’s Last Book and numerous articles on Russian art, literature, and culture. She recently curated an online exhibit on Magda Nachman for Moscow’s State Museum of Oriental Cultures and is preparing a Russian-language version of Magda Nachman: An Artist in Exile.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. The Great Little Lady of the Bombay Art World
2. In Magda’s Footsteps
3. Once There Was and Once There Was Not
4. The School and the Teacher
5. The Constellation Leo
6. Koktebel
7. The Revolutions of 1917 and Their Aftermath
8. The People’s Theater at Ust′-Dolyssy
9. The Noskov Affair
10. M. P. T. Acharya
11. Exeunt Stage Left
12. The Emigrants
13. Bombay
14. A Case of Identity
15. In Quest of Magda’s Paintings
16. A Kindred Spirit
17. In Memoriam
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index