An exhibition of one of the first professional artists of Russia opened in Moscow

The original exhibition opened on September 7 at the Pushkin Museum. Several halls of the mansion on Prechistenka were allocated for temporary housing of artistic works by Elizaveta Boehm, whose activity occurred in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. Connoisseurs know her as the author of textbook illustrations for Russian classics, a graphic designer and silhouette artist, and generally the author of illustrations for children, who had a powerful influence on the style of her era.

The main feature of the project “The Diversity of the Works of Elisabeth Böhm”, dedicated to the 180th anniversary of her birth, should be recognized as the exhibition of works from private collections. Sergei Lyakh, Mikhail Seslavinsky, Igor Vilkin and other collectors of antiquities shared with the museum the rarest specimens, which often came into their hands directly from Boehm’s heirs. The “donors” of the project were the Historical Museum, GMIRLI, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and the Leo Tolstoy Museum (later it will become clear why this is important). True, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum were not involved in participation, which would have been logical – but, according to the director of the Pushkin Museum, Evgeny Bogatyrev, this was done deliberately. “Otherwise, the scale of the exhibition exceeded our capabilities,” Bogatyrev said at the opening ceremony. Most of the artifacts are presented to the public for the first time, the organizers emphasize.

All the works seen by the MK correspondent can be divided into five layers. Firstly, porcelain decorated with drawings, designer boxes, glassware and other items of decorative and applied art. Consider, for example, damask and glasses painted with gold and enamels, created in the 1870s/1900s. Such “containers” were not seen in folk tobacco houses and taverns – it was available only to the highest nobility.

The second layer is books designed by the artist. Elizaveta Merkurievna, in principle, was one of the first women to become a professional artist in the Russian Empire. But if art historians in her pictures from children’s books, textbooks, ABCs and anthologies for “first reading” (such as “Animal Friend”) see Russian style and romantic features of modernism rooted in tradition, then a casual visitor will be struck by a purely female love for children, meticulousness and attention to detail.

To examine the third layer – the silhouettes, the heroes of which were again 90% children – working, playing with dolls or animals, reading books, making crafts and simply finding time for simple fun – it is better to arm yourself with a magnifying glass. Elisabeth Böhm really did not create large canvases, such as to occupy the entire wall of the royal palace. But for its “anti-scale” and apophatic type of artistic expression (when the image is created not by “light”, but by shadow), Repin appreciated it, calling Boehm’s silhouettes “Dark.” Their great contemporary loved them more than “Little Whites,” that is, ordinary color pictures.

The fourth layer is Easter and other holiday-themed cards, “wishes of money and good luck,” restaurant menus, etc. They are undoubtedly interesting, like, say, “war postcards”, the characters of which were heroic kids. But it should be noted that many masters looked at the First World War with “children’s eyes,” depicting ten-year-old soldiers, nurses, and even a little boy – an Austrian prisoner, whom a Russian feeds porridge.

Finally, fifth and most importantly: illustrations for Russian classics: Krylov’s fables, the works of Leskov, Leo Tolstoy, Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter,” where writers and, after them, Elizaveta Boehm showed bright folk types. She created compassionate pictures, reflecting the poverty and suffering of the people in the tradition of Dostoevsky’s “The Boy at Christ on the Christmas Tree,” Nekrasov’s “Peasant Children” and the great paintings of the Itinerant artists.

The artist was not cut off from life, knocking on the window often not with a lilac branch, but with the dirty hand of a beggar. And this is a very important aspect.

At the beginning of the last century, Arkady Averchenko mercilessly ridiculed the “sweet” design and content of contemporary, combed and smoothed children’s literature. The satirist described the magazine for very young readers as follows: on the first page there is some “Girl with an Apple”, then the novel “Separate Roads”, again – “Girl with a Cat”, the same one congratulating her grandmother on her birthday… and at the end the same damn girl with a dog called “Two Friends”. And so – every number.”

Of course, idyllic subjects rejected by Averchenko (and their consumers, it should be noted, were offspring from wealthy families: color printed books were expensive), were also created by Elizaveta Boehm. But this was an “order” from publishers and the secular part of society.

But her “proverbs in silhouettes” and “popular” works were closer to the “broad masses,” as they would say in the USSR. And the watercolors “Hungry Boy” (to Tolstoy’s article “On Hunger”), “L.N. Tolstoy among the Yasnaya Polyana children at the “tree of the poor” and the works, the heroes of which are dressed not in boyar caftans, but in village clothes or dressed in the cast-offs of a poor man, are spiritually related to the paintings “Troika” or “Seeing Away for the Dead” by Perov.