20. gadsimta sākuma modernā Rīgas grafiķe Alise Dmitrijeva

• Authors: Vanaga Baiba

Title variants

EN

Early 20th Century Riga’s Modern Graphic Artist Alice Dmitrijew

• Languages of publication: LV

Abstracts

EN

In autumn 1911, Alice Dmitrijew (1876–1945) showed her decorative, stylised colour woodcuts for the first time to the public of her native Riga at the 2nd exhibition of the Baltic Artists’ Association in the Riga Art Society premises. Existing publications, mainly artists’ dictionaries, provide very little information on her biography, largely containing birth and death years, some facts and short descriptions of her graphic works but nothing about her education. Also early 20th century local periodicals give only descriptions of works shown in exhibitions and individual reproductions. Significant hints of a more comprehensive biography have been found in a letter by the Riga-born German Margot Mecketh (1889–1956) to Paul Campe (1885–1960) preserved in the legacy of this architect and historian of architecture at the Herder Institute in Marburg and so far unknown to Latvian researchers. Alice Dmitrijew was born in Riga to the family of Ivan Dmitrijew, a merchant from Yaroslavl and active member of the city’s Russian community, and his wife Alice, a Riga-born descendant of a Silesian weavers’ family. Dmitrijew most often exhibited colour woodcuts in local art shows, being one of the first Baltic artists to take up print techniques seriously; she largely earned positive reviews in both the German and Latvian press. However, today we know just twelve woodcuts from the print collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art, one painting that has recently surfaced in the art market, one cover design for a book and several reproductions in the Yearbook of Baltic Art. Dmitrijew’s preserved works, all dated about 1910–1915, feature typical Art Nouveau interplays of rhythmical areas and a refined, subdued colour range. In this period she had used simple compositions, laconic, generalised and unified colour fields and subtle tonal variations to create decorative, moderately elegant and sometimes playfully fresh interpretations of figural, landscape and still life motifs.

Keywords

EN

ALICE DMITRIJEW; WOODCUT; LANDSCAPE; STILL LIFE; ART NOUVEAU

• Publisher: Institute of Art History of the Latvian Academy of Art and Art History Research Support Foundation
• Journal: Makslas Vesture un Teorija
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 19
• Pages: 48-62

Contributors

author

Vanaga Baiba

• Latvian National Archives, 11 Šķūņu Street, Riga LV-1050, Latvia