SERGE IVANOFF (1893–1983)
Portrait of writer and poet Archag Tchobanian (1872–1954)
SERGE IVANOFF (1893–1983)
Portrait of writer and poet Archag Tchobanian (1872–1954)
Oil on canvas, signed on the left. Located and dated Paris, 1943.
Gift from architect Edouard Utudjian.
A painter and engraver born in Moscow on 25 December 1893, died in Paris on 8 February 1983.
Sergei Petrovich Ivanoff was from a family of art-loving traders. He attended the Faculty of Natural Sciences in Saint Petersbourg. At the age of 24, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts under the supervision of Maître Braz, the curator of the Hermitage Museum.
He was deeply affected by the famine raging in Bolshevik Russia.
He sent his wife and two children to Paris and joined them permanently in 1922. He earned his living there by illustrating books, posters and advertisements, and acquired a solid reputation as a portraitist.
He travelled around Europe for “L’Illustration” to which he contributed from 1930.
He was a member of the Société des Artistes Indépendants [Society of Independent Artists] from 1942, and is best know as a portraitist of a great variety of subjects ranging from clergymen to politicians and artists, both in Europe and the United States.
Towards the end of the 1960s, in his studio at 80 rue Taitbout in Paris, he gave a more personal touch to his works. He was awarded the gold medal from André Malraux at the Salon des Indépendants (Exhibition of Independent Artists] in 1966 for his painting “Les Menaces.”
Frédéric Fringhian