Date: 1937
Size: 5 x 6 inches
Artist: Ivanoff, Serge
About The Poster: This small tip-on print is part of an unidentified series showing various traditional dances, and is illustrated by the Russian artist Serge Ivanoff. The series is in booklet form but some pages are detached - page measures 15.25 x 11.25 inches. Of Serge Ivanoff, Wikipedia writes:
"The son of a family of Moscovite merchants, Serge Ivanoff was artistic from a young age. On his parents' move to St. Petersburg, he had the opportunity for further studies and contact with Europe. In 1917, while the Russian Revolution raged, he entered what was then the Higher Arts College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture at the Imperial Academy of Arts (which was to become, by 1992, the I.E. Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture,[2] subordinated within the Russian Academy of Arts).[3][4] In 1920, his wife, with their two children, fled to Paris from the Bolsheviks. Two years later, having finished his studies and forever marked by the horrors of the revolution, Serge joined them.
A talented portraitist, he executed the portraits of many personalities, among them Pope Pius XI, Serge Lifar, Yvette Chauviré, Arthur Honneger, Edwige Feuillère, Vladimir Kirillovich, Grand Duke of Russia, Princess Vassili, Aleksandr Benois, Zinaida Serebriakova, Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, Alexandre Barbera-Ivanoff, Paul Valéry, Jacques Fath, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jefferson Caffery. Among the lesser known, Ivanoff also painted the sculptor François Cogné (Cogné, in French) and the American designer and artist Irina Belotelkin.
In 1950, Ivanoff moved to the United States; a year later he became an honorary citizen. For over a decade he traveled across the American continent, executing many portraits. At the end of the 1960s, he returned to France. He was a member of the Salon des Indépendants. In 1966, France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, awarded him a gold medal".