Alexander Kohts and Vasily Vatagin
Alexander Kohts was a Russian evolutionary biologist, professor, museologist, and the founding director of the State Darwin Museum in Moscow. His wife, the animal psychologist and primatologist Nadezhda Ladygina-Kohts, and the pioneering Russian wildlife painter Vasily Vatagin are usually considered to be the museum’s co-founders.
Vatagin, who was also interested in Indian culture, has left a diverse creative legacy of sculpture, drawings, paintings, and illustrations. He collaborated with the Darwin Museum for 45 years, from 1908 to 1953. In 1918, Kohts commissioned him to make a series of sculptures of thinkers who had made important contributions to evolutionary theory. The first work in the series was a bust of Charles Darwin and the last was a huge bust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The series also included a bust of Rudolf Steiner that is now lost but can be seen in two photographs. One features Alexander and Nadezhda Kohts and the other the Kohts couple with Vatagin and Margarita Sabashnikova, Steiner’s student, who took part in the construction of the First Goetheanum.
In the 1920s, Kohts commissioned Vatagin to produce the triptych Evolution of Worldviews: Ancient Myths, Dogmatic Theology, and Science. The Darwin Museum also holds Vatagin’s original studies for these works, and whereas that for Dogmatic Theology is almost identical to the painting (the only addition to the latter was a panther), the sketch for Ancient Myths includes an important element that is missing in the final work. All of the fantastical creatures—the triton, the sphinx, the satyr, and the centaur—are in place, but instead of a goddess standing by a tripod, as in the painting, there is a naked man standing on the back of a centaur with a skull in his hand. Above him is an angel making a gesture of blessing.
It is interesting to compare this image to Sabashnikova’s description in her memoirs of the “Slavic initiate” she painted in the Goetheanum. “The second figure entrusted to me in the circle of figures representing various cultures was a Slavic man. [...] Splitting away from him was his dark shadow. A blue angel was giving the man a blessing with one hand and pointing to a strange figure approaching from the sky with the other: a red winged horse with eight legs and a human face.”1 The anthroposophists depicted the “Slavic initiate” as a man standing between an angel and a centaur. Rudolf Steiner believed that the mission of the Slavic (and in particular Russian) people was to bring together in their culture the spiritual mysticism of the East and Western materialism, a merger that would lay the foundation for true human brotherhood.2 This is exactly what Vatagin depicted in his study for Dogmatic Theology. Kohts rejected the initial composition for reasons that are unknown to us, but he carefully preserved the original sketch in his museum.