Ariadna Arendt
Ariadna Arendt was born into a family of doctors, and as a child was a regular visitor to Boran-Eli, the estate and studio of Mikhail Lattry. This haven of creativity was also frequented by Maximilian Voloshin, the Tsvetaeva sisters, Aristarkh Lentulov, Konstantin Bogaevsky, and Nikolay Khrustachev, among others.
“In the morning everybody worked in their own corner or outdoors,” Ariadna recalled. “Artists painted and poets wrote. There was also a pottery studio, where anyone could come and work with clay. Later, their pieces were fired and glazed. [...] To me it was all magic, just like the paintings that emerged from a blank canvas.”1 As a child, Arendt took classes from Elizaveta Govorova, a member of the World of Art group, who was a student of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, a mystic and theosophist who greatly influenced Arendt’s worldview and style. Her teenage works, especially drawings, already revealed an interest in symbolism and mysticism.
Later, writing about one of her other teachers Nikolay Samokish, Arendt recalled, “N.S. said of Maximilian Voloshin that he knew no better art historian. He had a lot of respect for Arkhip Kuindzhi and his students, especially for Nicholas Roerich and, strangely, our student sketches reminded him of the new directions pointed out by Roerich.” Her close connection with Voloshin—a family friend and her mentor in art (he was also a mentor in poetry for the young Marina Tsvetaeva)—brought Arendt to Koktebel, a place that would play a crucial role in her life.
Deeply influenced by the theosophical beliefs she picked up from Voloshin, Arendt learnt to seek and find harmony even in life’s darkest moments. As a young girl, she had what she called a revelation. “I remember when I was 16 and was studying at Simferopol Art College. I finished a life drawing and went into the small room where we stored our works. As I was about to pull aside the curtain something happened to me, which I cannot describe in words. Any attempt to do so would be very pale in comparison to the actual experience. All of a sudden, time ceased to exist. How long I stood there I do not know, but I experienced immense, ineffable happiness. I was so happy that I could not breathe. It seemed to me at that moment that I knew everything; that I could answer any question; that God existed; that evil was an illusion; that there was no death and that the world was boundless [...]. I could see golden rays that pierced me from above and, and seemed to grow narrower toward the bottom. My essence was shaken. Everything ended as abruptly as it had started, but I left that small room a different person. This was cosmic and inexpressible happiness!”
In 1932, after graduating from VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN, where her teachers included Lev Bruni, Nina Niss-Goldman, Vera Mukhina, Joseph Chaikov, Sergei Bulakovsky, Ivan Efimov, and Vladimir Favorsky, Arendt settled in Moscow. She lived in the artists’ village at Verkhnyaya Maslovka, known as the Russian Montmartre, where she worked alongside her friends Sarra Lebedeva, Vasily Vatagin, Ivan Efimov, her first partner Meer Ayzenshtadt, and her husband Anatoly Grigoriev.
In a tragic incident in 1936, Arendt was run over by a tram and lost both legs, however she remained active both in her daily life and creative work.
In the 1940s, Arendt and Grigoriev were both members of a theosophical circle run by Arendt’s relative, Olga Butkevich. In 1948, Grigoriev was arrested as a member of “the anti-Soviet theosophical underground” and sent to a prison camp, but Arendt miraculously avoided arrest. In the mid-1950s, she started building a house in Koktebel, where her friends and like-minded artists came to stay in the years that followed. Amaravella artists Viktor Chernovolenko and Boris Smirnov-Rusetsky were frequent guests.
Toward the end of her artistic career, Arendt began making innovative compositions of stones and fossils she found in Koktebel, which had parallels with Amaravella’s work. “I got into [collecting stones] much later. Maximilian Voloshin was no longer around and I couldn’t run up and down the mountains, and that was when I discovered the microcosm of rocks.
Maria Arendt, Natalia Arendt
1. All quotes are from: Ariadna Arendt, “V strane golubykh kholmov,” in Natalya Menchinskaya, Krymskie “argonavty” XX veka (Moscow: Kriterion, 2003).