Ivan Bilibin
Ivan Bilibin was a Russian Art Nouveau illustrator who lived from 1876 to 1942. He was born just outside of St. Petersburg, Russia. Between 1898 and 1901, he went to art school in Munich and was influenced by the artists of the Art Nouveau. Other influences include Russian artist, Ilya Repin, Slavic folklore, and the traditional Japanese woodblock prints.
In 1899, after seeing an exhibition by fellow Russian artist, Victor Vasnetsov, Ivan Bilibin was inspired to travel north and paint the countryside of Old Russia. His watercolors from that trip got him the commission that made him famous. Between 1901 and 1903, the Department for the Production of State Documents hired Bilibin to illustrate a series of Russian fairy tales recorded by the Russian ethnographer, Alexander Afanasyev. In these fairy tales, Bilibin dressed his figures in traditional costume and used the mountains and forests of Old Russia for the backgrounds. Often, he even used traditional designs and motifs to border the scenes he was illustrating.
Bilibin was part of the greater Russian moderne movement; the Art Nouveau movement that spread through Russia in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. These works gained him notoriety and soon after he was hired to work for the Russian Museum as an ethnographer. They sent him into northern Russia to study the folk arts of the country. Ivan Bilibin continued with his art, drawing political cartoons for magazines. His illustrations and backgrounds of the countryside served as the perfect imagery for set design and he was hired to design stage sets for the opera.
Ivan Bilibin left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, living in Crimea, then Cairo, and Paris and painting private commissions. But he was homesick and finally returned home in 1936. After returning home, he became a professor at the Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Unfortunately, Bilibin starved and died in February of 1942 at 65 years of age during the WWII German siege of Leningrad. He was buried in a communal grave with other university professors.
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