Marie Bashkirtseff was a Ukrainian diarist, painter, and sculptor. She created her works in such styles as Realism and Naturalism.
Background
Bashkirtseff was born in Poltava, Ukraine, on November 24, 1858, into a noble and wealthy family. When Marie Bashkirtseff was a little girl, her parents separated and her mother took Marie to live with her parents near Cherniakhivka. Later, she decided to travel across Europe and brought her daughter with her.
Education
Marie Bashkirtseff acquired an education superior to that given to most girls of her rank. She could read Plato and Virgil in the original, and was fluent in four languages (Russian, French, Italian and English). A gifted musician, she at first hoped to be a singer, and studied seriously in Italy. However, in 1877, she lost her voice while suffering from the effects of tuberculosis misdiagnosed as chronic laryngitis. She then turned her efforts to painting.
To improve her skills in painting, she went to France and attended the Robert-Fleury studio and at the Académie Julian. The Académie was one of the few institutions that accepted female students, so it attracted young women from all over Europe and the United States. Her fellow students at the Académie were Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa and Louise Breslau, whom Marie Bashkirtseff viewed as her only real rival.
Bashkirtseff produced a remarkable body of work in her short lifetime. She started to exhibit her works at the Paris Salon as early as 1880 and participated there every year until her death, except the year 1883. In 1884, she displayed a portrait of Paris slum children entitled The Meeting and a pastel portrait of her cousin.
Among her best-known works were also the painting The Umbrella (1883), and a bronze statue Nausicaa’s Pain (1884). All in all, between 1877 and 1884 she created some 230 works of art, chiefly paintings and drawings. She also wrote several articles for Hubertine Auclert's feminist newspaper La Citoyenne in 1881 under the pen name Pauline Orrel.
As a painter, Marie Bashkirtseff was inspired by her friend Jules Bastien-Lepage's admiration for realism and naturalism. She mostly depicted the urban scenes in her artworks. By mischance, both artists fell a victim to chronic illness the same year.
Bashkirtseff started to keep a diary since her early adolescence. It offered an honest picture of her artistic and emotional development and a strikingly modern psychological self-portrait of a young, gifted mind in the process of growth. The earliest version of the diary, edited by André Theuriet - the edition first translated into English in 1890 - contained her mother’s edits and additions. The complete translation was eventually published in two volumes: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff (1997) and Lust for Glory (2013).
Quotations:
"To a woman who knows her own mind men can only be a minor consideration."
"Let us love dogs; let us love only dogs! Men and cats are unworthy creatures."
"I am the most interesting book of all."
"I was born to be a remarkable woman; it matters little in what way or how. ... I shall be famous or I will die."
"Nothing is ever so good or so bad in reality as it is in the anticipation."
"When I die my death will be caused by indignation at the stupidity of human nature."
"Art just consists in making us swallow the commonplaces by charming us eternally."
"Art ... is as much a source of happiness for the beginner as for the master. One forgets everything in one's work."
"What am I? Nothing. What would I be? Everything."
"Art consists precisely in making us admire old stories, charming us with them eternally, as Nature charms with her eternal sun, her ancient earth, and her men built all on the same pattern, and all animated by the same feelings."
Connections
The magnate Hryts Myloradovych proposed her, but she refused to marry him.
life partner:
Hryts Myloradovych
References
Portrait of Young Genius: The Mind and Art of Marie Bashkirtseff
The book is somewhat unique in format. The first part is a biographical section that describes Marie's unusual and fascinating life. Then a second section, consists of a single Journal excerpt (in English translation from the original French) on each left-hand page, juxtaposed with one of her outstanding works of art on the facing page.
2016
Marie Bashkirtseff: The Journal of a Young Artist, 1860-1884
In these pages, science, art, literature, social questions, love, are treated with all the cynicism of a Machiavelli and the naivete of an ardent and enthusiastic girl, Marie Bashkirtseff.
The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All
128 years after her death, Fonthill Press brings forth the most complete, unsanitized version of Marie Bashkirtseff’s Journal ever published in the English language. In this fresh and timeless translation, Katherine Kernberger has returned to the original text - Marie’s notebooks held in Bibliothèque Nationale de France.