Nathan Altman was a Russian and Soviet avant-garde artist who worked in different art fields such as painting (including book illustrations), draftsmanship, poster art, sculpture, theatre, and industrial design. All his creations were based on the concept of constructivism and cubism as the opposition to primitive conventional realist art.
Background
Nathan Altman was born in 1889 on 22 of December in Vinnytsia, a town situated by the time in the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine. He came from a poor Jewish family – his father was a small merchant, and mother worked as laundrywoman in a hospital.
Nathan lost his father at the age of four when the latter died of tuberculosis. The artist’s mother fled the country hiding from the pogroms of Jews. So, Altman was raised by his grandmother.
Education
Altman revealed his extraordinary abilities in painting at the young age. He started his education at Art College in Odessa where he had studied painting under the tutelage of Kyriak Kostandi and Gennady Lodyzhensky and sculpture with L. D. Iorini and I. I. Marmone for five years from 1902.
Three years after graduating from the College, Altman pursued his one-year training in Paris where he met many avant-garde artists, most of whom were Russians, including Marc Chagall, Alexander Archipenko, Ossip Zadkine, David Shterenberg, Chaim Soutine. Young Nathan joined the ‘Montparnasse School’ and entered the Vassilieva’s Free Russian academy founded by Russian immigrate painter Maria Vassilieva where he worked in the studio of Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine.
In 1912, Altman became an apprentice in a stained-glass workshop in St. Petersburg. Later, the same year, he received the diploma of a painter of signs after passing the exams in Berdichev.
Career
Nathan Altman presented his paintings to the public for the first time in 1906 and 1910 in Odessa. A year later, in Paris, the artist took part at the Salon of the National Society of Fine Arts with his impressionist and fauvist works.
After the return to his native Vinnytsia in 1911, he became an artist-in-residence in Vinnytsia’s City Theatre. This period, Altman painted The Jewish Funeral, based on his grandfather’s death, and a lot of cartoons of his countrymen, which later were collected in a book Vinnytsia in Caricatures (1912).
About 1912, Altman moved to St. Petersburg, where he worked as a craftsman. While in this northern capital, the artist joined many artistic unions and attended multiple poetic salons, one of which was ‘Stray Dog’. He received the first popularity thanks to his theatre decorations for the cabaret ‘Comedians Halt’.
The painting created in a Cubist style, which brought the artist great success, was the portrait of Anna Akhmatova (1914). Since then, Altman took part in more and more exhibitions, including ‘World of Art’ (1913, 1915-16), ‘Union of Youth’ (1913-14) and ‘Jack of Diamonds’ (1916). Besides, he started to illustrate the poetry collections of his literary friends. In 1915, the artist occupied the teacher’s post at Mikhail Bernstein's private art school, which he had held for two years.
The Revolution of 1917 fascinated Nathan Altman by its ideas and he took an active part in it along with many of his contemporaries, including Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir Mayakovsky. So, he edited the first Soviet journal on the questions of art, ‘Art of the Commune’, played an important role in the foundation of the Museum of Artistic Culture and portrayed many eminent Bolshevist leaders, for example Anatoly Lunacharsky and Vladimir Lenin. Altman as well worked in the Board for Artistic Matters within the Department of Fine Arts of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment along with Malevich, Baranoff-Rossine and Shevchenko.
In 1920, Nathan Altman became the director of the Museum of Painterly Culture in St. Petersburg. He had held this position for one year.
Another post the artist got in 1921 after moving to Moscow was the presidency of the Deparment of Fine Arts where Nathan met Maxim Gorky, Ilya Ehrenburg and Isaac Babel. A year later, the artist presented his works at the ‘Exhibition of Three’ along with Marc Chagall and David Shterenberg. Via these artists, Altman became a decorator for the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET) with his first design for Mayakovsky’s ‘Mystery Bouffe’ presented in 1921 in German for the delegates of the third Congress of the Comintern. These projects were followed by ‘Uriel Acosta’ (1922) and ‘Habima’ (1922) which had a great success. At the same time, in Berlin, appeared his book Evrejskaja grafika Natana Al'tmana: Tekst Maksa Osborna which gathered his Jewish graphic art. With one of the actors of GOSET, Solomon Mikhoels, Natan Altman, Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel created a movie ‘Jewish Luck‘ filmed in Vinnytsia. Altman participated as well in such theatre projects as ‘Doctor’, the comedy ‘137 Children’s Homes’ and the opera ‘The Tenth Commandment’.
The first solo show of Nathan Altman was organized in St. Petersburg in 1926.
Two years later, Altman’s collaboration with the Yiddish theatre ended and the artist came again to Paris where he had painted multiple landscapes and still lives in an impressionist manner. Nathan took part in two Parisian exhibitions, the one of the ‘Young Europe’ society (1932) and the second of the ‘Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists’ (1934).
In 1936, the artist came back to St. Petersburg which political situation was full of ideological pressure and terror by the time. Altman was obliged to commemorate Stalin’s different triumphs in huge banners. While in St. Petersburg, the painter also created stage designs for theatre, in particular, Shakespearian themes staged by the director Grigory Kozintsev, illustrated different books, including Old Testament, for children and Gogol’s Petersburg Novels (1937), and wrote essays on art. The artist painted less since then and till the end of his days. Among the works of this period were ‘Forest Avenue’ (1940), some landscapes of Perm, created during the war evacuation and ‘Portrait of the artist’s wife’ (1963, begun in 1936). In Perm, Altman collaborated with the Kirov opera by creating the design for Verdi’s ‘Otello’ by Kozintsev and done some caricatures of Goebbels and other representatives of the Third Reich for the army’s newspaper ‘The Star’.
Nathan Altman’s evacuation ended in 1948 and he returned to St. Petersburg where he had his last success, including the illustrations of Sholem Aleichems’ works, ‘Hamlet’ by Kozintsev at the Pushkin Theatre of Drama, a film ‘Don Quixote’ and the exhibition in 1969.