Ivan Gregorewitch Olinsky

Ivan G. Olinsky

(1878-1962)

Olinsky is best known as a leading twentieth-century portrait painter, but he also executed a notable series of landscapes in Venice. His life began in Elizabethgrad in the Ukraine, where his father was a farm manager. The family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City when Ivan was thirteen.

Olinsky studied at the National Academy of Design from 1893 to 1898 withCharles Yardley Turner and George W. Maynard, among others. He frequented the Metropolitan Museum of Art and enrolled at the Art Students League to study with the artist Bryson Burroughs, who was also a curator at the Metropolitan. Olinsky was selected to assist John LaFarge in 1900 and spent the next seven years traveling with him and working on various murals. During this period he met many of the leading figures of the Gilded Age. As LaFarge’s health declined, his young protégé was called upon to take charge of various commissions and execute LaFarge’s instructions.

By 1908 Olinsky was ready to establish his professional independence and, with his wife and infant daughter, sailed for Europe, where he traveled and painted. He returned to New York in time to serve as a pallbearer at LaFarge’s funeral and then he set up a studio on Washington Square. Beginning in 1911 he became associated with the pioneering modernist gallery of dealer William Macbeth, who also represented many leading Impressionists and Realists known, respectively, as The Ten and the Ashcan School. Olinsky joined an illustrious stable that included John Twachtman, Winslow Homer, Arthur B. Davies, Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, and J. Alden Weir.

In 1917, Macbeth joined with European art dealers Knoedler and Durant-Ruel in organizing an exhibition of twenty-three prominent French and American artists, including Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Olinsky. Olinsky also showed at the Grand Central Galleries, New York. After moving to a studio at 27 West Sixty-seventh Street, he joined the lively art scene dominated by such friends and teaching colleagues as Gifford Beal, Frank Dumond and Luis Mora. He taught at the National Academy of Design from 1911 to 1962 and at the Art Students League for many years.

Having painted portraits of his parents when he was a sixteen-year old art student, Olinsky continued for the rest of his life to be fascinated by the human face and developed an extraordinary skill in depicting the character of his sitters. His portraits of women in general and of his lovely wife, Genevieve, and daughters Leonore and Tosca, in particular demonstrate his lively style. In his New York studio in fall, winter, and spring and, after 1917, in the stone studio he built in Old Lyme, Connecticut, he worked on two or three canvasses a day, according to the conditions of light. His better-known subjects included artist-friend Isabel Bishop, President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University, John LaFarge, model Evelyn Nesbit (“the girl in the red velvet swing”), and actress Leatrice Joy.

After Olinsky’s death in 1962, Robert Beverly Hale wrote, “In our present world of speed, violence, and thrashing egos he remained to the very end balanced, gracious, and unpretentious. His kindness and consideration were so innate that his courtesy became a legend…He was indeed the best of artists, and we all loved him.” (1)

At The Festival of the Redeemer

During Olinsky’s 1908–10 stay in Europe he went to France and Italy, touring museums and visiting several art colonies. He found Venice a land of enchanting architecture and light and completed many on-the-spot sketches that demonstrate his youthful experimentation. Alternately painting more sharply focused oils of canals and bridges and then more amorphous subjects such as the clock tower, he delighted in life in the ancient city. He no doubt was aware of Whistler’s various abstract compositions based on his own sojourns in Venice because many of Olinsky’s works from this time are similarly subtle and atmospheric. The “New York Times” reported his arrest by Venetian police who came upon him painting in the Piazza San Marco at night. The spectacles he enjoyed must have remained indelibly etched in his mind long after his departure from Venice, as he painted from memory a striking Venetian nighttime fête while on a visit to Vernon, in Normandy. Other paintings of Venice specifically relate to changing weather conditions that clothe the city in a range of colors from gray to bright blue.

One of the most successful landscapes is “At the Festival of the Redeemer” (Festa del Redentore). The artist has set up his easel on the Zattere, with the pontoon bridge spanning the Giudecca Canal from center right on a sharp diagonal to the left, culminating at the Church of the Redeemer. Assorted gondolas with their passengers linger on the canal. In the foreground two young ladies elegantly attired in pink and blue dresses with matching broad-brimmed straw hats gaze out at the canal and the cortege of state and ecclesiastical officers on their way to the church. The stunning painting demonstrates Olinsky’s deft Impressionistic handling of light as it dances across the watery expanse. The July sun that basks the scene in warmth is almost palpable and the intense blue green mixed with flecks of other colors is arresting.

Andrea Palladio (1508-80) was commissioned by the Venetian Senate to build a grand church on the island of Guidecca was in fulfillment of a vow to be kept on the deliverance of the city from the devastating plague of 1575-76. Palladio imbued his Church of the Redeemer, which was to be his last building in Venice, with a sense of theater. After the Council of Trent, the Church of Rome responded to the growth of Protestant sects with a concerted effort that led to the Counter Reformation. The Latin cross plan was favored over the central plan in an effort to find shapes for a rejuvenated liturgy. Similarly, the almost complete abstention from nonarchitectural ornament and the chaste whiteness of the interior, both characteristics of the Redeemer, were hallmarks of the Palladian style.

The Venetian senate entrusted the care of the church to the Capuchin Order and vowed to visit annually in perpetuity. A grandiose ritual was initiated and continues to be celebrated each year on the third weekend in July. At one time, the Doge and the senators proceeded over a temporary causeway consisting of gondolas and barges assembled across the Gindecca canal and the ceremony concluded with prayers within the magnificent church’s tribune, especially designed by Palladio for this purpose. The festival remains a colorful reminder of Venice’s golden age and attracts thousands of onlookers who revel in the spectacle of costumes, music, and fireworks.

NOTES:

1. Ivan G. Olinsky (1878-1962), Arvest Galleries, Inc., Oct. 26-Nov. 30, 1985, p. 13

Ivan G. Olinsky (1878 – 1962)

At the Festa del Redentore

At The Festival of the Redeemer, 1908

Oil on canvas

24 x 32 in. (61 x 81.2 cm)

Gift of John and Richard Miller (2003.26)