|
Varvara Jmoudsky, better known as Barbara Karinska or simply Karinska (October 3, 1886 – October 18, 1983), was costumer of the New York City Ballet, and the first costume designer ever to win the Capezio Dance Award, for costumes "of visual beauty for the spectator and complete delight for the dancer".〔(Sunday NY Times article by John Martin, December 31, 1961 )〕 Along with Dorothy Jeakins, she won the 1948 Oscar for color costume design (the first year costume design was divided into color and black and white categories) for ''Joan of Arc'', and was nominated in 1952 for the Samuel Goldwyn musical ''Hans Christian Andersen'', starring Danny Kaye. She divided her time between homes in Manhattan, Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and Domrémy-la-Pucelle, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc. For the stage, she designed the costumes for George Balanchine's production of Tchaikovsky's ''The Nutcracker'', among others. == Early life == Barbara Karinska was born Varvara Andreevna Jmoudsky () in Kharkov, Ukraine ("Little Russia") in 1886, to a successful textile manufacturer. She was the third and eldest female of the ten Jmoudsky siblings. Russian embroidery was an art form filled with detailed shades and colors of varying texture of stitches – some tiny and fine and others broad and rough. This was Karinska's artistic medium as a child. She studied law at the University of Kharkov and, in 1908, married Alexander Moïssenko, the son of another wealthy Kharkov industrialist. Moïssenko died in 1909 several months before the birth of their daughter Irina. In 1910, Varvara’s older brother Anatoly, owner of the moderately Socialist Kharkov newspaper UTRO (Morning), went through divorce proceedings that resulted in Varvara winning custody of his two-year-old son, Vladimir Anatolevich Jmoudsky. Vladimir and Irina were raised as brother and sister. Varvara soon remarried a prominent Muscovite criminal lawyer, N. S. Karinsky, who was residing in Kharkov. With his law practice burgeoning, the Karinsky family of four moved to Moscow in 1915, to a spacious apartment that Varvara had purchased. Karinsky continued to practice criminal law from the apartment on a strictly pro bono basis and gained fame and prestige throughout the Russian Empire. Varvara, meanwhile, became totally engrossed in the arts and hosted her famous salon every night after the theater or ballet. She developed her own form of painting applying pieces of colored silk gauze to photographs and drawings. Her first subjects were ballet scenes. After much tearing apart and redoing, she exhibited about 12 of her works in a prominent Moscow gallery and was quite successful both financially and critically. Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, to the provisional government, first headed by Prince Lvov and then by Alexander Kerensky. N.S. Karinsky was appointed by Lvov as Attorney General and Presiding Justice of the Court of Appeals of the District of St. Petersburg. As Civil War followed the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, The Ministry of the Interior of the White Occupied Southern Territories assigned to N.S. Karinsky the governorship of several southern provinces. Varvara, Irina and Vladimir spent the years of the civil war moving between Kharkov and Crimea; Karinsky joining them where and whenever possible. With the fall of Crimea to the Red forces, in 1921, Karinsky was a marked man, yet he stayed at his post until the very end helping others to escape. Unable to find his family, several of Varvara’s sisters and brothers forced him to leave Crimea with them by ship, assuring him that Varvara would soon follow. But Varvara had decided to remain in the "New Russia" and filed a “post card divorce”, legitimate and popular during those years of upheaval. N. S. Karinsky eventually made his way to New York where, unable to speak English, he undertook a variety of menial jobs, including driving a taxi. Nicholas Karinsky never lost his good nature or optimistic philosophy of life. He continued his intellectual pursuits editing for the Russian American press and authored a number of articles and monographs; most notably a history of aviation in pre-revolutionary Russia. When Varvara arrived to New York in 1939, she and Nicholas Karinsky had many friends in common, yet it appears that neither ever sought the other’s company. They are buried less than ten yards apart; several of Karinska’s siblings between them. Meanwhile, in 1921, Varvara made her way back to Moscow where she met and married Vladimir Mamontov, son of one of Moscow’s wealthiest pre-revolutionary industrialists. Having lost everything, Mamontov remained with nothing except his charm, beautiful piano playing and the delusion that someday his late father’s fortune would be returned to him. Lenin’s New Economic Policy (1921–1928) provided for limited capitalism to help finance his new regime exhausted and debilitated by three years of civil war. Karinska went way beyond Lenin’s limits. She opened a Tea Salon that became the meeting place of Moscow artists, intellectuals and government officials every afternoon at five o’clock. In the same complex she founded an haute-couture and a millinery atelier to dress the wives of the Soviet elite. She opened an antique store and an embroidery school where she taught the needle arts to the proletariat. Karinska’s reasons for leaving Russia are multifold. First there was the death of Lenin in 1924 and the uncertainty of what was to come; secondly, within weeks after Lenin’s death the new regime nationalized her embroidery school and turned it into a factory to manufacture Soviet flags (In exchange, she was awarded the title of “Inspector of Fine Arts”); thirdly and primarily, Mamontov, a chronic alcoholic and incapable of performing any kind of work was a symbol of bourgeois decadence and his arrest was imminent. Karinska devised a plan to save Mamontov. Supported by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Minister of Education and long time friend of her father, she proposed to take a large number of embroideries made by her students to exhibit in Western European cities as a “good will” gesture to demonstrate the great cultural advances that the young Soviet regime was making. The proposition was enthusiastically accepted across the high ranks, although Lunacharsky and others knew quite well what she was up to. With corruption widely practiced throughout the Soviet government, an exit visa was obtained for Mamontov who left immediately for Germany where he had cousins in exile. A few weeks later Karinska, Irina and Vladimir left together from Moscow station on a Berlin-bound train. Irina boarded the train whimpering under the weight of a huge chapeau. “Stop whining!” her mother would scold. Later the girl of 14 learned that the hat was filled with diamonds. Vladimir boarded the train with a suitcase filled with his Soviet school books, American hundred dollar bills, bought on the black market, hidden between the pages. Karinska boarded the train waving and blowing kisses to the crowd that came to bid her bon voyage. But the crates with her student’s embroideries framed under glass had, hidden underneath each, antique embroideries sewn by the ladies-in-waiting to the Russian Empresses of the past centuries. Reuniting with Vladimir Mamontov in Berlin, the family of four headed for Brussels where Karinska’s father and several brothers and sisters were living. But Brussels was too quiet for Karinska and after a few months they moved to Paris. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Barbara Karinska」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|