Alexandre Iacovleff

Alexandre Iacovleff was a Russian painter, draftsman, engraver, and decorator of the School of Paris. He was born in Saint Petersburg in 1887 and entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in 1905, where he studied under Dmitri Kardovski (1866-1943) and Alexandre Kisselev (1838-1911). During his academic training, he became friends with the painter Vassili Choukhaïev (1887-1973) and joined the Mir Iskousstva movement, animated notably by Alexandre Benois (1870-1960) and Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929).

In 1913, Alexandre Iacovleff received a scholarship from the Academy that allowed him to travel to Italy and Spain to study the masters of the Renaissance. In 1917, he undertook a long journey to Mongolia, China, and Japan. He then settled in Paris in 1920 and successively published Dessins et peintures d'Extrême-Orient (1922), then Le Théâtre chinois (1922), which helped to make his work known.
In 1924, André Citroën (1875-1935) chose him as the official painter of the Croisière Noire, an expedition that crossed the African continent. He thus produced nearly 300 drawings, published in 1927 in Dessins et peintures d'Afrique. Between 1931 and 1932, he also participated in the Croisière Jaune, from Beirut to Beijing, and produced about a hundred drawings, watercolors, and paintings, gathered in Dessins et peintures d'Asie, published in 1934.

Upon his return to France, an important exhibition was devoted to him at the J. Charpentier gallery in Paris, where 136 paintings and 240 drawings made during this expedition were presented. In 1934, he created the sets for the ballet Sémiramis by Paul Valéry (1871-1945) at the Paris Opera before being appointed director of the School of Drawing and Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Back in Paris in 1937, he died of stomach cancer in 1938.

The work of Alexandre Iacovleff is characterized by a highly precise drawing, nourished notably by the many journeys he undertook in Africa and Asia. In 1926, he received the Legion of Honor in recognition of his artistic contribution to the Croisière Noire.

Alexandre Iacovleff's works are today preserved in numerous public collections, notably at the Centre Pompidou, the Guimet Museum, the Musée des Années Trente in Boulogne-Billancourt, the Tate in London, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, as well as in the collections of several museums dedicated to Asian art and travel arts.