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# The Final Week of the Remarkable Exhibition "Faith in Yermolayeva" at Galeev Gallery
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/posledniuiu-nedeliu-v-galeev-galeree-idet-zamechatelnaia-vystavka-vera-v-ermolaevu/
- Published: 2024-11-08T19:37:14.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:32:11.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Coming Up, Art, Books, Moscow, Museums, People

The final week of the remarkable exhibition "Faith in Yermolayeva" is under way at Galeev Gallery. It is not merely a weighty event from the curatorial point of view, but also an important account of Vera Yermolayeva (1893-1937), whose name, though little known, has become one of the key ones for Russian art of the twentieth century.

Vera Yermolayeva, to whose difficult fate fell only 20 years of creative life, nevertheless found herself a participant in the most important artistic events of the early century. She worked alongside Chagall at the Vitebsk People's Art School, was among the organisers of Kazimir Malevich's school of the UNOVIS (Champions of the New Art), took part in the cooperative "Segodnya" ("Today"), which printed the artist's book, ran a laboratory at the State Institute of Artistic Culture, was a prolific painter, illustrated books, from children's literature to Kharms and Zabolotsky, taught a great deal, and gave open lectures on the newest trends.

By birth she was a noblewoman. Her father was chairman of the district council, her brother a Menshevik revolutionary. As a child Vera fell from a horse, and after that tragedy she walked on crutches for the rest of her life.

In 1934 Yermolayeva was sentenced to 3 years in the camps for home exhibitions and anti-Soviet activity, which consisted in illustrations to Goethe that the powers that be took for a satirical mockery and a threat. The punishment was uncommonly cruel. The artist did not return from the Gulag; later she was given another sentence, and in 1937 she was shot in Karlag. In the 1980s the Vitebsk Gioconda, as Chagall called her, was rehabilitated, and what had been clear to everyone all along, that she had committed no crimes, was officially recognised.

An unmistakable avant-gardist, at the start of her career she belonged to the pre-Dadaist movement, and in the 1910s she was a member of the group "Bloodless Murder"; later, having passed through the formative stage of modernist practices, Vera Mikhailovna came to call her own style pictorial-plastic realism. A separate page of Vera Yermolayeva's creative life is her curatorial work: the exhibitions she held in her flat, showing the brightest young artists and launching more than one career, were invariably a major event. Yermolayeva's graphic legacy belongs to the golden fund of Russian book graphics, her illustrations are executed in an inimitable style, but her paintings have survived far worse, she never had a representative exhibition, and every effort was made to erase her name from the pages of history. Fortunately, such a talent cannot be expunged from memory. Her unique creative path and distinctive manner are once again attracting great interest.

Thanks are due to Ildar Galeev for the enormous work he has done, gathering dozens of outstanding and never previously shown works by Vera Yermolayeva from the 1920s-30s and organising the exhibition with such interest and care. The opening coincided with the publication of a book by the Saint Petersburg art historian Antonina Zainchkovskaya, "Vera Yermolayeva. Biography. Documents. Book Graphics".

I recommend making time to visit the exhibition before 13 November

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