Arts and Letters

Leonid, when I first knew him, was already an accomplished painter. That was in Paris, 1925, and he was 29.

He had also found his subject-matter, which was the shores of oceans and the people who work there. The complex interpenetrations of water and land, the sight of ships, of the elaborate manoeuvres for fishing from beaches, of tidal fishing as a way of life, these things he loved and never ceased to love. They nourished him, and they nourished his painting; they were his almost sole theme as an artist.

This obsession was so clear and so undeniable that in all the fifty years of our friendship it never occurred to me to wonder how it had come about.

Brought up in a well-to-do banking family of St. Petersburg, educated in the best gymnasia, in the days of Kerensky a member of the stylish Corps of Pages, then later in Paris as a young man of artistic promise, he pursued the sea as no one I have ever known. But he pursued it only as a theme. No sailor he, nor yet a fisherman, but simply one obsessed by watching, transcribing.

He cared not where he found his models. Any sea would do—Marseille, the Norman coast, Brittany, La Rochelle, later Portugal, Indonesia, Rhode Island, the Gaspé Peninsula, Egypt's Nile, the lagoon of Venice—the waters of anywhere and the people working in them.

There was a time during the German occupation in France when he actually lived with such a land-and-water family. They were a family of well-to-do peasants owning both farms and mussel-fisheries. Leonid enjoyed that period, being a part of, at last, the thing that he always before (and always afterwards, too) merely watched, even though toward the end of that period he was commandeered by the occupying army for more than a year's day-labor on the roads, in something called the Tod Battalion.

But Leonid, though small, was strong, used to sports and physical exertions, a man of action and of muscles. He used his muscles every day, just as he painted every day. I never knew him not to paint or play physical games. And few are his paintings that do not picture water or scenes of heavy sea labor, preferably both.

How this very great gentleman, a city man, an easel painter, and a sportsman came to worship so deeply seashores and their working peoples, and this moreover without sentiment or political emotions of any sort, is a mystery I never thought about until he left us. It was all so natural, so taken for granted, so accepted by Leonid himself that one hardly realized the enormity of the phenomenon, which is that of an artist whose unique subject-matter, no less than the procedures of his art, with which it early of course became bound up, constituted for fifty years, right along with the act of painting, a true vocation. Others have used persistent or recurrent themes, but I know of none other so compulsive in his devotion.