IVAN OLINSKY (RUSSIAN-AMERICAN 1878-1962)

La Fete, San Marco,
oil on canvas
57 x 74 cm (22 1/2 x 29 1/8 in.)
signed lower left

PROVENANCE
The artist
Mrs. Leonore Miller, New York (the artist's daughter)
Arvest Galleries, Inc., Boston
Property from the Estate of Richard Smart
Christie's, New York, May 23, 1996, lot 122 (sold by the above on behalf of the Parker Ranch Foundation Trust)
Acquired at the above by the present owner

EXHIBITED
Boston, Arvest Galleries, Inc., Ivan G. Olinksy N.A. (1878-1962), October-November 1985, no. 8

LOT NOTES

Ivan Grigorievich Olinsky, born in 1878 in Elizabegrad, Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine), came with his family to New York City, aged thirteen, in 1890. Soon after, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where he studied under American Impressionists Julian Alden Weir and Robert Vonnoh, as well as muralist and illustrator George W. Maynard, who then hired Olinsky as an assistant. In the 1890s, he was also a student the Art Students League under Bryson Burroughs. In 1900, Olinsky moved on to Boston as an aide to John La Farge. Increasingly motivated to establish himself as a painter in his own right, Olinsky ended his eight-year assistantship to La Farge and embarked a tour of Italy and France with his wife and first child. The most notable pictures of the period are his stunning Venetian scenes, including La Fete, San Marco (lot 155 of this sale).

Upon his return to New York in 1910, Olinsky took up a studio in Greenwich Village, where he began producing, to near-immediate acclaim, the sensitive, Impressionism-inflected society portraits with which he is still associated (this part of his oeuvre is represented by lots 150, 156 and 157).

He exhibited frequently, largely in group shows, notably at Macbeth Gallery (which had recently introduced "The Eight") and the Lyme Art Association of Old Lyme, whose artist colony Olinsky discovered in 1917 and participated in until the end of his life. Hildegard Cummings, author of the influential catalogue accompanying Olinsky's posthumous 1995 retrospective at the William Benton Museum of Art, attributes the lack of individual lifetime exhibitions to commercial success so tremendous that the painter simply did not have enough pictures to present for a solo show.

In addition to painting, Olinsky maintained a fifty-year career as a teacher at both of his alma maters (one of his students was Lee Krasner), was a member of the Association of Mural Painters and the Salmagundi Club, and recipient of numerous prizes: the Thomas B. Clarke Prize (1914) the Andrew Carnegie Prize (1929 and 1955) and the Clara Obrig Prize (1939 and 1940).

CONDITION
Observed in frame, the work is in overall excellent condition. Miniscule scuffs to lower edge. Inspection under UV light shows a line of retouching to the top edge (15 cm (5 7/8 in.) from right margin), 11 cm (4 3/8 in.) long. Small 1 cm-long (3/8 in.) retouch to the back of the chair along bottom edge.

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