Artist: Andrey Avinoff

Andrey Avinoff (Russian: Андрей Авинов; 1884-1949) was the Director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for 20 years, after being established as one of the world's greatest butterfly collectors. With a clear and profound grace in every field he endeavoured, Avinoff stands as a master painter, with works in the National Gallery and other prestigious locations and as the unsung Grandfather of the modern museum.

Avinoff was born in Tulchyn, Podolia Governorate, now Ukraine, to a wealthy Russian family with ties to nobility who served a diplomatic role in the Nicholas II of Russia's court. Avinoff learned to speak English fluently during his childhood. He left Russia after the Revolution and moved to America. In 1924, he was hired as an assistant curator of entomology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He was promoted to director in 1926, a position he held until 1946. He was also appointed a trustee of the museum.

In 1927 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. His associates at the Carnegie Museum included William P. Comstock, E. Irving Huntington, Cyril F. dos Passos and Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков; better known by his pen name Vladimir Sirin).

Avinoff generally lived a secluded upper-class life in Pittsburgh, a popular and thriving metropolis with a strong elitist society at the time. A homosexual, Avinoff never had children. Later in life, suffering from health conditions, he moved to New York where he resumed his interest in painting, and the New Yorker profiled him in a 12-page article about his life. At his death, he had created hundreds of paintings which are largely sought after by collectors today.

Avinoff was close friends with the biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, largely due to their similar interest in insects from Kinsey's work with gall wasps.

Later in his life, unable to travel from his health conditions, he moved to New York and resumed an interest from earlier in his life in painting. He was also the brother of the famous portrait painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who is most famous for painting Frankin Delano Roosevelt at the moment when he collapsed and died. Avinoff's paintings were highly skilled images of flora or fauna, or paintings with deep meanings with themes of religious, sexual, apocalyptic nature, or combinations of the three. He worked in a wide variety of mediums from precise pencil and ink drawings to oil to watercolor.

One of his most famous series of paintings depict The Fall of Atlantis, a poem by George V. Golokhvastoff published in limited edition in 1938 (see below). The Birth of Atlantis, illustrated in his series of paintings, exemplifies the Art Deco style popular in the 1930s. The image is of a young male figure rising out of the sea, symbolic of the legendary island said by Plato to have later disappeared beneath the waves during an earthquake. His paintings of flowers, and 350 of his works illustrate Wildflowers of Western Pennsylvania and the Upper Ohio Basin.

Avinoff the Artist

A man of extraordinary intelligence, compulsively productive, and obsessed with the beauty of the exquisite, Avinoff became world-renowned for his scientific work on butterflies. Few were also aware of his artistic talent, as expressed in his occasional illustrations for Carnegie magazine and charming designs for Christmas cards, bookplates, banquet menus, and personal gifts. What they didn’t know is that before his appointment to the museum, Avinoff had made a living as a commercial illustrator, and that beginning in the 1930s, he began a second career, parallel to his day job at the museum, as a visionary artist.

Image: Kinsey Institute Collection

From the very beginning, Avinoff’s work served both art and science. Among his earliest surviving watercolors is a set of views made during his trips to collect butterflies in northern India, Kashmir, and western Tibet in 1908 and 1912. The view from the interior of his tent in the Karakoram Mountains artfully foregrounds the clutter of Western civilization—revolver, whiskey bottle, pith helmet, and leather-bound trunks—against a barren, pitiless background of rock and snow. Of no obvious scientific value, it provides a vivid sense of the experience of sitting in a canvas tent on a stony riverbank somewhere in the mountains of western Asia at the beginning of the 20th century. On the back of the sheet we discovered brilliantly colored drawings of butterfly wings, evidently made for study, arranged on the page with no concern at all for symmetry or aesthetics.

Image: Kinsey Institute Collection

While Avinoff was synthesizing the scientific information from his butterfly collections into a sophisticated theory of evolution and speciation he was also expressing his ideas about metamorphosis, transience, and change in weird, fantastical, and beautiful watercolor paintings. Beginning in the 1930s—probably while hearing of the horrors of Stalinism in his native Russia and experiencing the crushing effects of economic depression in the United States and the onset of war in Europe—he began to extend his theories of evolution, change, decay, and metamorphosis to human history and his own life story.

Below sources, Avinoff’s illustrations for George Golokhvastoff’s poem “The Fall of Atlantis”, 1938.

Sources:

• “Andrey Avinoff”. Wikipedia, retrieved: 11 Nov 2018.
• Jennings, Otto Emery, text; and Avinoff, Andrey, watercolors. Wildflowers of Western Pennsylvania and the Upper Ohio Basin (2 volumes). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1953.
• Lippincott, Louise. “Recollecting Andrey Avinoff”. Carnegie Magazine, Spring 2009, retrieved: 11 Nov 2018.
• Rawlins, John. “Andrey Avinoff: Master of Arts and Sciences”. Carnegie Magazine, Spring 2009, retrieved: 11 Nov 2018.
• Staff of CMNH. “Celebrating Carnegie History: Dr. Andrey Avinoff”. Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 27 Feb 2018, retrieved: 11 Nov 2018.