Yefim Ladyzhensky (1911-1982)
Born in Odessa in 1911, Yefim Ladyzhensky was the son of a fish salter. He studied at the theater department of the Odessa Art College before leaving Odessa for Moscow in 1931. Throughout the 1930s he worked as a stage designer for various theaters and films. From 1949 to 1956 he lived in Siberia, where he continued to work as an artist, and upon his return to Moscow, he began painting works in series, which he worked on concurrently. He began his Growing Up in Odessa series in the 1960s.
In 1939 he joined the Union of Soviet Artists, and, as a state-supported artist, much of his work was exhibited in the Soviet Union. However, like many such artists, some of his output was unsanctioned by the Soviet state; government authorities would not exhibit work with themes which they perceived as critical of the Soviet Union– including Ladyzhensky’s images of the Odessa of his youth.
In 1978, hoping to achieve recognition for the work that the Soviet state had suppressed, Ladyzhensky immigrated to Israel and joined his daughter in Jerusalem. But he faced exorbitant customs duties on his artwork which belonged to the state, so he destroyed hundreds of works of art before leaving the Soviet Union.
In Israel, he continued to paint his memories of Odessa. He was granted a major retrospective of his works at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1979, and a show at the University of Haifa Art Gallery in 1980. Nonetheless, Ladyzhensky was dismayed and bewildered at what he perceived as inadequate recognition, notoriety, and success. He could not comprehend either the capitalist art market, or the cultural relevance of painters in Israeli society.
Shortly before his death by suicide in 1982, and with the help of his daughter Victoria, he began writing and dictating stories to accompany his paintings.
Yefim Ladyzhensky, photo courtesy of the artist’s family.
Odessa
The Pale of Settlement, indicated here, ended with the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917.
Located on the Black Sea, Odessa was founded at the site of a former Ottoman town called Khadzhibei, in a swath of territory conquered and renamed “New Russia” by the Russian Empire in the late 18th-century. Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, envisioned this coastal territory as a European and Russian commercial and cultural center. In 1794 she renamed the town “Odessa,” associating it with the ancient and legendary city of Odessos.
Catherine and her successors incentivized commercial activity at Odessa’s port and immigration to New Russia. Odessa was uniquely free of many of the legal restrictions that limited who could own property, take part in certain professions, or handle money. Odessa quickly became a multiethnic immigrant city, attracting people from across the Russian Empire as well as from around the world, notably from Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Armenia, France, and Italy.
In 1791 Catherine established the Pale of Settlement, a territory within the Russian Empire, restricting Jews’ professions and where Jews were permitted to reside and travel within the Empire until its fall in 1917. But when the Empire decreed that Jews could settle in New Russia, thousands came to Odessa and neighboring towns. By 1911 – the year of Yefim Ladyzhensky’s birth, and just before the Bolshevik Revolution – one third of Odessa’s population of approximately 620,000 was Jewish. Odessa became a site of great Jewish cultural achievement and expression, both religious and secular. The city was identified as much with Jewish literature as with Jewish merchants, composers, and criminals.
Ladyzhensky’s memories of his childhood in Odessa include the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. He recalled violent pogroms in Odessa, Jewish life under Soviet rule, and great social and economic upheaval.
Note on the Spelling of Odessa:
Yefim Ladyzhensky spoke and wrote in Russian, and lived in Odessa long before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and formation of Ukraine as an independent state in 1991. The Jewish Museum of Maryland has accordingly decided to use the Russian spelling of Odessa with two s’s to reflect the language of the Odessa of Ladyzhensky’s memory and youth, as opposed to the Ukrainian spelling, ‘Odesa’.