Dali House

“The Women’s Den” from 1940

Thanks to Dali House visitors I’ve recently been floored twice, learning amazing new things about two artists. I’ll soon be taking a far more measured look at Hieronymus Bosch, who turns out to be far more than I thought he was, and here, someone whose name is barely known — but what an incredible story.

Back in early July, I posted a glimpse of the art of Nikolai Konstantinovich Kalmakov after three pieces went up for sale at Sotheby’s.

Then Andrea Bartelucci contacted me, having used Kalmakoff’s 1917 pastel “Leda and the Swan”, shown below, for the cover of his new jazz album “Flirty Gerty”.

Basically Andrea threw open a door for me onto a startling, magical world. He referred me to Laurence Caruana’s terrific website Visionary Revue, where the Kalmakoff saga (Caruana uses a different transliteration) is grippingly unfolded.

His 18-page article on the Russian is encapsulated below, but it really has to be read in its entirety. Caruana goes into intense detail about both the man and his individual works of art.

“Kalmakoff, the Forgotten Visionary”, which Caruana based on a 1986 catalogue he translated from the French, begins like this:

In 1955, a Russian émigré died alone, unknown and in poverty at the hôpital de Lagny to the north of Paris. After leading a hermit’s existence in his small room at the hotel de la Rochefoucault in Paris, this former Russian aristocrat had created a fascinating body of work which, deemed eccentric and worthless, was locked away in storage and forgotten.

Throughout his solitary life, the artist had painted works that reflected his various obsessions with martyrdom, asceticism, decadence, spirituality and sexuality. Executed in a style marked by the Russian art nouveau, his imagery nevertheless transcended this movement, bearing undeniable traces of demented vision, indeed, genius.

Only in 1962 did some of his works come to light when Bertrand Collin du Bocage and Georges Martin du Nord discovered forty canvases in the Marché aux Puces, a large flea market to the north of Paris. All the works in this unusual collection were signed with a stylized “K” monogram.

The Hungarian merchant who sold the lot to them included with it a poster of an exhibition held in Galerie Le Roy, Brussels, in 1924. Here, for the first time, the full name of the mysterious “K” was revealed — Nicolas Kalmakoff.

Martin du Nord’s subsequent sleuthing and the life history he uncovered add up to a riveting read, and uncovered works that an appraiser had once dismissed as not worth “a cup of cider”. These were exhibited at Galerie Motte Paris in 1964, which sparked the emergence of another 24 paintings, “including an entire series which once decorated a chapel dedicated (ironically) to the resurrected”.

Given the nature of the imagery, Caruana wonders whether Kalmakoff’s “spiritual ideals drive him towards an extreme asceticism, which then had the contrary effect of releasing onto his canvases a rich profusion of repressed eroticism, effeminism, misogyny and narcissism — culminating in delusions of Satanhood and even Godhood”. See the rest.