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”.

Kalmakoff, he relates, was the son of a Russian general married to an Italian. His German governess, Kalmakoff said, “made me live in an imaginary world taken from the Brothers Grimm with a sprinkling of [German Romantic fantasy and horror author] ETA Hoffmann”.

“I devoured those tales with delight. Around the age of nine I would often wander into the furthermost room of our house, where I would carefully conceal myself. Then, alone in the darkness, I would call upon the devil to appear.”

In St Petersburg Kalmakoff graduated in law, then pursued art. At his home he claimed to be getting visits from Satan and sketching everything he could remember — his eyes, tail, hooves. He joined the Skoptzy movement, which held that Christ could reveal himself within the bodies of the faithful, and which counted Rasputin among its earliest adherents.

“The Skoptzy saw sex as the source of all evil to be combatted through abstinence, asceticism and, if necessary, castration,” Caruana writes. “Certainly, Martin du Nord creates a portrait of Kalmakoff as an extreme ascetic. He claims that the artist’s beliefs drove him to misogyny and even maltreatment of his wife” — and, ironically, eroticism.

“All his works,” recalled an actor friend, “betrayed a certain eroticism — an eroticism so overwhelming that it could only be attributed to Satan himself, or worse, to a force even greater than Satan, to something infinitely more awesome and terrifying.”

“It appears,” Caruana continues, “that, as a result of his intensive denial, Kalmakoff had — in the pure Freudian sense — displaced his desire onto images which sublimated his eroticism entirely. Since the source of his desire was, at once, paradisical and demonic, the women in his paintings also took on the dual aspect of ethereal and malevolent.”

“Time and again,” the actor also noted, “he depicted vague organic shapes, as if he wanted to magnify a million times the first cellular lifeform from the universe’s inception … The subjects in the paintings were often difficult to distinguish, but you could still sense the intense desire to understand, beyond the fantasy and caprice, the essence of something evil.”

A 1921 self-portrait

The influences of Art Nouveau, Russia’s Mir Iskousstva (”art world”) movement, the Secessionists of Vienna and Munich are duly noted — stylised decoration with vivid colours and rich texturing. Kalmakoff threw his efforts into designing sets and costumes for the theatre, which was the only activity that could get him away from home and his trysts with the devil.

His sensational debut, with Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, resulted in the lead actress falling in love with him and the Church shutting the production down on opening night: the temple looked a little too much like a female vulva.

Meanwhile Kalmakoff’s interest in Hindu and Buddhist art, says Caruana, makes his work “transcend his own period and become truly visionary”. He “evolves beyond” Jugendstil and Art Nouveau.

“Ernst Fuchs remains, for me, the greatest Visionary artist of the century,” Caruana says. “And yet, if 20th-century Visionary Art has an unrecognised parent and precursor, it is surely Kalmakoff.”

The aftermath of the 1917 revolution drove Kalmakoff from Russia, though he left his wife and children behind, with a canvas that Caruana characterises as “sarcastic, a parody at most”, called “The Wedding Couple” — “he, a slobbering drooling corpse with lascivious eyes; she, a heap of flesh so immense that her cheeks and mouth seem more like ass and anus”.

Kalmakoff lingered by the Baltic, then gave up hope of any return and moved to the Riviera, where he’d been born. There he killed his lover’s husband in a duel and had to move on once more. He exhibited 133 works in in Brussels in June 1924 (most since lost) and two years later settled in Paris, at the Hotel de la rue la Rochefoucault.

The work he produced in his remaining decades in Paris, particularly his foppish self-portraits, lead Caruana to speculate about possible passive bisexuality. In “Narcissus”, for example, he depicts himself with breasts, arched hips and “the curly red locks of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden”, the hermaphrodite Narcissus became when he entered his reflecting pool.

Like Wilde, in Narcissus and Adonis Kalmakoff found himself. Adonis was an “ever dying and rising god”, like Osiris in Egypt and Baal in Phoenicia, death and resurrection signalling the turn of the crop seasons. In these immortals and Christ, there was Kalmakoff.

“It is within this context that we are to understand one of his most powerful works, ‘The Crown of Thorns’,” writes Caruana. “Once more we are presented with a self-portrait of the artist, but now as ‘the dying and rising god’ of Christianity …

“Like all the other self-portraits, this painting serves as a mirror — but a mirror into which Kalmakoff may gaze directly, to behold his own death and hopeful resurrection with wide-eyed horror and fascination.

“What is more, given his involvement with the Skoptzy movement, this painting may even reflect his belief that Christ had revealed himself within Kalmakoff’s own flesh. If so, then his spiritual ideals had driven him from extreme asceticism to eroticism, from radical misogyny to effeminate narcissism, and from Satanism to delusions of Godhood.”

Almost comically, Kalmakoff was persuaded to join in on a restaging of “Salome” in Paris, only to once again begin an affair with the lead actress that caused the show to be postponed and then abandoned. In the wash, he created “some of his finest erotic works”, including “Astarte” in 1926, seen here.

Two years later Kalmakoff exhibited 162 works at Galerie Charpentier, about the same time that 40 pieces were put in storage, writes Caruana, “and then forgotten for the next 35 years”. The keeper eventually sold them for next to nothing to an auction house, “and eventually they made their way to the Marché de St Ouen flea market” where Martin du Nord found them.

Also in 1928, Kalmakoff was commissioned by Héliodore Fortin, author of “The Bible of Spirits”, to paint works for the interior of his Chapel of the Resurrected in Metz. He depicted a series of demons with haloes and crowns of flames and other “nightmarish” images, and a central figure “enthroned upon a rainbow, holding the world in one hand and pointing outward with the other … This incredible ensemble of paintings was only rediscovered in 1964. Their strange iconography has yet to be interpreted.”

Beginning in the late 1920s Kalmakoff’s work became more monumental, with Salome reappearing “as a six-winged sphinx, caressing the Baptist’s severed head with one of her mighty paws”, and Neptune “in this same epic style”. But he was financially increasingly destitute and more anti-social than ever.

“Kalmakoff’s arrogance and misanthropy, his cloistered existence, and his refusal to exhibit his works led to increasing poverty. As Mme S, his last intimate, recalled, ‘Everyone in the building knew that the old painter in the attic was dying of hunger. It had come to the point where he was living off one cube of soup mix per day. But his arrogance discouraged all compassion.’”

Self-portrait 1929

Later he earned his keep selling pious commercial images, and during World War II he did illustrations for the occupying German forces. “Mme S”, a Guatemalan neighbour, tended to him for six years, and then in 1947, “in exchange for a large collection of his work”, placed the 68-year-old in a home for indigent seniors, la Maison des Veillards in Chelles, north of Paris. When Kalmakoff tried to get his paintings back to earn some money, Mme S refused.

Kalmakoff died at the Hôpital de Lagny, near Chelles, in 1955 and was buried in the village cemetery, where he remains “beneath a crooked and nameless cross rusted by time”.

Laurence Caruana, who has graciously given me permission to quote liberally from his article, says he’s just learned that a Russian publishing company, Iskusstvo 21, has released a significant colour monograph on Kalmakoff. The text is in Russian. See this website and bring a translator.