Boris Chaliaplin Biography
Boris Fyodorovich Chaliapin was born on October 5, 1904 in Moscow, Russia, where he spent much of his childhood and youth. His mother, Iole Tornaghi, was a former dancer of Italian descent before marrying his father, Fyodor Chaliapin, a celebrated opera singer. Among the most famous roles of Chaliapin's elder father was Boris Gudonov, after whom he is named. Chaliapin showed a talent for drawing at a young age and it became one of his major concerns during his childhood. Despite his family's ample means, his father's peasant origins prevented Chaliapin from attending the elite Russian high schools reserved for the aristocracy. As a result, he received his basic education in one of the less exclusive gymnasiums in Moscow.
During the years immediately following the Russian Revolution, Chaliapin's family was sympathetic to their country's new communist order, and his father, a declared People's Artist, at one point undertook concert tours abroad to raise funds to alleviate the post-revolutionary famine in Soviet Russia. The young Chaliapin continued formal artistic study. In 1919 he spent several months at the Petrograd Academy of Art and, returning to Moscow, worked in the studios of the painters Abram Arkipov and Dimitri Kardovsky. Shortly after completing secondary school in 1922, Chaliapin was admitted to the state higher art and technology workshops. He wanted to study painting there, but due to crowded enrollment in the school's painting curriculum, he was forced to settle for sculpture courses, under the guidance of Sergei Konenkov. Chaliapin's main interest remains painting, and so, after several failed attempts to move on to workshop painting courses, he emigrates to Paris to pursue an artistic education more to his liking. He was supported in that decision by his father, whose disillusionment with the Soviet regime had by then led to his immigration to the French capital. Arriving in Paris in the summer of 1925, Chaliapin studied with numerous painters, including fellow Russian Konstantin Korovin and an artist identified only as Gerin. It was through Gerin's timed drawing exercises, Chaliapin later said, that he developed his unusual facility for quick and confident drawing. Chaliapin was always a resolute realist in his painting, and in later years he rejected abstract trends in 20th-century art as "a cultured approach to madness" promoted by "incurable criminals". In Paris, where the avant-garde was becoming increasingly dominant in the art world, he found himself out of sync with the currents of the time. Another source of dissatisfaction was his inability to make a decent living from his art in Paris.
In 1935 he sailed to the United States in hopes of finding a more receptive artistic community and market for his work. Settling in New York City, Chaliapin focused primarily on portraiture. Thanks in large part to his family's connections in the performing arts, many of his early subjects were actors, dancers, and musicians, including violinist Jascha Heifetz and members of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. His first commission came from Time magazine in 1942 for a cover portrait of a journalist, a likeness of Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru. When Chaliapin quickly fulfilled the request for a second cover portrait a few weeks later, it became clear that his talents were unusually suited to the magazine's needs. The strong realism of his portraiture was entirely compatible with Time's style, and his ability to meet short print deadlines greatly improved the magazine's ability to shift cover subjects in the face of breaking news. Chaliapin soon became one of Time's regular cover artists, and between 1942 and 1970 he produced more than four hundred covers for the publication.
Chaliapin's success at Time was the turning point of his career, and soon after his first cover was published, several advertising agencies, including J. Walter Thompson, began recruiting his services. Among his publicity work was a series of portraits produced for Magnavox of prominent musical personalities, such as the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the singer Lily Pons. His Time covers also enhanced his standing as a studio portraitist, and in the years to come, he painted noncommercial likenesses of many notables, including the conductor Fritz Reiner, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, and the dancer Katherine Dunham .
