Conseil de Guerre, 1917
Marie Vassilieff (1884-1957)
Marie Vassilieff was a Russian-born artist closely associated with the Montparnasse avant-garde in Paris and an early champion of Cubism. After studying under Henri Matisse, she established the Académie Vassilieff and became a central figure in the artistic circles of Paris before and after the First World War. During the war, she famously transformed her studio into a canteen that provided affordable meals and a gathering place for artists facing hardship.
Alongside her paintings and sculptures, Vassilieff produced a significant body of pen-and-ink drawings documenting life within her Montparnasse circle. These works record gatherings at her studio and canteen, as well as encounters with Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and the many artists, writers, and intellectuals who moved within her orbit. Created alongside notebooks and draft memoir material, the drawings suggest that Vassilieff may have envisaged a broader autobiographical project in which personal recollection and artistic observation were closely intertwined.
'Conseil de Guerre' (War Council), executed in ink and pencil in 1917, belongs within this autobiographical group of works. It is generally understood to relate to Vassilieff's own experience of appearing before a French military tribunal (conseil de guerre) during the First World War, when, as a Russian national living in France, she was required to present herself before the authorities in connection with her status as a foreign resident and the issue of her 'carte d'identité des étrangers'. The drawing may therefore record her recollection of this encounter, transforming an episode of wartime bureaucracy into a vivid and subtly satirical image. Its title carries a deliberate ambiguity, referring both to the military tribunal itself and, more broadly, to the structures of state authority during wartime.
Although Vassilieff is best known for her Cubist paintings, portraits of artists and intellectuals, and works featuring dolls, masks, and theatrical subjects, 'Conseil de Guerre' reveals a more intimate engagement with the social and political realities of the First World War. As part of her autobiographical collection, the drawing offers a rare and compelling insight into the lived experience of a foreign avant-garde artist negotiating the complexities of life in wartime Paris.
Marie Vassilieff (1884-1957)
Marie Vassilieff was born in Smilensk, Russia, in 1884. She studied at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg and from 1905 at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Matisse Academy. In 1908, she founded the Académie Russe which was renamed the following year as the Académie Vassilieff. In 1912 she opened her own atelier in Montparnasse which became a meeting place for artists and writers, including Nina Hamnett, Olga Sacharoff and Valentine Prax. By 1913, her studio was so widely known that Fernand Léger gave two lectures there on the topic of Modern Art. What Marie Vassilieff is perhaps most remembered for, however, is her canteen which provided a full meal and a glass of wine for only a few centimes during World War 1 and became a place of nighttime entertainment, including musical and literary evenings. In 1938, Vassilieff moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer, where she painted fantastical floral bouquets. Vassilieff developed a personal style of painting inspired by Cubism and later primitivism, which also paid tribute to Russian popular art known as loubok art. As well as painting, she also made "portrait dolls" and marionettes of artists of the École de Paris, which she first exhibited at Paul Poiret’s mansion in 1916. Functioning as effigies, mementoes and decorative artefacts, these portrait dolls reflected a primitivist interest in the magical and uncanny in interwar Paris.
