Adapting to America

Djeneeff’s efforts to establish a foothold in the competitive New York art world required him to undertake work that he would not have considered in Russia, given his status as a privileged graduate of the Saint Petersburg Academy. Contacts with the growing émigré community in New York led to commissions such as designs for banknotes, a calendar, and note-cards. But he also worked for a quintessential American enterprise, Lord & Taylor, designing promotional images for the department store’s centennial celebration. These painstakingly detailed drawings, containing references to the ancient world as well as the American flag and the Statue of Liberty, attest to the firm’s solidity. Other commercial works point to Djeneeff’s surprising flexibility in suiting style to subject: advertisements for lipstick show young women in 1920s fashions and fetching poses, while those for more prosaic products such as cooking oil and soup use young children to add appeal.

The covers for Better Crops: The Pocket Book of Agriculture indicate a different approach. Djeneeff’s scenes of rural life, such as a peasant girl watching geese and a woman teaching her daughter how to spin, feature traditional Russian and Ukrainian costumes, settings, and domestic furnishings. One cover depicts a sleigh pulled by three horses - the classic Russian troika - dashing past a snow covered village with a domed church and a log house, or izba, typical of central Russia. Djeneeff had sketched many such scenes in his notebooks, and he adapted these genre motifs to a variety of projects, including book illustrations and decorative miniatures of tales from Russian history and legend.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO VIEW >>