Abraham Manievich

Abraham A. Manievich (1881-1942) was known as a Post-Impressionist landscape painter whose distinctive career carried him from the vibrant art centers of Eastern Europe to the industrial landscapes and rural villages of North America. Born in Russia, Manievich took as his subjects Ukrainian and Lithuanian village and country scenes, as well as street scenes of Moscow, Kiev, and Petrograd.

After studying in Munich, Manievich traveled throughout France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and England, painting in a bold Fauvist style. He exhibited with the important French Fauvists, and he received critical acclaim for his first solo exhibition at the famed Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1913. He lived in Moscow from 1914 to 1916 and was appointed art professor at the Ukrainian Art Academy in Kiev in 1917, a position that placed him at the heart of the extraordinary cultural ferment of the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Ukrainian national art tradition. In 1921 he left revolutionary Russia for Warsaw, and in 1922 he emigrated to the United States, settling in the Bronx. His Russian-period works date from 1902 to 1921.

After emigrating to the United States, Manievich traveled extensively, often walking many miles and painting regional scenes in industrial Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania mining towns, villages along the Hudson River and in Connecticut, and winter scenes in Canada. In the United States he exhibited both his Russian and American landscapes, which were acclaimed for their lyrical yet vigorous brushwork and expressive use of color. His American subjects gave him the opportunity to bring his European Fauvist and Post-Impressionist vocabulary to bear on the distinctive light and terrain of North America, producing pictures that combine his European painterly inheritance with the very different atmosphere of his adopted country.

Manievich's paintings are held today in significant American and Eastern European museum collections, where they remain vital documents of a transnational artistic life shaped by revolution, emigration, and sustained painterly dedication.