the magic circle

Varvara Bubnova was born in 1886 in St. Petersburg, where her father was a bank clerk. Her mother believed that the only way for women to express their ability was through the arts, and taught her three daughters languages, music, and painting. Marya, the oldest, and Anna, the youngest, were both musically gifted, but middle daughter Varvara’s skills ran to the visual arts; at twenty-one she entered the prestigious St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a painter in oils. There (along with artists including Mayakovsky, Natalia Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich) she met the painter Voldemārs Matvejs, a Latvian who was studying African art; they spent their summers traveling Europe, visiting museums of art and ethnology and discovering local folklore. In 1914, just after their engagement, Matvejs died; not long after, Varvara’s father followed him.

In response, Varvara buried herself in her work. In 1917, as the Russian Revolution broke out, her sister Anna fled to Japan with her Japanese husband Ono Shun’ichi. Varvara chose to move to Moscow and continue Matvejs’ work, learning lithography and working among others with Kandinsky, Lyubov Popova, and Rodchenko. She published a book on African art in Europe in 1919, under Matvejs’ name.

In 1922, she and her mother made the six-month trip to Japan in order to see Anna and her family. She enjoyed the new landscapes and unfamiliar customs, but found the art world unsatisfying (“they have inherited nothing from the past and have not yet formed anything modern,” she wrote to a friend), although she was fascinated by traditional Japanese painting. Varvara’s own work at first failed to find an audience when it was exhibited. After publishing an essay on Russian art in one of the leading literary journals, she was invited to join an exhibition held by the young avant-garde, who adopted her as one of them. Some theories suggest that her name was the V in MAVO, the name given by the playwright and artist Murayama Tomoyoshi to his journal in 1924.

For an independent income (so as not to be a drag on her sister’s household forever), Varvara took a post as lecturer in Russian at Waseda University and later at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, where many of her students later became well-known translators and scholars (at least one, Yonekawa Masao, admired her intelligence and erudition so much as to write that he would have proposed to her if he hadn’t already had a family). In 1927 she married Vladimir Golovshchikov, who was over a decade younger than she (and seems to have no historical existence except as her husband, I’m not even sure I’ve transcribed his name right). She continued to exhibit her lithographs and to discuss art with her colleagues, such as the left-wing satirical cartoonist Yanase Masamu, who shared her admiration for the painter Käthe Kollwitz. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1932, focusing on depictions of laborers such as farmers, fishers, ex-servicemen, and ama divers. The artist Onchi Koshiro, a longtime friend, wrote that her work was “full of extremely realistic detail, cleaving closely to everyday life and yet holding a sense of mystery of a sort.” She went on to provide illustrations for the translations from Russian published by her students, and acted as interpreter for the visionary German architect Bruno Taut when he visited Japan.

During the war, her nationality made her suspect and she was constantly under surveillance, but her friends and students stayed by her. Her mother died in 1940 and her husband in 1946. She continued to ride the tram to her work at the university and teach her students to read Pushkin, a distant relative on her mother’s side. In 1958 she returned to the Soviet Union, where she held several solo exhibitions, settling in Sukhumi (modern-day Abkhazia/Georgia) on the Black Sea along with her older sister Marya. She died in 1983 at the age of ninety-six.

Sources
Mori 2008
https://jp.rbth.com/arts/82711-bubnova-shimai
https://note.com/bunkertokyo/n/nb7d17d92dedd (Japanese) Articles illustrated with Varvara’s works