Nadezhda Evseevna (born Ginda-Neka Shyevna Fishman) Dobychina

Nadezhda Dobychina was a patron of modern Russian art, founder of the Dobychina Art Bureau (1911–19), and a cultural administrator during the early years of the Soviet Union. The Dobychina Art Bureau served as a premier exhibition space in Saint Petersburg (later Petrograd) and was not only one of the first commercial art galleries in the Russian Empire but also one of the earliest venues showcasing the work of the revolutionary avant-garde.

Dobychina was born into a Jewish family in Orel, nearly two-hundred miles south of Moscow. Due to her father’s position in the Imperial army, Dobychina’s family was permitted to live beyond the Pale of Settlement, the only place Jews were allowed to settle, an area along the Russian Empire’s western margins in present-day Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. Though poor, Dobychina was able to attend high school in Orel, where she met the wealthy noble, Pëtr Petrovich Dobychin, who would convert to Judaism to become her husband.

In 1903, Dobychina moved to Saint Petersburg to study biology at Kursy Lesgrafta—Vremennye kursy dlia prigotovleniia rukovoditel’nits fizicheskogo vospitaniia i igr (Lesgaft’s Part-Time Courses for Training Women Instructors of Physical Exercises and Games), an institution unique in its time for offering women educational opportunities in well-compensated fields in which they were historically excluded. At school, Dobychina met Nikolai Ivanovich Kulbin (also Kul’bin), a military surgeon employed as a biology instructor who harbored a strong interest in contemporary art and music. After graduating in 1909, she worked as a secretary for two exhibitions organized by Kulbin: Impressionists (1909), the first exhibition of avant-garde art in Saint Petersburg, and Triangle (1910), a showcase of work by an artistic group of the same name interested in recent developments in psychology and symbolist art. Her responsibilities included acquiring permits and securing venues. As no commercial galleries then existed in the imperial Russian capital, Impressionists took place in a vacant store and Triangle in the basement of the Hotel Aurora. Both the exhibitions’ sites and works were derided by contemporary critics who were accustomed to exhibitions of naturalistic painting hosted at the Imperial Academy of Arts or in the halls of the city’s urban palaces rented by artists’ societies.

With the support of her husband’s inheritance, Dobychina opened the Dobychina Art Bureau in 1911. It was located first in an apartment at 9 Divenskaia Street, then in an apartment at 63 Moika Embankment between 1913 and 1914, before finally occupying six of ten rooms in an apartment on the second floor of the Adamini House at 7 Field of Mars/1 Moika Embankment. Rather than representing a specific roster of artists, the bureau hosted exhibitions that included works for sale. Prior to the opening of the Art Bureau, the contemporary art market in Saint Petersburg was dominated by the Imperial Academy of the Arts and independent artist societies that rented exhibition space at art and science academies, palaces, churches, and department stores, among other locations. Described in a 1913 issue of the newspaper Santk-Peterburgskie Vedomosti as “a sort of permanent commission bureau for artists,” the Art Bureau functioned as an exhibition space where Dobychina earned income through commissions from works sold rather than through leasing fees from artist groups.

Beyond facilitating the sales of painting, fashion, and decorative arts, the Bureau also hosted concerts, operas, and literary salons. In 1913, Dobychina dedicated permanent space in her Art Bureau for a rotating Permanent Exhibition of Contemporary Art. Eclectic in content, with works ranging from the realist tableaux of the artist group “The Wanderers” (“Peredvizhniki”) to the avant-garde painting of Kulbin and Vassily Kandinsky, the Permanent Exhibition would come to present nearly three-hundred artists during the Bureau’s roughly eight years of activity. The painter Alexander Benois described Dobychina’s Bureau in the Russian press as “a store for art of the European variety.”

The most significant event hosted by the Dobychina Art Bureau was The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting: 0,10 (1915–16). Organized by the artist-couple Ksenia Boguslavskaia and Ivan Puni (Jean Pugny), the exhibition was one of Russia’s first to feature wholly non-representational, abstract art. In addition to Boguslavskaia and Puni, artists participating in 0,10 also included Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Nadezhda Udal’tsova.

Although the Bureau focused almost exclusively on contemporary Russian art, Dobychina traveled abroad to meet foreign artists in hopes of organizing exhibitions of their work in Petrograd. She traveled to Paris in 1914 to prepare a retrospective of Pablo Picasso, though the onset of World War I prevented the show from ever being realized. An exhibition of contemporary Finnish art, however, did take place in 1917, though with far fewer works than initially anticipated as Finnish museums, galleries, and collectors were wary of transporting work to Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution.

Dobychina was forced to close the Art Bureau in 1918 following the nationalization of artistic exhibitions under the All-Russian Central Exhibitions Bureau that autumn. “I have just closed down the Art Bureau! I have just lost a child,” she wrote in an October 2, 1918, diary entry.

Despite losing her gallery, Dobychina’s work in the arts continued during Soviet Russia’s early years. In 1919, she became the head of the exhibition departments at the House of the Arts and the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts until 1924. She would go on to direct the Circle of Friends of Chamber Music (1926–30) and work as a researcher in the Department of Soviet Art at the State Russian Museum (1932–34). There, she helped author a plan to restructure the museum as a gallery dedicated to the art of Soviet nations. Together with Nikolai Punin, a scholar, critic and People’s Commissar of the Russian Museum, as well as the artist Pëtr Ivanovich Neradovski, she curated the exhibition 15 Years of Artists of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) in 1933.

Dobychina moved to Moscow in 1935 to work at Mosfilm, the Soviet Union’s state film studio, as a material culture consultant for the film Queen of Spades. The following year, she joined the art department of the Museum of the Revolution, where she remained until 1941. In 1944, she was awarded a Charter of the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh Republic for her promotion of artists from Kazakhstan. Dobychina died in Moscow in 1950.