Art: Boris Pasternak’s Father

Elderly ladies in lace jabots and stiffly polite gentlemen in somewhat frayed double-breasted black suits filled five small rooms in Munich’s Municipal Gallery. They were members of Munich’s large Russian colony, and they had come to see their own past reflected in an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Leonid Pasternak, father of the late Russian poet-novelist, Boris.

The drawings, all done with a swinging and resonant network of strokes, were portraits of some of the chief figures of Russia’s pre-Revolution Parnassus—Sergei Rachmaninoff, Feodor Chaliapin, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy—all close friends of the artist. There was a startling psychological study of Lenin, done in 1921, which captures his aggressive intelligence. From Pasternak’s later period in Berlin there was a sketch of a dark-haired, mustachioed Albert Einstein playing the violin. Most of the 82 charcoal, pastel, chalk and red pencil drawings in the show demonstrated Pasternak’s talent for capturing a fleeting moment of gentleness and humanity—a talent that made many an aging visitor stop, catch his breath and murmur: “Ah, that is the way I knew him too.” Nosed Out by a Girl. The show in Munich was brought together this month to honor the centennial of Pasternak’s birth in Odessa in 1862. His ambitious parents wanted him to be a doctor, scratched together enough to send him to medical school in Moscow. But Pasternak had no stomach for dissection, and, after a brief attempt to get through law school, decided to give in and fulfill his burning ambition to be an artist. He applied for an opening at the Moscow Academy of Arts, was nosed out by a girl whom he was to encounter many years later as Countess Tolstoy. Pasternak went instead to Munich and studied for two years.

Back in Moscow in 1892, he was asked to help turn out illustrations of a deluxe edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The Pasternak family became intimate friends of the Tolstoys, frequently visiting Yasnaya Polyana, the novelist’s country estate near Tula. Pasternak made some memorable sketches of Tolstoy working with a scythe in the wheat fields.

A Wounded Soldier. In the 20 years before World War I, Pasternak developed into one of the most representative of Russian artists, painting in the typical Russian palette, which tends to emphasize a sort of oriental drug coloring of dusty blues and darkish reds. The 26 oil, tempera and watercolor paintings in the Munich show demonstrate that, though influenced by the early impressionists, his style could scarcely be called modern. He scorned his fellow Russian, Kandinsky, the first major abstractionist. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Pasternak drew a war poster showing a wounded soldier, which became immensely popular even though the Czar criticized it on the ground that it aroused pity rather than admiration for bravery. Four years later the Soviet government used the same poster as anti-war propaganda.

Pasternak’s political beliefs were ambiguous. After he and his wife and two daughters left Russia in 1921, leaving Boris and his brother Alexander behind, he never again saw Russia. In Berlin he became a success all over again, was able to collect a sociable circle of intellectuals and almost re-create the happy prewar Moscow days. Yet shortly before the Nazis took over Germany, Pasternak tried to return to Russia, could not get in, went to England instead. He spent the war years as a sick and half-forgotten man, still hoping to go back to Russia, and died in Oxford in 1945 at the age of 83. On his easel was an unfinished portrait of Lenin, which he had been trying to do from memory.