Lot 180: Nikolai Akimov , Russian 1901-1968 Pair of Stage Designs for THE BAT , 1948 watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper laid down on board

watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper laid down on board

measurements each: 11 by 19 in. alternate measurements 28 by 48.5 cm

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION
Nikolai Akimov was an innovative theater director as well as graphic artist and gifted stage designer. During his artistic career, he designed stage and costume designs for over two hundred theater productions in various theaters in Leningrad and Moscow.

Between 1916 and 1918, Akimov was a student of the prominent World of Art members Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Vasily Shukhaev, and Alexander Iacovleff. From 1927 to 1933 Akimov was the chief artist of both the Leningrad Academic Drama Theater and the Yevgeny Vakhtangov Theater.

In 1935, Akimov was appointed the artistic director of the Leningrad Theater of Comedy, and soon acquired a reputation as one of the most experimental stage directors of the time. The following decade, amid the state's anti-cosmopolitan campaign against European and other foreign influences, his works were severely criticized for their divergence from the tenets of Socialist Realism, and he was subsequently forced to leave the theater in 1949. After Stalin's death in 1953, a department of stage design was established in the Leningrad Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography, and Akimov was named its head. In this capacity, Akimov helped launch the careers of a wide range of Soviet nonconformist artists. In 1956--the year of Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech," which initiated the de-Stalinization process--Akimov was reinstated as the artistic director of the Comedy Theater.