Esphyr slobodkina biography of martin

During the period of social and political turmoil that followed the Russian Revolution, Esphyr Slobodkina fled with her family to Vladivostok, and then to Harbin, Manchuria. In 1928, she immigrated to New York and the following year entered the National Academy of Design. Although unenthusiastic about the curriculum, Slobodkina's visa required that she attend school, and she remained at the Academy until 1933. It was fortunate that she did, because through his sister, also a student, she met Ilya Bolotowsky, whom she married in 1933.

Slobodkina remembers her first long conversation with Bolotowsky as a lecture on composition, in which Bolotowsky talked of organization, mass, form, color, space—heady new ideas despite her several years of academic training. Through Bolotowsky, Slobodkina met Byron Browne, Gertrude and Balcomb Greene, Giorgio Cavallon, and others whose conversations roamed from discussions of the cost of canvas to the "latest capers in Picass Esphyr slobodkina biography of martin johnson!