Danila Ivanovich Vassilieff (1897-1958) was born at Kagalnitskaya, near Rostov-on-Don Russia. Educated at a technical school at Novocherkassk and at a military academy in St Petersburg, Danila specialised in mechanical engineering. In WW1 he served on the Eastern Front with a Cossack cavalry regiment. Then he saw action with the White forces in the Russian Civil War.
After being captured and imprisoned by the Reds at Baku in 1920, Danila escaped on a motor bike, eventually travelling to China. Due to his wartime experiences, Vassilieff felt free to continue life as a womaniser; until he married Anisia Nicolaevna at the Shanghai Russian Church in 1923.
From Shanghai the couple sailed to Australia in 1923. In 1923 they bought a sugar-plantation near Townsville but in 1928 he separated from his wife and was employed on the Northern Territory railway.
In 1929 he left Australia, studying art in Brasil (1930-1) and in the West Indies and South America (1932-3). Then he spent two years in England, Spain and Portugal (1933-4), mixing with White Russian ex-pats and creating a relationship between modernist art and Russian decorative art.
During his 5 years travelling, the UK was where he met fellow Russian Vladimir Polunin who was a teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art. The period emphasised Vassilieff’s Russian heritage of strong colour.
In 1934 Vassilieff returned to Australia and became the link between Australian and European art history. Complete with his dark beret, nicotine-stained clothes and intense gaze, the Russian became a colourful man. In Oct 1935 Vassilieff settled in Sydney, painting stormy, inner-city street scenes. Only now did enthusiastic reviews of his work establish his reputation eg scruffy children playing in workingclass suburbs, still lifes and portraits. His expressionist works were shown twice at the Macquarie Galleries. His biggest supporter was the famous art critic Basil Burdett.
Fitzroy Girls, 1936
St Martin Place, Sydney 1936
Fitzroy Street Scene, Boy with a Sling Shot, 1937
Weakening sales pushed Vassilieff away from inner city art, so he went into teaching instead. In 1939 he became the first art teacher at Clive and Janet Nield's Koornong Modern School in Warrandyte, in outer Melbourne. Danil’s newest lover, Helen Macdonald, was a music teacher there. And he sang in the Russian Orthodox Church choir.
Heide was the home built around bourgeois art patrons John and Sunday Reed in the 1930s, and attracted artists Sidney Nolan, Bert Tucker and Joy Hester. Not far from Heide in Bulleen, Danila Vassilieff created his own bohemian stone-and-log house in North Warrandyte, a home he called Stonygrad. Here he created a terraced garden with fruit trees and flowers, and sculptures out of local stone.
Stonygrad became a focal point for the Angry Penguins and other locals. In the late 1930s-40s, Danila influenced many of the younger painters who later became Australia's stars - Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, Joy Hester and Sid Nolan.
In 1944 his relationship with Helen Macdonald ended. Vassilieff had separated from his first wife way back in 1929 but they were not divorced until 1947. Because his art was unappreciated in Australia, he decided to sell Stonygrad and move to South Africa. In true Vassilieff style, he fell in love with the purchaser of Stonygrad, academic Elizabeth Orme Hamill. 3 months later they married and, newly inspired, the artist turned to sculpture using lime-stone from Lilydale.
in outer Melbourne
Welcomed into Melbourne's artistic circles, Vassilieff joined the Contemporary Art Society, supported by George Bell, Vance & Nettie Palmer, Adrian Lawlor, and John and Sunday Reed. In 1953 the Russian-Australian artist became vice-president of the Contemporary Art Society.
His view that immediacy and message mattered more than intellect and aesthetics, influenced younger artists: Albert Tucker, Lina Bryans, Joy Hester and Sidney Nolan. He did exhibit again later at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Melbourne, but now his work was not in great demand.
Sickly and slim, Vassilieff had always spoken English in a low, accented voice. As he sold few paintings, he never had any money and traded portraits for hot dinners. He also traded on his romantic image to get women into bed. Sadly he spent his final months in a shack near Mildura painting unhappy water-colours, the last in 1958.
Vassilieff died of a heart attack alongside John Reed at Heide, who stood by the artist to the end. A memorial exhibition of Danil’s oeuvre was held at Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Art of Australia in 1959. His work is now represented in major Australian galleries.
He and Elizabeth separated and he moved first to Mildura High School and then to Swan Hill High in rural Victoria. Vassilieff was living in lodgings in both towns, earning an income, but never surviving long at any teaching positions. In the last months of his life he was living in a fishing shack owned by a fellow teacher on the banks of the Murray River. The artist had been dismissed from his last teaching job and his health was bad. He fished in the day, and at night painted the river by the light of a kerosene lamp.
His view that immediacy and message mattered more than intellect and aesthetics, influenced younger artists: Albert Tucker, Lina Bryans, Joy Hester and Sidney Nolan. He did exhibit again later at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Melbourne, but now his work was not in great demand.
Sickly and slim, Vassilieff had always spoken English in a low, accented voice. As he sold few paintings, he never had any money and traded portraits for hot dinners. He also traded on his romantic image to get women into bed. Sadly he spent his final months in a shack near Mildura painting unhappy water-colours, the last in 1958.
Vassilieff died of a heart attack alongside John Reed at Heide, who stood by the artist to the end. A memorial exhibition of Danil’s oeuvre was held at Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Art of Australia in 1959. His work is now represented in major Australian galleries.
Vassilieff's biographer Felicity St John Moore published Vassilieff and His Art in 2012. Vassilieff brought a stream of Russian folk art into Australian art, as well as exciting ideas about the indivisibility of art and life. The bright colours reflected his exuberant love of the river, its flora and fauna. Sadly, Felicity said, he divided critics and friends, thanks to a peculiarly Cossack chauvinism, fierce anti-intellectualism, dysfunctional relationships with women and crude painterly language.
In 2012 an exhibition at Heidi examined the profound influence of this artist in the history of Australian art. It comprised key paintings from the mid-1930s to mid-1940s, works on paper and sculpture. This project highlighted Vassilieff’s role in linking the expressive tradition of Russian folk art with modern Australia art.
In 2015 director Richard Moore's film, The Wolf in Australian Art: Life and Art of Danila Vassilieff was based on a book published by his mother, Felicity St John Moore. She also co-curated a 2012 show at Heide that did much to restore Vassilieff to the modern public.