Artists Web Bio | View Artwork
Andrey Avinoff emerges as an important historical figure. He was a gay Russian artist who made it in the very straight world of American science and education, and an autocratic European traditionalist who helped create the modern, anything-goes New York scene. His intriguing body of artwork, multifaceted interests, and equally multifaceted identity significantly enhances our understanding of twentieth-century art, in all its vitality and complexity, Throughout his life, Avinoff was known worldwide for his scientific research on the influence of geography and ecology on the evolution of butterflies. But also for his beautiful watercolors, meticulously painted that expressed his ideas about the unity of nature and life. Many of Avinoff's works can be read as symbolist fantasies or surreal nightmares, iridescent butterflies, exquisitely detailed flowers, translucent surfaces, reflective elements such as water, soap bubbles, gemstones, and jellyfish.
His private feelings as well as his loyalty to Russian traditions and a deeply spiritual view of nature are expressed in his work.
Friend of Alfred Kinsey, of whom he made a portrait, which made a reading loaded with sexual connotations of his work. Avinoff was quite reserved about his private life, although there is no doubt about his homosexuality, you just have to look at his work and a wonderful portrait of Nijinsky, of whom he was an admirer, in which the dancer turns into a butterfly.
But the reason I brought this Russian entomologist art because of the wonderful drawings he made to illustrate George Golokhvastoff's poem, "The Fall of Atlantis." within a cross between symbolism and surrealism - of which we have one.