It took the October Revolution for Nadia Khodossievich, a little Russian peasant born on October 23, 1904, in a village in the Russian Empire, to enter the Beliov School of Fine Arts and learn about Art. drawing and painting. By decision of the very young Bolshevik revolution, artistic education became free. For Nadia, who wore shoes with bark soles throughout her childhood, a new world opened up before her. She will discover the history of art and join all the avant-gardes which break with academicism.
In 1919, Nadia joined the National Higher Workshops of Fine Arts in Smolensk and followed the teaching of Wladyslaw Strzeminski, a major figure of the Russian-Polish avant-garde. She discovered Suprematism, a movement stemming from Cubism which only uses geometric shapes and plays on color contrasts, a movement theorized by Malevich of whom she is a fervent admirer. If the revolution allows him to paint, it does not allow him to eat his fill or have decent housing. Some nights she sleeps on freight trains. But nothing undermines his convictions. His life is painting. And if she wants to go to Paris, it is not to flee the revolution, unlike the White Russians whom she despises, but to participate in all the avant-gardes that meet in the City of Lights.
Close friend of Chagall, she frequented Picasso and Braque
She will have to wait four years in Poland, where she meets a young artist, Stanislas Grabowski, whom she will marry. They rub shoulders with the Blok group where cubists, suprematists and constructivists coexist. The couple eventually joined Paris in December 1924, settling in a modest boarding house in the Latin Quarter. Nadia joined the Modern Academy of Fernand Léger, whose work she had discovered in the magazine “L’Esprit Nouveau” at the Smolensk library. Fascinated by this artist, she knows that her place is at his side. Nadia and her husband participate in around ten group exhibitions of Academy students. The Parisian Gallery of Contemporary Art devoted an exhibition to both of them which allowed Nadia to sell her first Cubist nude.
His relationship is failing. Pregnant, she leaves her alcoholic and violent husband and takes refuge in a hospice for unmarried mothers where she gives birth to her only child, a little girl named Wanda. Nadia hangs on. To earn enough to survive, she gets up at dawn and cleans the pension where she stays with her baby. Then head to the Academy to learn and learn under the eye of the master.
