Danila Vassilieff

Danila Vassilieff (16 December 1897 – 22 March 1958) was a Russian-born Australian painter and sculptor. He has been called the "father of Australian modernism".

Danila Ivanovich Vassilieff (Данила Иванович Васильев) was born in 1897 at Kagalnitskaya, near Rostov-on-Don, Russia. His father was a Cossack and his mother Ukrainian. He studied mechanical engineering at a technical school at Novocherkassk and at a military academy in Saint Petersburg. During World War I and the Russian Civil War, he served with a Don Cossack cavalry regiment. He was captured by the Red Army at Baku in April 1920, but escaped by motorbike and made his way to China via Armenia, Persia, India and Burma. In May 1923 in Shanghai he married Anisia Nicolaevna, a fellow refugee; then they set out for Australia, arriving in Townsville, Queensland in July.

They bought a sugar-farm at Yuruga, located near Ingham. By 1928 he was working as a railway labourer at Mataranka, Northern Territory. It was here that he began to paint, using a child's paint set. In 1929 he separated from his wife, was naturalized, and left Australia. He travelled to Paris and then on to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where in 1930 and 1931 he had his first formal studies in art, under Dimitri Ismailovitch, a specialist in Byzantine mosaics and frescoes. From 1932 to 1935 he worked and exhibited in the West Indies, South America, England, Spain and Portugal.

While living in England, his ideas of using traditional Russian decorative art in a modernist context began to form. This was helped by his friendship with Vladimir Polunin, at that time a teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art but previously a scene painter for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Danila Vassilieff wanted to return to Russia, but Stalin's repressive regime made this impossible.

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