Aquarium (Self-Portrait)

An important figure in the prewar Russian and early Soviet avant-garde, Sofia (Sara) Dymshits-Tolstaya was born in St. Petersburg into the family of a successful timber merchant. In 1905 Dymshits briefly married Marc Chagall’s brother-in-law, Isaac Rosenfeld, and between 1907 and 1914 she was married to the writer Count Alexei Tolstoy. In St. Petersburg, Dymshits-Tolstaya studied at the progressive Zvantseva school with Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Leon Bakst, and Marc Chagall before moving temporarily to Paris. She was close to the Russian Jack of Diamonds group before World War I. In 1916, Dymshits-Tolstaya began painting dual-sided glass reliefs, indicating her shift in focus to three-dimensional and mixed media. She would consolidate this shift as one of the co-creators of the Soviet avant-garde Constructivist trend. In the Soviet Union, she served as secretary of the Fine Arts Department of the regime’s People’s Commissariat for Education, was a founding member of the Soviet Union of Artists, and in the 1920s and 1930s edited the art sections of major regime publications such as Rabotnitsa (Working Woman) and later Krest’yanka (Peasant Woman).