Eya Nicolaevna Fechin (June 14, 1914, Kazan, Russian Empire – September 20, 2002, Taos, USA)Artist Nicolai Fechin's daughter dead at 88 // Santa Fe New Mexican: newspaper. 3 October 2002. Archive: 4 January 2019. was the daughter of and thereby the long-serving model for a Russian, Soviet and American artist Nicolai Fechin; and a psychic, dancer and psychiatrist (art therapist), author of memoirs about Nicolai Fechin, books and articles about his work, and founder of a private museum in Taos dedicated to his work. Her father's biographer, Galina Tuluzakova, calls his portraits of her "unconditional masterpieces", stating: "Each of the numerous portraits of the daughter reflects both the immensity of paternal love and the brilliant skill of a great artist. In Tuluzakova's opinion, in Fechin's portraits of Eya "ideal and real, desirable and real, life and art happily united". According to the poet and artist Pavel Radimov, the last chairman of the Peredvizhniki Society and the first chairman of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, "Eya's head is shining in Fechin's numerous sketches and studies with all the joy of his paternal love".
Fechin created pictorial portraits, pencil drawings, and carved images of his daughter from her birth to her twentieth birthday. About forty of these portraits are known, most of them in museums and private collections in Russia and the United States. As of 2011, three sketches and one miniature were identified in Russian collections (one more is in question). The whereabouts of some of Nicolai Fechin's paintings of his daughter are unknown.
Biography
Eya Fechin was born in 1914 in Kazan into the family of the artist Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin, who was already well known in Russia and Europe. Her mother, Alexandra Nikolayevna Fechin (née Belkovich), one of the daughters of the first director of the Kazan Art School, was eleven years younger than her husband. The girl was baptized in the local church of St. Barbara the Great Martyr.В честь Николая Фешина // Вечерняя Казань: газета. 2011. 1 November 2011. Archive: 4 January 2019. The father, according to Galina Tuluzakova, "idolized" his only child, and his daughter fully reciprocated – her attitude to her father was "reverent" (in 1933, when Nicolai Ivanovich and Alexandra Nikolaevna divorced, Eya stayed with her father). Fechin continuously painted studies and portraits of Eya from the time of her birth, marking his daughter's maturation. Many sketches "impress with their accuracy, emotional intensity and brilliant pictorial mastery".
There is a small amount of documentary evidence from contemporaries about Eya Fechin's childhood in Russia. Natalia Krotova, who posed for her father, wrote in her memoirs about visiting the Fechins: "There I met his daughter Eya, who was also out for a walk. We spent a pleasant hour with her. She was about six years old. She was very well-behaved, not at all shy, and chatted happily with me". Eya Fechin occupies an important place in her mother Alexandra Fechin's book March of the Past (1937), which consists of two stories in English about the flight of the White Guards from Kazan and the life of the Fechin family in Vasilievo, 30 versts from Kazan, during the Civil War.
In 1923, Eya emigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of nine. The family first settled in New York City. In 1927, they moved to Taos, New Mexico, where they stayed with Mabel Dodge Luhan, patroness of the Taos art colony. The Fechin family soon purchased seven acres (2.8 ha) of land. According to his design, Nicolai Fechin built a house with a studio on it. Eya recalled (keeping the spelling and style of the original):
They bought horses for me, and I rode almost every day, sometimes with Helen Blumenschein (daughter of the painter Ernest Blumenschein). I had tutors.Eya Feshina had private teachers of music and riding. The first (and the longest) was Mrs. Phillips, wife of the painter Bert Phillips...
During the American period of her childhood, Eya was constantly around personalities in music, fine arts and literature, among them the writer Frieda Lawrence and the artist Dorothy Brett.
In 1933, after her parents' divorce, Eya stayed with her father. He described that event in a letter to his brother Pavel Fechin:Воронов Вл. Судьба Николая Фешина // Огонёк: журнал. – 1964. – 12 июля (No. 29 (1925)). pp. 16–17. Archive: 16 December 2018.
Fascinated by a poet, she wanted to be a writer herself. You know how she is with her impulsive nature, putting everything upside down. She ruined my life. I'm not kidding, after living with someone for more than 20 years, you have to start over. It was unbearably painful. Of course, during the divorce, she took everything of value that was acquired by me here in America, and we are now with Eya real homeless. She ruined both our lives and hers...Eya's, so attached to her mother before, has now lost her friendship and is attached to me and lives with me. She has decided to be a dancer and is working very hard and feels more or less happy. Poor girl, she has suffered the most.
Fechin and his daughter spent the winter in New York and then moved to Los Angeles. The house in Taos was registered in the name of Fechin's wife and remained with her. It turned out that Fechin and his daughter were not adapted to independent daily life (the household was previously run by Alexandra Fechin): they did not know how to sign cheques, to order a hotel room, or to cook (the only dish that Eya could cook was buckwheat porridge). In 1945, Eya married and left California, where her father stayed.
Eya Fechin studied modern dance and became a professional dancer. In the 1930s, she performed in Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring at the Hollywood Bowl. In 1936, she was a member of the Communist Ballet Company under the direction of choreographer Lester Horton. After her dancing career ended, she tried to combine dance with psychiatry and found herself among the pioneers of art therapy.Nicolai Fechin Biography. Robert L. Parsons Fine Art. Дата обращения: 25 December 2018. Archive: 4 January 2019. In particular, like her first husband, she was personally acquainted with Jacob Levi Moreno, the founder of psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy. In the 1940s, Fechin earned a degree as a modern dance therapist and founded an art therapy department at the Iowa State Mental Hospital. In the first half of the 1950s, she worked as a mental health specialist in New York City. For a long time, she lived in San Cristobal, New Mexico, where a special stage was built for dance therapy. she wrote a small booklet devoted to the problems of self-knowledge in the process of art therapy, published in 1949.
Private life Eya Fechin was married twice. The first time was from 1945 to 1954, to the writer, modernist composer, abstractionist painter, poet, philosopher, and astrologer Dane Rudhyar.
For the second time, from 1954, her husband was Bennett Branham, who also was her partner in art psychotherapy and co-author of scientific articles.Rudhyar E. Fechin, Branham B. The Development of a Psychodrama Department in a Mental Hospital // Group Psychotherapy: journal. 1953. June. pp 110–114. Their marriage was registered on April 26, 1954, in Los Angeles. The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper wrote in a 2002 obituary about Eya Fechin's divorce from her second husband and her separation from him (Eya lived with her daughter in Taos and Albuquerque).
From her second marriage, Eya had a daughter, Nicaela named in honor of her grandfather.
Popularization of her father's work
After her mother's death in 1983, Fechin's house in Taos was inherited by Eya Nikolayevna. She restored it and reconstructed its interiors to resemble their appearance when her father was alive. The house became a private museum. Eya Nikolayevna registered the Fechin Institute, a non-profit organization that supported the house as a museum.Тулузакова Г. П. Фешин – самый крупный и значимый художник, связанный с Казанью // Бизнес-онлайн: газета. 22 July 2018. Archive: 22 July 2018. The Institute organized exhibitions of contemporary artists, and published catalogs and its own periodical newsletter. Its staff included Eya Nikolayevna herself and volunteers. Fechin gave lectures on psychology and art history. She shared her memories of her father, and provided his paintings from her collection for exhibitions. With Eya's participation, a hotel in the style of Nicolai Fechin's house was built in Taos. Part of its income was intended to support the museum, but this plan could not be realized, and the hotel was soon closed.
Galina Tuluzakova noted the importance of Eya Fechin's memoirs in reconstructing her father's views on art. Eya wrote that he appreciated abstract art: “...I wanted my father to experiment in this direction. He replied that he had not yet fully exhausted or perfected his style of painting. He regretted that his imagination was not free enough because he had studied for too long...” She also noted that her father admired the work of Pablo Picasso and Carlos Mérida, one of whose sketches he had acquired. She mentioned his love of architecture and his desire to explore it. Tuluzakova observed that Eya Fechin created an “almost mythological image” of her father. According to the art historian:
She practically dissolved in her love and adoration for the memory of her nearest and dearest. Her reminiscences, commentaries, and numerous interviews are of exceptional value for understanding the artist's personality and many important facts and details of his American life...
The second half of her life, Eya dedicated to preserving her father's memory. She made significant efforts to popularize his art, including writing the foreword to a 1975 book about his work by artist Mary Balcom, and creating her father's archive. At Eya's insistence, her father's ashes were reburied in Kazan in 1976.Шкуренок Н. Николай Фешин, русский американец // Культура : газета. 16 March 2012. She also returned some of Fechin's works to his homeland, donating several graphic works to the Tretyakov Gallery and not only drawings but also paintings and sculptures to the museum in Kazan. With her help, an exhibition of his paintings from collections in the USSR and the United States was held in Kazan, Leningrad, Santa Fe, and New York in 1976. She also succeeded in having Nicolai Fechin's house in Taos added to the National Register of Historic Places in the United States. It now () belongs to the private Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, where it exhibits paintings by Nicolai Fechin as well as works by artists who were members of the Taos Society of Artists in the 1910s and 1930s.Любимова О. Картина на миллион. Загадки самого «дорогого» художника русского модерна // Аргументы и факты : еженедельник. 2016. 22 November (No. 47). Archive: 4 January 2019.
In 2002, Eya Fechin was buried next to her father, fulfilling her mother's last wish.
Eya Fechin in her father's work