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Vassilieff [Vasiliyev], Danila (Ivanovich)
(b Kagal’nitskaya, nr Rostov-on-Don, 16 Dec 1897; d Melbourne, 22 March 1958). Australian painter and sculptor of Russian birth. He had no early formal art training, attending instead the Technical Artillery School in St Petersburg before serving in the Russian army (1917–18). He fled Russia, travelled overland through Asia and arrived in Australia in 1923. In 1929 he went to France to study art and then worked as an artist in Brazil, the West Indies, England, Spain and Portugal. In 1935 he returned to Australia where he began painting street scenes of the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, for example a Street in Fitzroy (1937; Mr and Mrs John Reed priv. col., see St John Moore, p. 48). Vassilieff’s direct and expressive painting with its graphic spontaneity and free use of colour was opposed to the influence of French formal abstraction on Australian art. The roots of his art lie as much in the folk art of his Cossack heritage as in the work of such artists as Vincent van Gogh, Maurice de Vlaminck and Chaïm Soutine, whom he admired.
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