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Yakunchikova [Yakunchikova-Weber], Mariya (Vasil’yevna)
(b Wiesbaden, 31 Jan 1870; d Chêne Bougerie, nr Geneva, 27 Dec 1902). Russian painter, decorative artist and designer. She was a major Symbolist artist in Russia and played a significant role in the revival of folk traditions in Russian art in the late 19th century. She grew up in Moscow and studied (1885–8) under Yelena Polenova and Vasily Polenov as an external student at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Subsequently she joined Yelena Polenova’s group for the study of the historical and archaeological monuments of Moscow and became closely associated with the ABRAMTSEVO group. From 1888 she spent winters in Paris, where she enrolled as a student at the Académie Julian. Her paintings, sometimes consisting of melancholic depictions of decaying mansions in the manner of Viktor Borisov-Musatov, were dominated by decorative landscapes. Always striving to express the synthetic inner vitality of organic life, she concentrated on forest motifs (e.g. The Window and Aspen and Fir Tree (both pokerwork and oil on panel, 1896; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.). In 1894 she organized an exhibition in Paris of women’s applied art and from 1895 organized and participated in exhibitions of folk art, such as that of the Russian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, for which, with Aleksandr Golovin and Natal’ya Davydova (1873–1926), she designed the interior inspired by folk craft. She also exhibited from 1899 with the WORLD OF ART and in 1901–2 with the Moscow group known as 36 Artists. In 1899 she designed the cover of issues 13–24 of Mir iskusstva. The asymmetrical arrangement of juniper berries, ancient orthography and a stylized depiction of a swan in a lake surrounded by fir trees culminating in a variety of Christian crosses is one of the most evocative expressions of Russian Art Nouveau. Her decorative work encompassed pokerwork, furniture design, toys, ceramics and embroidery, as in the appliqué panel Little Girl and the Wood Spirits (1899; Chêne Bougerie, I. S. Weber Col.).
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