Leopold Bernstein-Sinaeff, Male Bust

Leopold (Lev) Bernstein-Sinaeff (1867-1944)
Bust of a man
Early 20th century, moulding, marble, h 30
Sign. Bernstein Sinayeff

The works of Leopold (Lev) Bernstein-Sinaeff, born in Vilnius, are sculptures and graphic works almost unknown to the modern art lover. The nature of his work can be inferred from the paucity of biographical data and the few surviving works.

He left for Paris when he was only fourteen, but before that he had the opportunity to learn the basics of art for a couple of years at the Vilnius Drawing School. In Paris, he studied sculpture with Aimé-Jules Dalou, a renowned creator of monuments and decorative sculpture of the time. He also assisted the sculptor Auguste Rodin in his workshop. He did not return to Lithuania, but founded his own sculpture studio in Paris and had students.

He created bronze and marble busts of famous people, genre and symbolist sculptures and monuments. He exhibited his works in Parisian salons as early as 1890, was awarded a gold medal at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, and was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1901. In 1900 he visited Russia, met Leo Tolstoy and later created a medal for him. In Moscow, he sketched a bas-relief frieze depicting the procession of Russian artists and writers to the god Apollo for the façade of the present-day Pushkin Art Museum. The project was never realised, but these sketches were supposedly used as the basis for the mouldings which decorate a private rental house on Plotnikov Street. Later, he took part in a competition for a monument to Emperor Alexander II. Because of his links with Russia, he is often attributed to Russian artists. In Paris, he worked for a decade on the Symbolist sculpture Youth and Old Age, which was destroyed by the German invaders, and the artist was sent to the Drancy concentration camp in 1944 and shortly afterwards transferred to Auschwitz, where Bernstein-Sinaeff lost his life in a short time. Only a few museums, including the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, have individual works by the sculptor.