Died 12 February 1951 | ||
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The Russian artist Magda Nachman Acharya was born on 20 July 1889 in Pavlovsk (a suburb of St. Petersburg), Russia, and died on 12 February 1951 in Bombay, India. From 1907 to 1913, she attended the Zvantseva Art Academy, in St. Petersburg, where she studied with Léon Bakst, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. She had already begun exhibiting her work in 1910. In 1916, Nachman moved to Moscow. World War I, the revolutions of 1917, and the beginning of the Civil War the following year forced her into a peripatetic existence in several Russian provincial towns and villages, where she struggled to support herself by exchanging portraits for food, designing sets in the people’s theater in the village of Ust-Dolyssy (near Nevel, in Vitebsk Gubernia), and taking on various odd jobs. In 1921, she met and married the Indian nationalist M.P.T. Acharya, and they left Russia in 1922 for Berlin. In 1936, the couple having by then obtained British passports, Nachman traveled to Bombay, India, to join her husband, who had left for Bombay the previous year. In India, Nachman became a widely acclaimed painter of Indian subjects and was in great demand as a portraitist. She died in Bombay on February 12, 1951.