Angelina Beloff — painter, printmaker and puppeteer with roots in the Russian Empire
Angelina Beloff was born Angelina Petrovna Belova on 23 June 1879 in St Petersburg, in the Russian Empire, and was raised there in an intellectual family. She first trained outside the arts, finishing the Vasileostrovskaya women's gymnasium and a four-year science course at the Higher Women's Courses, and took evening classes in painting. From 1904 she studied at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, then the centre of Russian art.
After her parents died in 1909, her teachers encouraged her to continue her studies in France, and she went to Paris, where she took lessons at the Académie Matisse and with the Catalan painter Hermen Anglada Camarasa. That year she met the young Mexican painter Diego Rivera, then travelling in Bruges; they married, and lived together in Paris for about a decade among the city's expatriate artists. In 1916 she gave birth to their son, Dieguito, who died at fourteen months. From 1912 she exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, of which she became a sociétaire in 1913, the Salon des Indépendants, which gave her a retrospective in 1926, and the Salon des Tuileries. In 1921 Rivera returned to Mexico alone; their marriage ended, and she never remarried.
In 1932, through her contacts with Mexican artists, she was sponsored to live and work in Mexico, and she moved to Mexico City, where she spent the rest of her life. She taught art and sculpture, created marionette shows and wrote for the puppet theatre, illustrated books, and was a member of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. In 1949 she was among the founders of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, and she exhibited regularly with the Galería de Arte Mexicano and the Salón. Her paintings, chiefly landscapes, flowers and portraits, used Mexican subjects while her style remained European, and she worked above all as an illustrator and printmaker.
She died in Mexico City on 30 December 1969, aged ninety. Her memoirs were published in 1986. In 1978 the writer Elena Poniatowska published a novel based on her life. The Museo Dolores Olmedo acquired the largest collection of her work in 1994, and in 2012 the Museo Mural Diego Rivera held a retrospective of some ninety of her works.
"Left Russia for Paris in 1909; moved to Mexico City in 1932 and spent the rest of her life there."
Migration storyTracing the roots — St Petersburg (Russia)
Born Angelina Petrovna Belova in St Petersburg in 1879 into an intellectual family, she studied science at the Higher Women's Courses and art at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts before leaving for Paris in 1909.
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St Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.