Our beloved colleague, mentor, teacher, and friend, Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier (RI, 1951; Ph.D., GSAS, 1973), passed away peacefully at the Cape Cod home of her daughter, Lisa Valkenier, on November 13, 2024. It was her 98th birthday.
Valkenier, daughter of Manfred Kridl, renowned scholar and professor of Polish Literature at Wilno University, came to the United States in 1941 with her mother and brother to join her father who was already teaching at Smith College. Valkenier graduated from Smith College in 1948 and earned her M.A. in history at Yale (1949), where she discovered her love for Russian history and met her future husband, Robert Valkenier. They moved to New York City, where Elizabeth started a doctoral program at Columbia. She earned the Certificate of the Russian Institute in 1951, and received her Ph.D. in History at Columbia in 1973, focusing on Russian art history.
Valkenier’s three seminal books on Russian art history were all published under the aegis of Studies of the Russian/Harriman Institute. In the first, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ardis, 1977), Valkenier traced the influence of the Peredvizhniki—a cooperative of 19th century realist artists formed in resistance to academic restrictions—into the twentieth century as a model for socialist realism.
Valkenier’s initial experiences in the USSR date back to a 10-day Intourist trip to Moscow in 1958. The following year she returned as a guide for the American Exhibit, which she wrote about for Harriman Magazine‘s Fall 2021 issue. Valkenier returned to Moscow in 1967 as a research assistant to her mentor, Philip Mosely, director of the European Institute. With Mosely’s introductions she met highly placed Soviet experts with whom she maintained contact for decades, which ultimately yielded her book, The Soviet Union and the Third World: An Economic Bind (Praeger, 1983).
Her next book, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (Columbia University Press, 1990), is a biography of the foremost Peredvizhnik and also an insightful look at the distorting lens of Soviet historiography. Valentin Serov: Portraits of Russia’s Silver Age (Northwestern University Press, 2001), a study of Repin’s best-known pupil, completes the cycle. Elizabeth Valkenier made extensive contributions to the field of Russian art history, which were celebrated by her colleagues with From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014). Edited by Rosalind Blakesley and Margaret Samu, the volume collects 13 essays by Western and Russian scholars, who develop major themes inspired by Valkenier’s work.◆
Read the full obituary here.
