Our beloved colleague, mentor, teacher, and friend, Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, passed away peacefully at the Cape Cod home of her daughter, Lisa Valkenier, on November 13, 2024. It was her 98th birthday.
Elizabeth Kridl, 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 had left Poland and was then teaching at Smith College. Kridl left Smith College in 1948, the same year that Elizabeth graduated from the college, for Columbia University, where he held the Adam Mickiewicz chair until his retirement in 1955. Elizabeth went to Yale University and earned her M.A. in history (1949). It was at Yale that she discovered her love for Russian history while taking a seminar with George Vernadsky. And it was also at Yale that Elizabeth met her future husband, Robert Valkenier. They moved to New York City, where Elizabeth pursued her study of Russian history at Columbia—the seminar in medieval Russia with Michael Cherniavsky led to her choosing a topic in art history for her dissertation. She earned the Certificate of the Russian Institute in 1951, and received her Ph.D. in History at Columbia in 1973. Robbie was longtime editor at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the editor of all of Elizabeth’s work until his death in 2003.
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), her considerably revised and expanded dissertation, Valkenier ventured beyond the Peredvizhniks’ heyday and traced their influence into the twentieth century as a model for socialist realism. The book was praised by none other than Hilton Kramer, the lead art critic at the New York Times, who writes: “Fortunately, there is a new book at hand—Elizabeth Valkenier’s Russian Realist Art (Ardis)—that fits the need for a serious and candid study of the political history of Russian art from the 1860s to the present.”
Valkenier’s initial contacts and experiences in the USSR date back to a 10-day Intourist trip to Moscow in 1958. She returned the following year as a guide for the American Exhibit, an experience she writes about in “Cultural Exchanges: A Personal Reflection” (Harriman Magazine, Fall 2021). When Valkenier returned to Moscow in 1967, it was in the capacity of research assistant to Philip Mosely, director of the European Institute and Valkenier’s cherished mentor. With Mosely’s introductions she met highly placed Soviet experts with whom she maintained contact for the next 30 years, which ultimately yielded her second book, The Soviet Union and the Third World: An Economic Bind (Praeger, 1983).
Her next book in art history, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (Columbia University Press, 1990), is not simply a biography of the foremost Peredvizhnik, but 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 set against the background of the transition from realism to Russian modernism and the interplay of art and social history during Russia’s Silver Age, completes the cycle. There is much more to be said about Elizabeth Valkenier’s contributions to the study of Russian art, at the very least that she edited the catalogue of The Wanderers for the exhibition from the Soviet Union mounted at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1991, with contributions from both Russian and American scholars—surely recognition of her status as one of the leading experts in the field. In 2008, Valkenier, together with Wendy Salmond, was guest editor of a special issue of Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture: “Russian Realist Painting. The Peredvizhniki: An Anthology,” a compilation of documents in English translation.
The year 2014 saw the publication of From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier (Northern Illinois University Press). 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.
Last but not least, Elizabeth and Robbie hosted friends and colleagues from the United States and abroad in their home on Morningside Drive in New York and their rural getaway in Connecticut for countless dinners, where the very good food was always bettered by the exciting conversation and camaraderie. A tradition that Elizabeth continued with flair after her husband’s death right up to the pandemic.
Photo: Elizabeth Valkenier in Warsaw (June 2010). Courtesy of Lisa Valkenier.
“Cultural Exchanges: A Personal Reflection” (Harriman Magazine, Fall 2021).
“The Totalitarian Model and Me” (Harriman Review, 14, nos. 1-2, Nov. 2002).
