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(1) Nikolay (Dmitriyevich) Milioti
(b Moscow, 29 Jan 1874; d Paris, 26 Dec 1962). The styles of both Nikolay and his brother (2) Vasily Milioti were formed under the influence of Mikhail Vrubel’ and the writings of the second generation of Russian Symbolist poets, Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok. A friendly critic writing in 1906 praised Nikolay Milioti’s ‘hovering pale veils’, while Vladimir Stasov, the champion of Realism in Russian art, attacked the ‘bacilli’ and ‘bacteria’ (of corruption, presumably) that he perceived in Nikolay Milioti’s works. Both comments may have been applied to one of his most frequently reproduced paintings, Angel of Sorrow (c. 1906–7; untraced, see Gray, 1986, pl. 44). This decorative panel painting has obvious affinities, in both subject-matter and style, with the painting by Vrubel’ of the Demon (1890; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.). In each painting the central figure is a spiritual being, but in Milioti’s it is a two-dimensional, wraith-like apparition rather than a fully three-dimensional, muscular presence. However, the construction in separate coloured facets derives from the treatment of the landscape in the painting by Vrubel’, and presumably it was this faceting that elicited Stasov’s unfavourable comments.
Part of the Milioti family
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