Victor Mikhail Arnautoff (born Uspenovka, Taurida Governorate, Russian Empire, November 11, 1896 – died Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, March 22, 1979) was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.
Early life in Russia and China
Arnautoff was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest. He showed a talent for art from an early age and hoped to study art after graduating from the gymnasium in Mariupol. With the outbreak of World War I, he enrolled in the Yelizavetgrad Cavalry School. He went on to hold military leadership positions in the army of Nicholas II and the White Siberian Army, and was repeatedly awarded medals for his service. While in cavalry school, he learned fencing, which would remain a hobby throughout his life.
With the defeat of the Whites in Siberia, he crossed into northeastern China and surrendered his weapons. He remained in China for five years. He again tried to pursue art, signing up for schooling in Harbin, but was impoverished and took a position training the cavalry of (and possibly fighting for) the warlord Zhang Zuolin. While serving the warlord in Mukden, China, he met and married Lydia Blonsky and they had two sons, Michael and Vasily.
Schooling and early work in San Francisco and Mexico
In November 1925 Arnautoff went to San Francisco on a student visa to study at the California School of Fine Arts. There he studied sculpture with Edgar Walter and painting with Gertrude Partington Albright and other instructors. He was given a scholarship as the best student in his year, and also became active in the city's leftist arts scene.
As his student visa expired, Arnautoff brought his family from China and then continued to Mexico in 1929. On Ralph Stackpole's recommendation, he became an assistant to the muralist Diego Rivera (who also spoke Russian as a result of travels in Paris and Russia). Rivera and Arnautoff worked on a series of murals at the National Palace and also at the Palace of Cortés, Cuernavaca. After starting the murals in the National Palace, Rivera went to San Francisco to paint a mural in the new Stock Exchange building, leaving Arnautoff in charge of the Mexican projects for a period of several months. During this period, Arnautoff matured as a muralist, both through technical practice (in San Francisco he had not done frescoes larger than an oil painting) and in style (Rivera advised him to move away from traditional European styles and learn from native Mexican styles).
A third son, Jacob, was born in Mexico, and named (somewhat indirectly) after Rivera. While in Mexico, Arnautoff also met Bernard Zakheim, another leftist San Francisco muralist who had been born in the then-Russian-Empire. The two would later work together on the Coit Tower murals.
Work in the Bay Area
In 1931 the family returned to San Francisco. Arnautoff's first significant work after returning was a mural on the wall of his studio, which he opened to the public.
Shortly afterward, he completed his first mural commission, for the Palo Alto Medical Clinic in Palo Alto (where he had been a patient) in August 1932. Arnautoff's mural series was in the historical Roth building, all were medically-themed murals done in the recessed under a loggia with four panels of modern medicine and other panels showing primitive medicine, and additionally he four painted medallions of Joseph Lister, Hippocrates, Louis Pasteur, and Wilhelm Röntgen are on the exterior wall of the loggia. The four murals done in color feature modern medicine and depict Luther Emmett Holt, William Osler, and Harvey Cushing. The unveiling of this mural caused a traffic jam and some controversy, in part because one of the murals showed a doctor examining a female patient whose bare breasts were at eye-level. Like his other works in the Bay Area, the murals were frescoes.