L'épée enflammée; and Monstre à Queue: two panels for the Chapelle Fortin

A mysterious recluse during his lifetime, the artist and stage designer Nicolas Kalmakoff was notable for creating scandalous artworks characterised by a mood of intense eroticism and mysticism, as well as an obsession with deity and legend and the use of necrological motifs. The present panels for the Chapelle Fortin form a career-defining highlight in Kalmakoff's oeuvre, successfully synthesising his most profound and significant themes of redemption, resurrection and godly power into one monumental and continuous masterpiece.
Born in Nervi on the Ligurian coast of Italy, Kalmakoff was the son of a Russian military officer and an Italian woman. As a child, Kalmakoff was entranced by his German governess recounting fairy-tales by the Brothers Grimm. Despite leaving to study law in St Petersburg, he never acclimatised to Russian life and returned to Italy to become a bona fide painter. At the turn of the century he returned to Russia and was introduced by his friend Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) to the members of the Mir Iskusstva, founded by Alexandre Benois (1870-1960) and Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929). In 1908, he was approached by Nikolai Evreinov (1879-1953) to create the stage designs for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, his first ever commission for the theatre. Kalmakoff did not disappoint: the design for the first act took the shape of female genitalia and caused such a scandal in St Petersburg that the production was closed hours before its premiere.
In 1927, Kalmakoff began work on twenty-five panels for the Chapelle Fortin du 'Resurrectoir', commissioned by Héliodore Fortin (1889-1934), the founder of the 'Resurrectoir' - a religious syncretism which combined elements of multiple religions and elected twelve vice-gods including Jesus Christ, Odin, Buddha and Osiris, among others. According to Fortin, Kalmakoff's series represents the path to deification, with twelve 'flames' or stations. As displayed in the present panels, each vice-god is endowed with a halo and a flaming sun overhead. The extraordinary interiors of the chapel, located at 38 bis rue Fontaine in Paris were forgotten for decades and rediscovered in the town of Metz in 1964, and later exhibited at the Musée-galerie de La Seita in Paris in 1986.
Kalmakoff’s panels entrust the hope of salvation to the all-seeing, all-powerful deities of the Chapelle Fortin in opposition, perhaps, to the hopeless circumstances of his personal life. Towards the end of his life, Kalmakoff was destitute and died in obscurity in a hospice outside Paris. In an interview with L’oeuvre, Héliodore Fortin referred to the panels as 'the work of Nicolas Kalmakoff’s visionary paintbrush' (P. Bénard, 'Le Chemin de la Divination au Résurrectoir', L’œuvre, 26 August 1928, p. 4). Their friendship and artistic partnership would endure, even beyond death, with Kalmakoff designing Fortin’s funerary monument at the Cimetière parisien de Pantin.