Andrey Avinoff

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Andrey Avinoff
Andrey Avinoff
Born	14 February 1884 Tulchyn, Podolia Governorate
Died	16 July 1949(1949-07-16) (aged 65)
Alma mater	University of Pittsburgh
Scientific career
Fields	Entomology

Dr. Andrey Avinoff (14 February 1884 – 16 July 1949; Russian: Андрей Николаевич Авинов Andrey Nikolayevich Avinov, sometimes referred to as Andrei Avinoff), was a Russian entomologist. After emigrating to the United States, from 1926 to 1946, Avinoff was the Director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for 20 years. He is well known for his paintings and was one of the world's greatest butterfly collectors. He was older brother to Elizabeth Shoumatoff, whose grandson, the journalist Alex Shoumatoff, has heavily profiled Avinoff in his book Russian Blood and articles in The New Yorker.

Biography[]

Avinoff was born in Tulchyn, Podolia Governorate, now Ukraine, to a wealthy Russian family with ties to nobility who served a diplomatic role in the Nicholas II of Russia's court. Avinoff learned to speak near-perfect English fluently during his childhood, as did his sister, Elizabeth Shoumatoff. He left Russia after the Revolution and moved to America. Shoumatoff's husband Leo, developed Sikorsky Aircraft with Igor Sikorsky in 2912 before a his death in a downing accident in 1928. Avinoff created the first logo for Sikorsky, the "winged S," and early marketing materials. In 1924, he was hired as an assistant curator of entomology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He was promoted to director in 1926, a position he held until 1946, and was appointed a trustee of the museum.^[1] Avinoff generally lived a secluded upper-class life in Pittsburgh, a popular and thriving metropolis with a strong elitist society at the time. Likely a homosexual, Avinoff never had children. In 1927, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. His associates at the Carnegie Museum included , , and Vladimir Nabokov. His sister became famous in 1945 for an unfinished portrait of Frankin Delano Roosevelt, who collapsed and died before her.

Butterflies[]

While in Europe, Avinoff spent his spare time traveling throughout the mountainous areas in Europe and Asia collecting butterflies. Avinoff would trace their genetic evolution through different valleys, since the mountains separating those valleys prevented different butterflies from mating. He found the Himalayas to be the ultimate proving ground. Avinoff's collection of Rhopalocera from the Pamir Mountains and Central Asia currently resides in the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg. This collection of some eighty thousand specimens was appropriated by the Soviet government. Avinoff was close friends with the biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, largely due to their similar interest in insects from Kinsey's work with gall wasps. Following World War II, the Mellon family asked to retrieve the collection, but this was refused.

Once in the US, through trading and purchase and through financing of expeditions, Avinoff managed to build up a near duplicate collection, most of which was donated to the Carnegie Museum. Much of his work still exists at the Carnegie Museum ^[2]and at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Avinoff also made six trips to Jamaica, which he described as "a dreamland of tropical splendor", between 1926 and 1940.

A year prior, Avinoff joined Entomological Society of America.^[3]

Accompanying him on five of those trips was , the son of his sister Elizabeth Shoumatoff, for whom Avinoff served as a father figure. The two caught more than fourteen thousand bots (butterflies and moths in Jamaican patois), doubling the number of known species on the island to more than a thousand.

Painting[]

Later in his life, unable to travel from his health conditions while living in New York, he resumed an interest from earlier in his life in painting. Avinoff's paintings were highly skilled images of flora or fauna, or paintings with deep meanings with themes of religious, sexual, apocalyptic nature, or combinations of the three. He worked in a wide variety of mediums from precise pencil and ink drawings to oil to watercolor.

One of his most famous series of paintings depict The Fall of Atlantis, a poem by George V. Golokhvastoff published in limited edition in 1938.^[4] The Birth of Atlantis, illustrated in his series of paintings, exemplifies the Art Deco style popular in the 1930s. The image is of a young male figure rising out of the sea, symbolic of the legendary island said by Plato to have later disappeared beneath the waves during an earthquake. His paintings of flowers, and 350 of his works illustrate Wildflowers of Western Pennsylvania and the Upper Ohio Basin.

Selected publications[]

• 1946, with N. Shoumatoff, "An Annotated List of the Butterflies of Jamaica." Ann. Carnegie Museum, vol. 2O: pp. 263–295, pi. I
• 1950, An Analysis of Color and Pattern in Butterflies of the Asiatic genus Karanasa. 10 p. 2 plates.
• 1951, with Swedner, "The Karanasa butterflies, a study in evolution". Ann. Carnegie Mus., 32:1-250. (Also Monograph of the Satyrids of Central Asia)

References[]

• Osborn, H. 1937: Fragments of Entomological History Including Some Personal Recollections of Men and Events. Columbus, Ohio, Published by the Author 1 1-394, 47 portraits.
• Osborn, H. 1952: A Brief History of Entomology Including Time of Demosthenes and Aristotle to Modern Times with over Five Hundred Portraits.. Columbus, Ohio, The Spahr & Glenn Company : 1-303.

External links[]

• A Profile of Andrey Avinoff in The New Yorker
• Andrey Avinoff: The Man 1886 - 1949 A Profile by the Carnegie Museum^{[permanent dead link]}
• The Andrey Avinoff foundation
• The Kinsey Institute
• Andrey Avinoff is widely discussed by his great nephew, the author Alex Shoumatoff from excerpts from his book on his family, Russian Blood - Please use the search function to find information.

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