Abraham A. Manievich

Abraham Anshelovich Manievich, sometimes catalogued as Manevich, was born on 25 November 1881 in Mstsislaw, then in the Russian Empire's Mogilev province and now in Belarus. He trained at the Kyiv Art School from about 1901 to 1905, then continued his studies in Munich, at the Academy of Fine Arts and, by some accounts, at the Anton Azbe school, into 1906 or 1907.

He built his early reputation in Central Europe, exhibiting at the Kunstverein in Munich in 1907 and at the Vienna Secession in 1908, and showing at the Paris Salon in the early 1910s. A solo exhibition at the Paul Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1913 drew critical attention and marked his emergence as an internationally recognized landscape painter. He is described in some sources as a co-founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts in Kyiv and an early faculty member there, with the professorship dated to 1917 by some accounts and to 1918 by a contemporary obituary.

Some secondary sources describe a personal and artistic turning point around 1919, when pogrom violence in Kyiv is reported to have destroyed his home and, by several accounts, killed his son; this episode is linked by multiple sources to his painting Destruction of the Ghetto, Kiev, now in the collection of The Jewish Museum in New York. Manievich emigrated to the United States around 1921 to 1922 and settled in the Bronx, continuing to paint and exhibit at venues including the Brooklyn Museum (1923), Babcock Gallery and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore (1924), and the Art Institute of Chicago and Carnegie Institute (1925). He died on 30 June 1942 at his home in the Bronx, New York, following what a contemporary Jewish Telegraphic Agency notice described as a brief illness; that notice was published 1 July 1942, which is the date given for his death in a small number of secondary sources.

Contemporary and later commentary treats Manievich as a serious figure in early Ukrainian and Russian modernism who carried his landscape practice into an American context after his emigration in the early 1920s. His 1913 Paris show at Durand-Ruel is repeatedly cited by researchers as the moment his reputation crossed into Western European criticism, with period reviews appearing in French art journals of the time. More recent scholarship, including 2025 Ukrainian art-historical research, has focused on reconstructing his exhibition history, identifying at least sixteen group exhibitions across Kyiv, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Scranton between 1905 and 1938.

Manievich's auction market is thin relative to major twentieth-century names, but it has produced one clear high point. Neige dans la foret, a 1913 winter forest scene, sold for CHF 305,000 (about USD 339,978) at Koller Auktionen in Zurich in 2021, a result Koller itself described as a new auction record for the artist; the exact day of sale is not independently confirmed beyond the 2021 auction season. Dealer summaries put his broader range of realized auction prices from roughly USD 293 for small works up to that 2021 high, reflecting significant variation by size, medium, and subject. No subsequent public auction result identified in available records exceeds the Koller figure.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Manievich, and no gallery or estate currently claims exclusive representation; his work moves through a small number of dealers, including Beloosesky Gallery in New York and K Gallery in Ohio, and through international auction houses such as Koller, Sotheby's, and MacDougall's. Because realized prices have ranged from a few hundred dollars to just over CHF 300,000 depending on size and subject, provenance and documented exhibition history matter more than they would for an artist with an established catalogue raisonne. Collectors should also expect minor discrepancies in published birth and death dates across sources and treat 25 November 1881 and 30 June 1942 as the best-supported dates.