Danila vassilieff biography of michael

Danila Vassilieff, sometimes called “the father of Australian modernist art”, was born on 16 December 1897 at Kagalnitskaya, near Rostov-na-Donu in Russia. Of mixed descent, Danila’s father, Ivan Ivanovich Vassilieff, was a Don Cossack, and his mother Eudoxia, née Perepelitsina was Ukrainian.

Though largely unrecognised for his work for much of his life, today Vassilieff is recognised as a key figure in abstract expressionism, yet he did not come from an artistic background.

According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vassilieff was educated at technical school at Novocherkassk and at a military academy in St Petersburg. While he specialized in mechanical engineering, from mid-1917 he served on the Eastern Front with a Don Cossack cavalry regiment, was captured by Communist forces and escaped via Persia and India to China.

In July 1923, Vassilieff and his then wife arrived in Queensland where they bought a sugar-farm at Yuruga,