Svetlana “Ludmilla” Alexeieff Rockwell 

Svetlana “Ludmilla” Alexeieff Rockwell  (1923 – 2015)

Artist

1678 Main “Lana Lane”, Westport Point

Svetlana was born in Paris to her mother Alexandra Grinevsky and father Alexandre Alexeieff, both eventually becoming illustrators.  Grinevsky was from European nobility and Alexeieff was from Kazan, Russia.  Her parents’ stories in their own right are fascinating living through the Russian revolution and the wars, which certainly contributed to Svetlana’s character.  Her mother was adopted by her aunt who had a musical salon in Paris. Alexeieff ended up in Paris where he worked as a set designer but soon because a rare book illustrator.  Her mother became a character actress in Parisian avant-garde.  Her parents met in 1921.  Svetlana’s childhood was spent surrounded by some of the most famous artists of the times.  WWII forced the family to move to New York with many of their friends.

Svetlana started her career by illustrating a book for Pantheon Books, and went to the Artist Student League in New York. She befriended Wiliam de Kooning and his wife, took modern dancing with Martha Graham and acted in a Claudel play with Yul Brynner and finished her academic studies at the French Lycee in Manhattan. She went back to Paris in 1946 where she continued to paint. Her canvases were shown to the famous collector Henri Kahnweiler who asked her to prepare a show of twenty paintings. Needing to go further in her explorations she refused to do so and came back to the States a couple of years later with her new husband Paul Rockwell.

Paul Rockwell came from a prominent family in Bristol, educated at Brown University and Bennington College. As an actor he joined a theater company which toured New England and decided to go to Paris a year later to study the French Theater with Jean Louis Barrault. He later was stage manager at the Brattle theatre in Cambridge for several years, and was co-found of Rockwell Color in Harvard Square.  He made documentary films with his brother, Charles B. Rockwell.

Svetlana gave birth to four children, Niki, Valery, Sacha and Alex. They attended Shady School in Cambridge where Edward Yeomans was the school master. The Rockwells were introduced to Westport through Ed. They acquired the old Macomber Farm across the road from him.  She settled in the Westport house when she decided to write her Memoirs and do pictorial works inspired by the New England coast.

During her thirty years spent in the Boston area, Svetlana first worked as an illustrator for the Peabody Museum of Anthropology at Harvard and for the Ford Foundation. She worked for the architect Ben Thompson at his store Design and Research in the department of interior design and later worked for him as a consultant. She helped Nina Nielsen and her husband start their gallery on Newbury street in Boston and then became the assistant head of the New England School of Art and Design. During that period Svetlana kept on painting and sold her work here and abroad.  She opened a gallery in Cambridge where she mainly represented the works of contemporary artists who made quilts.  Svetlana also lived in the Brickbottom Artist Building in Somerville, where she exhibited the works of artists’ friends as well as her own work.