Nikolai Gelikhovsky, McFadden Deauville Hotel, Miami Beach 1939. Signed and dated lower left.
Born in Kiev, Russia, Nikolai Gelikhovsky won scholarships to the Russian Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and the Russian Royal Academy of the Theater. A successful portrait artist, he was doing portraits of Russian notables including diplomats and clergy, when in 1917 the Russian Revolution began. Loyal to the Tzar, Gelikhovsky joined the White Army, was captured and sentenced to death. Escaping to Paris, he survived doing street and restaurant sketches. Moving from France to Germany, then Belgium, Italy, and finally Switzerland, in 1929 he was able to emigrate to the United States. Settling in New York City, Gelikhovsky designed sets in Greenwich Village for the Children’s Theater and in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression, when the New York City Aquarium decided it needed paintings of specimens so that visitors could identify them, worked for the WPA doing fish painting.
He began coming to Florida in 1939. The Miami Herald, January 9, 1940, “Nikolai Gelikhovsky a brilliant artist here doing a few tropical sketches for his one-man exhibit to be held in New York this spring… is an interesting person, speaks seven languages…was introduced to New York’s smart set and entertained them for a day at El Morocco…” In 1941 Gelikhovsky was spending his third winter on Miami Beach. He placed an ad in the Miami News, January 12, 1941, “Nikolai Gelikhovsky Formerly of the Russian Imperial Academy, is forming groups for outdoor sketching in oil and other mediums, write or call in person, 12 to 1, at 1350 N. W. 28th Str., Miami, Fla. Bus 5.” A February exhibit at the Miami Beach Library, Art Center, included works by Gelikhovsky, Edna Hibel, and Miami artists S. A. Jafnel and Jean Paleologue. He later moved to North Hollywood, California.
Education: Russian Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. Membership: Miami Unit of Palm Beach Art League. Exhibits: Miami Beach Library and Art Center, February 1941, oil paintings of Florida tropical gardens including: Mrs. W. Canes, Mrs. Strongman Miller’s, Mrs. Curtis Wheeler’s, and on loan from the Miramar Hotel, two paintings of the hotel grounds; Norton Gallery, March 1941; Norton Gallery January 1942.
Built in 1926 as the Deauville Hotel and Casino, in 1936 the hotel was purchased by Bernard MacFadden and renamed the MacFadden-Deauville Hotel. The original MacFadden was demolished in the 1950’s and rebuilt on the same site as the famed Deauville Beach Resort.
