1881 – 1958:
Serge Férat arrived in Western Europe in 1899, and settled in Paris in 1900 in the large duplex1 of his first cousin, Baroness Hélène Oettingen, daughter of his maternal aunt née Beinarovitch. He took Bouguereau’s classes at the Académie Julian. Under the pseudonym Roudniev, he exhibited several paintings influenced by Maurice Denis at the Salon des artistes français the following year. He was interested in the Italian Quattrocento and, influenced by Cubism, met Picasso and Apollinaire who gave him the pseudonym Férat. A wealthy and cultured aristocrat, he acquired about ten of Rousseau’s paintings from Douanier Rousseau (whose expert he would become after his death). In 1911, he bought the avant-garde magazine Les Soirées de Paris, edited by the poet, with his friend Apollinaire and his cousin Baroness Hélène Oettingen. He took over the artistic direction under the pseudonym of Jean Cérusse (of these Russians). In the spring of 1913, he began a relationship that would last until 1920 with Irène Lagut. The review was interrupted by the Great War. Hired as a volunteer nurse in the Russian Ambulances, then at the Italian Military Hospital opened on December 1, 1915 at 41 quai d’Orsay, where he ran the establishment under the responsibility of Doctor Ballodonmi but almost alone, Serge Férat had Apollinaire hospitalized there, injured in the head in 1916. Alongside only eleven other patients, the poet resumed his literary activities there thanks to the complicity of his friend. In 1917, Serge Férat illustrated and created the sets and costumes for Apollinaire’s play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, created in a production by Pierre Albert-Birot at the Maubel Conservatory in Paris. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne and the Salon de la Section d’Or. In the 1930s, his cubist style gradually became decorative. He also made tapestry cartoons for the Beauvais factory. He took part in the Russian Art Exhibition in Prague in 1935. His work was noted at the major Cubist exhibition in 1953 at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
