Zinaida Serebriakova died on September 19, 1967, in Paris, where she had lived in emigration since 1924, having continued painting into her final years.
Zinaida Serebriakova died on September 19, 1967, in Paris, the city that had been her home in emigration since 1924. She was 82 years old at the time of her death and was buried at the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, the resting place of many prominent Russian émigrés.
Serebriakova had left Soviet Russia in 1924, ostensibly for a temporary work trip to Paris, but political and economic upheaval, along with difficulties obtaining permission for her children to join her, meant she never returned. She spent more than four decades in France, working prolifically though often in financial hardship, separated for years from two of her four children who remained in the Soviet Union.
Despite the challenges of emigration, she continued to paint portraits, nudes, and landscapes, including significant travels to Morocco in the 1920s and 1930s that inspired vivid orientalist works. Recognition in her homeland was long delayed by Soviet politics, but beginning in the 1960s, as cultural relations slowly thawed, her reputation experienced a revival; a major retrospective exhibition of her work was held in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev in 1965 and 1966, allowing her to see renewed appreciation for her art in Russia before her death.
Her death marked the end of a remarkable career that bridged pre-revolutionary Russian art, Soviet-era upheaval, and the Russian émigré artistic community in France, and she is remembered today as one of the most important Russian women painters of the twentieth century.