(1863–1930)

A pupil of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Golovin attended private painting classes at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Vitti in Paris. He exhibited at the opening days of the Union of Russian Artists and the World of Art.

Since 1898, decorator at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. In 1901-1917, chief decorator of the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg. He got famous with the design of the ballet Don Quixote (together with Konstantin Korovin), of the operas Pskovytanka, Ruslan and Lyudmila, Carmen, Orpheus and Eurydice and of the dramas Don Juan and Masquerade. For Serge Diaghilev’s enterprise he designed the opera Boris Godunov (1908) and the ballet The Firebird (1910) in Paris.

In Soviet times, he continued to work for the theatre and provided the set design for the ballet Solveig at the former Mariinsky Theatre and for The Marriage of Figaro at the Moscow Art Theatre.

The author of the grand drapes of the Mariinsky and Alexandrinsky theatres and of the Odessa Opera. The set-design area above the auditorium in the old building of the Mariinsky Theatre is still called the Golovinsky Hall.