Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1921, in Baku.
Painter. Genre scenes, portraits.
Trained at the school of fine art in Moscow by the determined proponent of Socialist Realism Sergei Gerassimov, Mikhail Abdullaiev became one of the official painters of the Stalin and Brezhnev regimes, providing portraits and historic scenes in a style inherited from 19th-century academicism. His paintings were displayed in official exhibitions across the USSR. He taught in Baku....
Latvian, 20th century, male.
Born 25 July 1922, in Riga, Latvia; died 1 March 1983, in Riga, Latvian SSR (now Latvia).
Painter and theorist. Historical, still-life, cartographic, environmental, and abstract subjects.
Ojārs Ābols distinguished himself in later years by transcending political orthodoxy and stylistic parochialism in his own work and by enabling colleagues and younger artists to do likewise. His studies began under modernist Romans Suta at Riga’s Second Gymnasium ...
Russian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born c. 1960, in Novorossick.
Painter.
Sots Art.
Afrika belongs to the generation that had begun to find its feet during the liberalisation enjoyed under the Gorbachev regime. 'Sots Art' is the relative Russian parallel to the American-European Pop Art movement. The young Russian artists preserved the iconic subject matter of official Stalinist art, yet stripped it of its meanings in order to use it as a purely three-dimensional element....
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1911, in Clermont-Ferrand; died 18 June 1989, in Rochefort-Montagne.
Painter. Figure compositions.
Socialist Realism.
He exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1930 onwards, the Salon des Indépendants from 1935, and the Salon d'Automne from 1942...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1882; died 1938.
Painter. History painting.
Socialist Realism.
Avilov was a professor at the I.Repin institute in Leningrad. His Stalin Inspecting the Cavalry is at the Central House of the Soviet Army.
[Azgar, Zair Isaakovich]
(b Maǔǔany, Viciebsk [Vitebsk] region, Jan 15, 1908).
Belarusian sculptor . He studied in Belarus’ under Yury Pen and M. Kerzin during the early 1920s and then learnt from contemporaries such as Matvey Manizer as well as from the Hermitage collection in St Petersburg. In 1929, after visiting Ukraine and Georgia, he returned to Belarus’ and was commissioned to decorate the art museum, the opera house and the government building in Minsk. These Socialist Realist projects were made of non-durable plaster and have not survived. During World War II he sculpted a series of Neo-classical monuments to heroes of the war. In 1948–51 he created a series of sculptures of women collective farmworkers, for example Ye. P. Lesnichaya (bronze, 1949; Minsk, Belarus’ A. Mus.), that portray the idealized citizen of the USSR towering above her surroundings and reforming the world. Emulating Russian Neo-classical sculptors, he executed monuments to Pyotr Bagration and Mikhail Barclay de Tolly (bronze and granite, 1946–9...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1912, in Berdiansk; died 1989.
Painter. History painting, portraits.
Socialist Realism.
Piotr Petrovich Belousov settled in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1929 attending the I.Repin institute from 1934 to 1939. He is known as one of the finest portraitists of Lenin. The official channels continued to offer him solo exhibitions, even during the breakdown of the constraints of Social Realism as an ideological vehicle for the Party. Solo exhibitions of his work were held in ...
Hungarian, 20th century, male.
Born 1906.
Painter. Genre scenes, landscapes.
Socialist Realism.
Jeno Benedek trained between 1927 and 1936. He had several solo exhibitions and became a professor at the fine arts school and the school of decorative arts.
Budapest (Magyar Nemzeti Gal.)
Ukrainian, 20th century, male.
Born 1914, in Kiev; died 2000.
Painter. Scenes with figures, landscapes, still-lifes.
Max Birstein studied at the institute of arts in Moscow with Sergei Gerasimov. A socialist realist to begin with, he then changed style, moving towards a Post-Impressionism along the lines of his elders, Robert Falk and Atychler. Birstein mounted many collective and solo exhibitions since ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1895, in Nizhniy Novgorod; died 1959, in Moscow.
Painter. Figures, portraits, scenes with figures.
Socialist Realism.
AKhRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia).
Having studied at the Moscow institute and at the Higher Artistic and Technical Studios, Fedor Semienovich Bogorodsky depicted the Soviet people - peasants, workmen, soldiers of the Red Army - in naturalist compositions. He took part in exhibitions organised by the Union of Revolutionary Russian Artists. In ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1911; died 1985.
Painter. Figures, urban landscapes, flowers.
Pavel Boronkin studied at the Ilya Repin Institute in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and painted conventional subjects, marked by socialist realism; he has exhibited from 1950.
Moscow (State Tretyakov Gal.)
St Petersburg (Gosudarstvennyj Russkij Muz.)...
(Izrailevich)
(b Sofiyevka, nr Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, Jan 6, 1884; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], Aug 14, 1939).
Russian painter, graphic artist and collector, of Ukrainian birth. He studied at the School of Art in Odessa (1896–1902) under Kiriak Kostandi (1852–1921) and at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg (1902–8) under Il’ya Repin, who remained an important influence throughout his life. During the revolutionary years 1905 to 1907 Brodsky became famous as a political caricaturist and for his painting Red Funeral: The Funeral of the Victims of the Armed Attack on the Peaceful Demonstration in St Petersburg on 9 Jan 1905 (1906; St Petersburg, Acad. A., Mus.). From 1909 to 1911 he worked in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Austria on a scholarship from the Academy. Brodsky’s landscapes and portraits of the period are generally traditional and academic in style.
In 1917 Brodsky drew a series of portraits of the members of the Provisional Government and in 1919 received first prize in the ‘Great Russian Revolution’ competition for his painting ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Also active in France.
Born 5 September 1933, in Sverdlovsk or according to some sources in Saratov.
Painter. Figure compositions.
Sots Art.
Erik Vladimir Bulatov has lived in Moscow since a very young age; a pupil of Petr Dmitrievich Pokarzhevsky from 1952 to 1958...
Czech, 20th century, male.
Born 23 March 1887, in Hronov nad Metuji; died March 1945, in Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in the concentration camp.
Painter, watercolourist, engraver, illustrator. Figure compositions, figures. Stage sets.
Socialist Realism.
Groups: Mánes, Skupina Vytvarnych Umelcu (Group of Plastic Artists).
Josef Capek was the brother of the playright Karel Capek, the author of ...
Ukrainian, 20th century, male.
Born 1888, in Kiev; died 1986 (or 1979).
Sculptor, print artist, illustrator.
Constructivism, Socialist Realism.
Iosif Chaikov studied in Paris, at the École des Arts Décoratifs, in 1912-1913 at the École des Beaux-Arts, and under the Russian sculptor Naum Aronson from ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1914, in Omsk; died 1968, in Moscow.
Painter. Scenes with figures.
Socialist Realism.
Nikita Chebakov studied under L. Piminov at the Moscow School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1948, and had his first exhibition in the same year. He was one of the brigade painters under Boris Ioganson who painted ...
Russian, 20th century, female.
Born 1916; died 2002.
Painter, draughtswoman. Nudes.
Tamara Chilovskaia worked in the workshop of her father, a Stalinist architect. The Galerie Patrick Frémeaux in Vincennes posthumously presented an exhibition of her drawings, Forbidden Nudes in 2004. Drawing of nudes was effectively prohibited by the Soviet regime. In these drawings, the artist gives free rein to a fluid, sensual stroke inherited from the Constructivism of Matisse's 1930s....
Romanian, 20th century, male.
Born 1921, in Bulgaria.
Painter. Figure compositions, still-lifes.
Socialist Realism.
Spiru Chintilla studied at the institute of fine arts in Bucharest, and then travelled around Eastern Europe. In keeping with Socialist Realism, he often depicted scenes celebrating the lives of workers; he also painted several still-lifes. In ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 22 May 1935, in Moscow.
Collage artist.
Sots art.
Son of the artist Semen Chuikov, Ivan Chuikov studied at the Surikov Art Institute, Moscow, from 1954-1960 and taught at the Vladivostok Art School from 1960-1962. In 1968 he became a member of the USSR Artists Union. He lives and works in Moscow and Cologne....
(b Caracas, Aug 17, 1923).
Venezuelan kinetic artist and photographer. He studied in 1940 and 1941 at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas in Caracas, producing paintings in the style of Social Realism while working as art director to the McCann Erickson advertising agency in Venezuela, where he became interested in the effect of color in advertising. In 1955–1956 he visited Paris and Barcelona, where theories of geometric abstraction, scientific color theory, and Bauhaus ideas on the integration of the arts and crafts caught his interest. On returning to Caracas he opened the Estudio de Artes Visuales, where he began to investigate the role of color in kinetic art. Cruz-Diez gained wide experience in advertising, industrial applications of color, cinema, and photographic and photo-mechanical processes, and studied the work of Georges Seurat, Josef Albers, and Edwin H. Land’s scientific ideas on color perception. These inspirations led him to research the phenomenological and psychological effects of color on the viewer, and most importantly, the shifting condition of the chromatic experience as it takes place in real time. Attempting to free color from its symbolic, esoteric, or cultural implications throughout history, Cruz-Diez transformed the plane into a succession of color parallels that he placed vertically across the surface of the work, allowing the viewer to look at the piece from different angles. This experiment gave birth to ...
