24.06.1887–28.03.1985
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
04.12.1866–13.12.1944
Wassily Kandinsky
Until the age of thirty Wassily Kandinsky was a lawyer and economist preparing for a professorship at Moscow University. In 1896 he left to study painting in Munich, where he founded Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc and wrote the treatise “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”. After the revolutionary years in Moscow he taught at the Bauhaus, and from 1933 he lived in France.
24.07.1844–29.09.1930
Ilya Repin
Ilya Repin (1844–1930) started out in an icon-painting workshop in Chuguyev and ended up as a professor and rector of the Academy of Arts. A member of the Peredvizhniki, he painted “Barge Haulers on the Volga”, “Religious Procession in Kursk Province”, “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” and portraits of Mussorgsky and Tolstoy. From the early 1900s he lived at Penaty in Kuokkala, and after 1917, without moving anywhere, found himself in independent Finland.
17.07.1817–19.04.1900
Ivan Aivazovsky
Ivan Aivazovsky painted some six thousand pictures, and the sea is in almost all of them: storms, calms, moonlit nights, naval battles from Chesma to Sinop. From 1844 he was painter to the Main Naval Staff, yet he lived and worked in his native Feodosia, where he opened an art gallery, brought in a water supply and secured the building of a port. “The Ninth Wave” (1850) is in the Russian Museum.
11.02.1879–15.05.1935
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), a native of Kiev from a Polish family, invented Suprematism and in December 1915 showed “Black Square” at the “0,10” exhibition in Petrograd. He led UNOVIS in Vitebsk and GINKhUK in Leningrad and taught in Kiev. He reached non-objective art by way of Impressionism, Neo-Primitivism and Cubo-Futurism, and late in life went back to painting figures and portraits.
27.09.1874–13.12.1947
Nicholas Roerich
Nicholas Roerich began as a painter and archaeologist of early Rus: he studied under Kuindzhi, led excavations, and designed the “Polovtsian Dances” and “The Rite of Spring” for Diaghilev. After the revolution he found himself abroad, crossed Central Asia and Tibet with an expedition, and proposed a pact for the protection of cultural property. He spent his last twelve years in India's Kullu Valley, painting the Himalayas.
15.01.1841–11.07.1910
Arkhip Kuindzhi
Arkhip Kuindzhi, the son of a Greek shoemaker from Mariupol, spent several years as a photo retoucher in Taganrog and got into the Academy of Arts only at the third attempt. In 1880 his “Moonlit Night on the Dnieper” was shown in a darkened room as the only picture in the exhibition, and two years later he stopped exhibiting for twenty years. He taught landscape to Roerich, Rylov and Bogaevsky and left all his money to a society of artists later named after him.25.09.1903–25.02.1970
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz, came to America from Dvinsk as a boy of nine and became one of the creators of colour field painting. From 1949 he painted almost nothing but large canvases with two or three soft rectangles of colour. He turned down a lucrative commission for a restaurant in the Seagram Building and gave his last years to a chapel in Houston that opened only after his death.
03.05.1848–23.07.1926
Viktor Vasnetsov
Viktor Vasnetsov, the son of a village priest in Vyatka province, left the seminary for the Academy of Arts and made epic songs and fairy tales a subject for large-scale painting: “Alyonushka”, “The Knight at the Crossroads”, “Bogatyrs”. He spent ten years painting St Vladimir's Cathedral in Kiev, and the façade of the Tretyakov Gallery was built to his design. He did not accept the revolution but stayed in Moscow, working to the end on the cycle “The Poem of Seven Fairy Tales”.
13.01.1832–08.03.1898
Ivan Shishkin
Ivan Shishkin, a merchant's son from Yelabuga, painted forests in such detail that in his pictures you can tell the kinds of trees, the ferns, the deadwood and the soil beneath them. He studied in Moscow, at the St Petersburg Academy and under the animal painter Rudolf Koller in Zurich, was one of the founders of the Peredvizhniki and made about a hundred etchings. The bears in his “Morning in a Pine Forest” were painted by Konstantin Savitsky.
18.08.1860–22.07.1900
Isaac Levitan
Isaac Levitan, a pupil of Savrasov and a friend of Chekhov, turned the unassuming landscape of central Russia into a picture of a state of mind: “Vladimirka”, “Above Eternal Peace”, “March”, “Golden Autumn”. Twice, as a Jew, he was expelled from Moscow. His main subjects came from summer seasons on the Volga at Plyos and in Tver Governorate; in 1898 he became an academician and took charge of the landscape studio at the school where he had studied.
05.03.1856–01.04.1910
Mikhail Vrubel
Mikhail Vrubel worked in almost every field of art: church murals and icons in Kiev, majolica and fireplaces at Abramtsevo, stage sets, panels for Moscow mansions, illustrations to Lermontov. Critics long refused to accept his “Demons”, “The Swan Princess” and “Pan”; in 1896 the Academy jury had his panels removed from the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition. He was elected an academician in 1905, when he could hardly work any more.
12.01.1848–19.03.1916
Vasily Surikov
Vasily Surikov (1848–1916), a Siberian from a Cossack family, came to St Petersburg with the wagon train of a Krasnoyarsk gold-mine owner and made his name in Moscow with large history paintings. He often painted the figures of “The Morning of the Streltsy Execution”, “Boyarynya Morozova” and “Suvorov Crossing the Alps” from his Krasnoyarsk relatives and fellow townspeople. He was a Peredvizhnik, a full member of the Academy of Arts and an academician.
07.01.1865–22.11.1911
Valentin Serov
Valentin Serov (1865–1911), the son of the composers Alexander and Valentina Serov, studied under Repin from the age of nine and became the foremost portraitist of his generation, from “Girl with Peaches” to Nicholas II, Yermolova and Ida Rubinstein. For twelve years he taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture; his pupils included Petrov-Vodkin, Saryan and Yuon.28.11.1884–19.09.1967
Zinaida Serebriakova
Zinaida Serebriakova (1884–1967) grew up in the Lanceray and Benois families and joined the World of Art in 1911. The Tretyakov Gallery bought her self-portrait “At the Dressing Table” when she was twenty-five. She painted the peasant women of Neskuchnoye, her own children and the ballerinas of the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1924 she left for Paris and never came back; she went to Morocco twice and worked in France for the rest of her life.
27.05.1837–24.03.1887
Ivan Kramskoi
Ivan Kramskoi (1837–1887) began as a retoucher of photographs in Ostrogozhsk and Kharkov, and in 1863, on behalf of fourteen graduates of the Academy of Arts, refused to paint a competition piece on a set subject. He founded the Artel of Artists, became the chief ideologist of the Peredvizhniki and painted “Christ in the Desert”, “Unknown Woman” and portraits of Tolstoy, Shishkin and Tretyakov.
19.06.1889–06.10.1953
Vera Mukhina
Vera Mukhina (1889–1953) studied in Paris under Bourdelle, started out alongside the Cubists and Aleksandra Ekster, and became famous for “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman”, the 24-metre group on top of the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair. She made monuments and portraits, clothes together with Nadezhda Lamanova, and sculpture in glass; she won the Stalin Prize five times.09.02.1876–02.02.1956
Pyotr Konchalovsky
Pyotr Konchalovsky (1876–1956) came back in 1910 from Spain, where he had travelled with his father-in-law Vasily Surikov, and became one of the founders of the Knave of Diamonds and the leader of the circle of Russian Cézannists. Later he painted Novgorod landscapes, portraits of Meyerhold and Alexei Tolstoy, and more than forty still lifes with lilac. People’s Artist of the RSFSR, full member of the USSR Academy of Arts.
24.10.1878–15.02.1939
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939), the son of a Khvalynsk shoemaker, built his painting on his own “spherical perspective” and the three primary colours; his main pictures are “Bathing of a Red Horse”, “Petrograd Madonna” and “Death of a Commissar”. He studied under Serov, worked in Paris and North Africa, taught for fourteen years in Petrograd and Leningrad, and wrote plays and autobiographical prose.
08.05.1899–12.06.1969
Aleksandr Deyneka
Aleksandr Deyneka (1899–1969), the son of a Kursk railwayman, went from the agitation trains of the Civil War to the mosaics of Mayakovskaya metro station and the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. A pupil of Favorsky at Vkhutemas and a founder of OST, he painted “The Defence of Petrograd”, “Mother” and “The Defence of Sevastopol”, and loved to paint sport, aviation and the body in motion.
03.06.1881–10.05.1964
Mikhail Larionov
Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), a native of Tiraspol, was the chief ringleader of the Moscow avant-garde of the 1910s: he gave the Knave of Diamonds and the Donkey’s Tail their names, staged the Target exhibition and invented Rayonism together with Natalia Goncharova. From 1915 he lived in France and designed productions for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; he never returned to Russia.
08.01.1883–03.12.1941
Pavel Filonov
Pavel Filonov (1883–1941), the son of a Moscow coachman, called himself an “artist-researcher” and built his pictures out of the tiniest “atoms” of form and colour. Creator of analytical art and of the school Masters of Analytical Art, and a friend of Khlebnikov, he hardly ever sold his work, hoping to give it to the state for a museum. He died in besieged Leningrad.
18.01.1882–17.03.1949
Aleksandra Ekster
Aleksandra Ekster (1882–1949), born in Białystok and raised in Kiev, was friends with Picasso and Apollinaire in Paris and worked in Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism; Tyshler, Meller, Petritsky, Kozintsev and Yutkevich passed through her Kiev studio. She designed productions for the Kamerny Theatre and the film “Aelita”, lived in France from the 1920s and is considered one of the founders of Art Deco.
21.06.1886–07.11.1918