Aleksei Gritsai

Biography

In 1958 a bronze medal at the World’s Fair in Brussels went to a picture with a modest subject: “Snowdrops. Aspen Grove”, painted the year before. For an artist known in the preceding years for a landscape with the Volga and for a group portrait of scientists, it was a sign of where he would go next.

Aleksei Gritsai was born in Saint Petersburg on 7 March 1914 (22 February, Old Style). He began his studies in Leningrad in the studio of Samuil Zeidenberg; in 1932 he entered the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad, where he studied under Semyon Abugov, Isaak Brodsky and Vasily Yakovlev. He graduated in 1939. Judging by the list of his paintings, his diploma work was “Presentation of the State Deed for the Use of Land” (1939), that is, a subject picture rather than a landscape. He is linked to the first days of the war in Kamianets-Podilskyi and named as the prototype of the Red Army soldier Gorskov in Sergei Baruzdin’s story “By Itself”; I have not been able to check this against documents. Two Orders of the Patriotic War, Second Class (1943, 1985), and the Medal “For Courage” suggest that he saw front-line service.

After the war came “Electric Furnaces” (1947) and the Volga works: “In the Zhiguli Hills. A Stormy Day” (1948–1950) brought him a Stalin Prize, Third Class, in 1951, while “Above the Volga” was painted in 1950–1952. He received a second Stalin Prize of the same class in 1952, together with co-authors, for the group painting “Meeting of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences” and a series of portraits of scientists. In the same years he began to teach: at the 1905 Memorial Art School in Moscow, and from 1948 to 1952 at the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute, where he was an assistant to Vasily Yakovlev.

In the 1950s his subject became the landscape of central Russia, often around Moscow, and the season in it is almost always the same: early spring. “In the Evening” and “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and Son” (both 1954), “Leningrad. The Summer Garden” (1956), “First Greenery. A Herd” (1957), “Night Veranda” (1959), “Fog. Calves” (1962), “Spring Time” (1959–1965), “Black Water” (1967). The titles themselves point to his interest in the state of air and light: dusk, fog, a moonlit night, a ravine with meltwater. It seems to me that the late Gritsai is closer to Russian landscape of the second half of the nineteenth century than to his contemporaries: he continued that tradition.

From 1957 he was a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts, and from 1964 a full member. In 1957–1960 he was deputy chairman of the Organising Committee of the Union of Artists of the RSFSR, the Russian republic’s professional body. He was named Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR in 1959 and People’s Artist of the RSFSR in 1963.

From 1964 Gritsai again taught at the Surikov Institute, ran his own studio, and from 1966 was a professor. He stayed there for the rest of his life, more than thirty years.

The Repin State Prize of the RSFSR (1973) recognised the landscapes “April Evening”, “Ravine. Spring”, “Snowdrops” and “Moonrise”. The title of People’s Artist of the USSR was conferred in 1974. The USSR State Prize in 1978 was given for a cycle: “A Spring Day on the Oka”, “May. Spring Warmth”, “Spring Dusk. Ravine”, “May Evening”, “Spring Moonlit Night”, “In an Overgrown Park”. “Spring Dusk. Ravine” was painted in 1972–1973, “Ice Drift” in 1984–1985. Later came the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1984) and the Order of Friendship of Peoples (1994).

In his last years he painted mainly landscapes of the Moscow region. According to some accounts, toward the end of his life, because of limited mobility, he could not work from nature and relied on memory, which gave his late works a tone of recollection; there is little to confirm this, and I would treat the detail with caution.

Aleksei Gritsai died in Moscow on 6 May 1998 and was buried at the Vagankovo Cemetery (section 58). His works are held in the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum and other museums. In August 2020 a memorial plaque was unveiled on the building at 3 Verkhnyaya Maslovka Street in Moscow.