Alexander Bubnov

Biography

A group photograph of the 1926 graduates of the school in Atkarsk preserves a detail: Bubnov is shown holding a pencil and a sketchbook. He is eighteen there, and he was already more used to drawing than to anything else.

He was born on 4 March 1908 (20 February, Old Style) in Tiflis, into the family of a serviceman. When his father’s service ended, the family returned to the Saratov Province, to Atkarsk. In 1914 his father was called up again, and the mother and the boy spent three years in the village of Bubnovka with his grandfather. The father came back sick, the family moved to Atkarsk once more, and there Alexander started school. At the same time he attended an art studio for a while; the studio was closed because of the Civil War, but he went on drawing in pencil and charcoal and made sketches from life. His teacher, Nikolai Fedorov, taught history and local lore as well as drawing; his pupils took part in excavations near Atkarsk, and Bubnov sketched those too.

In 1926 or 1927 he went to Moscow and entered Vkhutein (the Higher Art and Technical Institute), where his teacher was Konstantin Istomin. Sources differ on the years of his study: by some accounts he studied from 1926 to 1930. In 1930 Vkhutein was broken up into several narrow trade schools, and its heritage came to be called “formalist”, a word that was dangerous to have attached to you. Bubnov himself was criticized for his manner of painting. He turned to Socialist Realism only in the middle of the 1930s.

In 1929 he joined AKhRR (the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) and began to show work at its exhibitions. In 1930 he was sent to Siberia, to Kuznetskstroy, as a junior architect, and he had to give up painting. He returned to Moscow in 1932. In his memoirs he wrote that his first picture, “Killed in Battle”, was shown at the exhibition “15 Years of the Red Army”, and the second, “Whites in the Town”, at the exhibition of young artists in 1934.

In 1936 came “Oktyabriny” (“Octobering”), showing the new Soviet naming ceremony meant to replace christening. The picture was shown at the exhibition “The Industry of Socialism”, and it is now in the Ulyanovsk Art Museum. In “Yablochko” (1938) he painted a famous dance, partly from life. He took part in making a huge panel, “Well-Known People of the U.S.S.R.”, for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. In the same year he painted “Comrade Stalin Among Collective Farmers”.

When the war began, Bubnov drew propaganda posters and painted pictures on military subjects: “Dying, but Did Not Surrender”, “To the Combat Position” and “Borodino Field” (all 1942). A portrait of Alexander Matrosov dates from the same time. His best-known work, “Morning on the Kulikovo Field”, was made in 1943–1947 and is devoted to the fourteenth-century battle; for it he received the Stalin Prize, second class, in 1948. The painting is in the Tretyakov Gallery.

After the war he painted landscapes, genre scenes and pictures on historical and mythological subjects, and illustrated Pushkin’s ballad “The Song of the Wise Oleg”. In 1954 he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts and given the title Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR. “Evening on the Ploughland” (1959–1960) is also in the Tretyakov Gallery, and “In the Field” (of the same period) is in the Russian Museum. Among his awards was a bronze medal at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. I think the late canvases of the countryside and the field are more interesting than the showy early ones: there is less that was prescribed in advance. In his last years he made illustrations for Gogol and Shevchenko. The triptych “Pugachev: The Popular Uprising” was left unfinished.

Bubnov died in Moscow on 30 July 1964 and was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery. In 2013 a museum bearing his name opened in Atkarsk.