Alexei Eriomin

Biography

In 1934 the Leningrad schoolboy Alexei Eriomin won first prize in a city competition for children’s drawings with an illustration to Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. The prize was presented in the Great Hall of the Philharmonic, and Sergei Kirov and Isaak Brodsky sat on the platform. Along with the certificate, the boy received a sketching easel, a set of oil paints and books. His first oil painting was made from a photograph: a portrait of his grandfather. His father hung it on the wall.

Eriomin was born on 17 March 1919 in the village of Velikaya Guba on Lake Onega, in the Zaonezhye region; by some accounts, in the hamlet of Uglyovshchina. His father, Grigory Ivanovich, was a carpenter who laid parquet floors, and his mother, Anastasia Andreevna, kept house and raised the children. In 1930 mother and son moved to Leningrad to join the father. At school in the Smolninsky district Alexei attended a drawing circle run by Vasily Smirnov, a graduate of the Academy of Arts. In 1935 he was admitted to the secondary art school attached to the Academy.

In 1939 he was drafted into the Red Army and served as a cadet in Tbilisi; in 1940 he took part for the first time in an exhibition of artists of the Transcaucasian Military District. He met the war in the armoured troops on the Western Front. After being wounded in 1942 he commanded a tank platoon on the Voronezh Front, and in 1943–1944 he fought on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts as commander of a company of IS heavy tanks. In the spring of 1944, after a serious wound, he was discharged as disabled with the rank of Guards senior lieutenant. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Red Star and medals.

In 1945 Eriomin entered the painting department of the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad. He studied under Boris Fogel, Semion Abugov, Alexander Debler and Alexander Zaytsev, and later under Boris Ioganson. He remembered Ioganson with pleasure: he came from Moscow only occasionally, entered the studio in a starched white shirt, asked for a palette and taught students to tune their colours “as a musician tunes an instrument”. In 1947 Eriomin married a fellow student, Irina Baldina, and in 1948 their daughter Natalia was born; she too became a painter.

He graduated in 1951. His diploma work was a history painting, “Lenin in Siberian Exile”. He was then assigned to the Novosibirsk branch of the Artists’ Union, where he stayed until 1953. There he exhibited and painted a series of pictures for the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. In 1953 he returned to Leningrad and became a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists; he served as chairman of its painting section, as a member of the board of the Leningrad organisation and as a member of the board of the Artists’ Union of the RSFSR.

Eriomin exhibited from 1951. He painted genre and history pictures, portraits, landscapes and studies from life, but his leading subject became the nature and people of the Russian North, Zaonezhye. His manner changed, from one close to Leonid Turzhansky to a broader touch and greater decorative quality. Among his Zaonezhye works I would mention “Spring in Zaonezhye” (1958), “Kizhi” (1960), “The Onega People” (1963), “Onega Fish Soup” (1969), “The Church of St Barbara on Lake Yandom” (1970), “The Motorist Zhenya Zaytsev” (1972) and “Zaonezhye. 9 May” (1977). He travelled to Zaonezhye in every season and admitted that without it he was “neither a man nor an artist”. In summer he lived on Lake Yandom and disliked artists’ retreats, where everything is provided: chores, in his words, help one see more accurately.

“In the Native Home” (1975) has a place of its own. A mother sits by a bed on which a ginger kitten dozes, with her son beside her. Eriomin made his first sketches from a hospital meeting with his mother, then gave up the white walls and gowns and moved the scene to the house where he was born. From the earlier versions he removed the brothers with their wives and the son’s wife, leaving the mother and son, an icon, sewing and the kitten. It seems to me that this picture shows best where the tone of his other Zaonezhye works comes from.

In 1970 Eriomin was given the title Honoured Artist of the RSFSR, and in 1978 People’s Artist of the RSFSR.

He died in Saint Petersburg in June 1998. His works are held in the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Karelia, the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War and other collections in Russia and abroad.