Boris Ioganson

Biography

For “Interrogation of the Communists”, Boris Ioganson’s friend, the painter and teacher Aleksandr Solovyov, sat as a model. Painted in 1933, the picture won the Grand Prix at the World Exhibition in Paris four years later, and in 1949 the artist made a replica of it.

The painter’s surname is Swedish. His father’s ancestors, Swedes named Johansson, gave it a Russian form; his father, Waldemar Karlovich Ioganson, was a clerk, and his mother, Olga Konstantinovna, came from the princely family of Radlensky. Boris was born in Moscow on 13 (25) July 1893. His grandfather, Karl Ivanovich Ioganson, had been one of the founders of the Komissarov Technical School, so the grandson studied there free of charge and graduated in 1912. That same year he began classes in Pyotr Kelin’s studio, and from 1912 to 1918 he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Abram Arkhipov, Nikolai Kasatkin, Sergei Malyutin and Konstantin Korovin. He exhibited from 1914; among his early works are “At the Vigil” (1914), “Circus” (1915) and “Still Life with Potatoes” (1918).

In 1919–1922 he worked as a stage designer in Krasnoyarsk and in Alexandria in Kherson Governorate. During the Civil War, according to available accounts, he served as an officer in Kolchak’s army, then ended up in hospital and eventually joined the Red Army.

In the early 1920s Ioganson was briefly drawn to Constructivism in the Society of Young Artists, but soon gave it up for easel painting. From 1922 to 1932 he belonged to the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. Repin and Surikov became his models, and into their manner he put, as people said at the time, “new revolutionary content”: “The Rabfak Is Coming” and “Soviet Court” (both 1928), “Interrogation of the Communists”, and finally “At an Old Ural Works” (1937), also known as “The Demidovs’ Urals”. For this last picture he received first prize at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in 1939, the Stalin Prize, first class, in 1941, and a gold medal at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. In 1934–1938 he led a team at the “Perekop” workshop, made sketches for a diorama, “The Storming of Perekop”, which was never realised, and worked with other artists on the panel “Festival at the Ilyich Collective Farm” for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. To my mind, the theatricality of his large compositions is not hard to explain: he studied under Korovin and spent several years painting stage sets.

He taught for almost his whole life. In 1931–1932 he led courses of the AKhR; in 1932–1935 he worked at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute; in 1935–1939 and again from 1964 at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute. From 1939 to 1962 he was a professor at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad and ran a creative studio of the Academy of Arts there, and then, until 1968, a similar studio in Moscow. His pupils included Alexei Eriomin, Nikolai Baskakov, Maya Kopitseva, Yuri Tulin, Mikhail Trufanov and Felix Lembersky. In 1939 he received a doctorate in art history, and later he published the books “For Mastery in Painting” (1952), “On Painting” (1955) and “How to Understand Fine Art” (1960).

The war can be seen in the still life “Days of War” (1942) and in the painting “Moscow, 1942” (1943). In 1943 Ioganson became People’s Artist of the USSR. In 1947 he painted “Victory Day, 9 May 1945, on Red Square” and a portrait of the actress D. V. Zerkalova, and in 1948 a portrait of Nemirovich-Danchenko. That same year, 1947, he became one of the first full members of the USSR Academy of Arts. His second Stalin Prize, in 1951, went to the collective painting “Lenin Addressing the Third Congress of the Komsomol” (1950). He also illustrated books: Nikolai Ostrovsky’s “How the Steel Was Tempered”, Gorky’s “Mother” and Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”. His paintings travelled to exhibitions of Soviet art in Warsaw, Venice, Bucharest, Mexico City and Delhi.

After this came high office. In 1951–1954 Ioganson headed the Tretyakov Gallery and wrote a book about it. From 1953 he was vice-president of the Academy of Arts; in January 1957, when Aleksandr Gerasimov asked to resign, he became acting president, and in 1958–1962 he was its president. In 1954–1957 he chaired the organising committee of the Union of Artists of the USSR, in 1965–1968 he was First Secretary of its board, and from 1962 he was editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia “Art of the Countries and Peoples of the World”. In 1958 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, and in 1968 he was made a Hero of Socialist Labour.

He worked on the painting “The Socialist Revolution Has Taken Place” from 1957 to 1965 and never finished it. A self-portrait with a palette of 1961–1964 also remained unfinished. A solo exhibition was held in Moscow in 1969.

Boris Ioganson died on 25 February 1973 in Moscow and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. His son Andrei and grandson Igor also became painters.