Boris Nemensky

Biography

On 27 April 1945 Boris Nemensky painted a burning Berlin street in oil on a small piece of cardboard, twenty by thirty centimetres. Twelve days later, on 9 May, he painted Berlin again. These two studies are among the few of his wartime works that survived, and both remained with the artist. How many there were in all is hard to say.

He was twenty-two.

He was born in Moscow on 24 December 1922. After school he studied at the Moscow Art School in Memory of 1905, in 1942 graduated from the Saratov Art School and was called up into the Red Army. He served in the Grekov Studio of War Artists, where the task was put plainly: a pictorial chronicle of real events at the front. His first assignment was the Panfilov Division on the Kalinin Front, where he arrived just before the New Year of 1943, and he saw in the New Year itself with scouts and a propaganda team. Then came the advance on Velikiye Luki, and in April 1945 the offensive from the Oder to Berlin. In 1943 he drew an orphan from Velikiye Luki in charcoal. After the Victory he stayed in Berlin with the Grekov artists, painting posters and portraits. His wartime sketchbook was later shown at the museum on Poklonnaya Hill.

In 1945 came the painting “Mother”, and in 1950 “Of Those Far and Near”, in which everyday life at the front is shown through individual soldiers, each with his own face. For it, in 1951, the year he graduated from the Surikov Institute, Nemensky received the Stalin Prize, third class; the canvas is in the Central Museum of the Armed Forces. “A Breath of Spring” (1955) is in the Russian Museum.

His most controversial work began as “Nameless Height” (1961–1962). On the canvas two dead men lie side by side, a German soldier and a Soviet one. The painting was attacked in the press and at the exhibition, and Konstantin Simonov then arranged a separate showing of it at the House of Writers. Nemensky kept returning to the subject until the mid-1990s; there are versions in Aachen, Tokyo, Omsk and Moscow, and one, under the title “It Is Us, Lord!”, is in the Institute of Russian Realist Art. Among his other paintings are “Scorched Earth” (1957), “Silence” (1965), “Soldiers” (1967–1971), “Your Distant Childhood. Fathers. 1941” (1969), “The Last Letter” (1975), “Memory of the Smolensk Land” and “Interlocutors” (both 1984), “The House of My Friend” (1985), “Mirror” (1991) and “New Childhood” (2001–2003). A canvas of 1971 in the Pskov Picture Gallery grew out of the story of a girl named Anya, the only person found alive in Velikiye Luki. Whether the charcoal drawing of 1943 is connected with her, I have not been able to establish.

From the late 1950s Nemensky taught: at the Potemkin Moscow State Pedagogical Institute (1957–1960), at the Lenin Moscow State Pedagogical Institute (1960–1962), and from 1966 as a professor in the art faculty of VGIK, the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. He devised his own programme of aesthetic education for schoolchildren. For his system of introduction to artistic culture he was awarded the State Prize of Russia for 1996, and for the teaching kit “Fine Art and Artistic Work” for primary school, the President’s Prize in Education for 2002. He is the author of the books “Open the Window” (1974), “Trust” (1984), “The Wisdom of Beauty” (the second edition of 1987 came out in a print run of a hundred thousand copies) and “Knowing through Art” (2000).

Since 1982 Nemensky has been a corresponding member, and since 1991 a full member, of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR, and since 1992 a full member of the Russian Academy of Education; in the Russian Academy of Arts he has been a corresponding member since 2001 and a full member since 2007. Honoured Artist of the RSFSR from 1973 and People’s Artist from 1986, he has been awarded the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland”, 4th class (2013) and 3rd class (2019). His solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War on Poklonnaya Hill and at the Russian Academy of Arts. In December 2022 he turned one hundred.