Chingiz Akhmarov

Biography

In 1948 Akhmarov received the Stalin Prize, first class, not for a painting but for walls: for the murals in the foyer of the Navoi Opera and Ballet Theatre in Tashkent. He accepted the commission in 1943, while still a postgraduate student, and finished the work in 1947.

He was born on 18 August 1912 (5 August, Old Style) in Troitsk, now in the Chelyabinsk region, into a Tatar family. His father was a wealthy, educated merchant, and the family had eleven children and a large library inherited from their grandfather. In 1927 Akhmarov entered the Perm School of Fine Arts. That same year the family moved to Qarshi because of his father’s health, and in 1930 to Samarkand; he joined them in 1931, after finishing the school. In Samarkand he taught drawing and painting at a newly opened art school and drew for the magazines Mushtum and Mashal. In May 1934 he moved to Tashkent and worked as an artist in a newspaper’s editorial office. There he was also given novels to illustrate, among them Holy Blood by Oybek and Li Chuv by Sh. Sulaimanov. In the 1930s he painted a series of portraits; two of them, Portrait of a Brother and Athletes, were shown in Moscow, at the Museum of Culture and Art of the Peoples of the East.

In 1935 the art school in Leningrad turned him down, and he went to Moscow instead, where he entered the Surikov Art Institute. He studied under Igor Grabar and Nikolai Chernyshev. During the Battle of Moscow he remained a student: he was not taken into the army because of poor hearing. In 1942 the institute was evacuated to Samarkand, and Akhmarov graduated there; the following year the institute returned to Moscow. He then began postgraduate studies, which he completed in 1949, becoming a candidate of art history.

He worked on the murals for the Navoi Theatre together with other artists, and all the participants received the 1948 prize. After that, commissions followed one after another. In 1952 he was summoned to Moscow to make the mosaic Friendship of Peoples for the Kiyevskaya metro station. In 1954–1955 he painted the foyer of the Musa Jalil Opera and Ballet Theatre in Kazan. There were panels for the Ulugh Beg Museum in Samarkand (1963–1964), murals for the Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent (1968–1969) and for the Yulduz restaurant in Samarkand, a panel at the Alisher Navoi station of the Tashkent metro, and another for the Uzbekistan sanatorium in Kislovodsk.

From 1949 he lived in Tashkent and taught, among other places at the Benkov art school and at the Ostrovsky Theatre and Art Institute, and became a professor. In 1962 he made watercolours for Maksud Sheikh-Zadeh’s book on Ulugh Beg, and the following year he was invited to create costumes and sketches for the film The Star of Ulugbek. For the Hamza Theatre he designed Mirzo Ulugbek by the same author. His late works included “Amir Temur and Bayezid” and other subjects from the life of Tamerlane (1992–1995). In 1964 he was given the title People’s Artist of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1968 the Hamza State Prize. Akhmarov’s works are held in the Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, the Museum of Applied Arts, the Navoi State Museum of Literature and the Kokand Literature Museum. To my mind, this list shows that what mattered most to him remained the world of books and Eastern subjects, not official commissions. His autobiographical book On the Path to the Beautiful came out in 2007, after his death.

He died on 13 March 1995 in Tashkent and is buried in the Chigatay cemetery.