Dmitry Buchkin

Biography

In 1937, when Dmitry Buchkin was ten, his father, the artist Pyotr Dmitrievich Buchkin, was arrested under Article 58, the political article of the Soviet criminal code. The family was sent to Tyumen. A year later the boy was back in Leningrad.

He was born on 23 July 1927 in Leningrad. Sources differ on the date of birth, giving either 23 July or 23 June; 23 July is the date used here. He studied at the Leningrad Secondary Art School. His first teacher of drawing and painting was his father, and later, at college, he went on studying with him.

Buchkin lived through the siege of Leningrad in the city with his family. He kept a graphic diary of those events; where this diary is now held, and in what form it has survived, I have not been able to establish.

In 1947 he entered the Leningrad Mukhina Higher School of Art and Industry. Besides his father, his teachers included Alexander Lyubimov, Konstantin Belokurov and Ivan Stepashkin. His diploma work in 1952 was a sketch for a mural panel on the theme “The Harvest”, intended for the school itself; the project was supervised by two of its teachers. Buchkin had been taking part in exhibitions since 1950, while still a student.

Over the next half-century he painted genre scenes, portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Among his early works are “Spring” and “Crimean Study” (both 1956), “On the Field of Mars” and “Pushkin Hills” (1957), “Summer” (1959) and “In the New Apartment” (1962). In 1964 came “The Building Site Draws Near”, “Lanskoye Highway”, “Izborsk” and “Fishing Boats”; in 1968 “Pskov” and a second “Izborsk”. A noticeable share of his subjects comes from the outskirts of Leningrad and from the Pskov region. Later he painted “Left Alone” (1970); “Portrait of the Artist Pyotr Dmitrievich Buchkin”, which by its title looks like a self-portrait but, since the name matches his father’s, may show the father (who is depicted has to be settled from the picture itself); “The Window of My Studio” (1971); “To Build New Cities” (1974); “Privates of October” (1977); “Abandoned House” and “Pesochnaya Embankment” (1978); the portrait of the director of the Pushkin Reserve (1984); and “Memory” (1995).

For many years he worked at the creative retreat of Leningrad artists in Staraya Ladoga; he went there repeatedly in the 1960s and 1980s, and later kept a house of his own with a studio in the town.

Alongside this, Buchkin made posters, both political and commercial. They include “Circus. Lyudmila Kanagina” (1962), a lottery poster, “Only the Cash-and-Goods Lottery Can Win You a Prize” (1966), the jubilee “Lenin. 100” (1969), and an anti-drinking poster, “Remember! From a Binge It’s a Short Way to a Hospital Bed” (1960s).

Solo exhibitions were held in Uglich (1965), in Leningrad at the hall of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists (1984), at the Pushkin Reserve (1985) and in Saint Petersburg in 1991, 1993 and 1995. In 1989–1992 his paintings were shown at exhibitions and auctions of Russian painting titled “The Leningrad School” (L’École de Leningrad) in France. His works are in museums and private collections in Russia, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, China, Japan, France and other countries.

He was a member of the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists (until 1992 the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic) and a full member of the Petrovskaya Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Buchkin died on 7 December 2024 in Saint Petersburg, at the age of 97.