Illarion Golitsyn

Biography

In March 1963, at a meeting between the country’s leadership and the intelligentsia in the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev publicly tore into the poet Andrei Voznesensky and the writer Vasily Aksyonov. The painter Illarion Golitsyn was caught up in the same attack: he had supported Voznesensky.

He was born on 20 May 1928 in Moscow, into the family of the graphic artist Vladimir Golitsyn and Elena Petrovna, née Countess Sheremeteva. The Golitsyns are an old princely house, and reference works often style the artist a prince. His first teacher was his father, and Pavel Korin helped with advice. That is, I think, all that is known of how his training went before art school.

In 1946–1953 he studied at the Moscow Higher School of Arts and Industry (formerly the Stroganov school), in the department of artistic woodworking. Carving and work in wood, it seems to me, explain his later attraction to woodcut, although I have no direct statements by the artist on the point. In 1957 he learned etching in the studio named after Ignaty Nivinsky, under Yevgeny Teis. From the mid-1950s Golitsyn was close to Vladimir Favorsky, the head of the Russian school of woodcut. He belonged to a circle of independent artists who gathered in Novogireevo, on the outskirts of Moscow: among them Dmitry Zhilinsky, Nina Zhilinskaya, Dmitry Shakhovskoy, Ivan Efimov and Nina Efimova, Lev and Lyudmila Kardashov. Novogireevo would later return in his work as the subject of a large series. At that time he worked mainly as a graphic artist: linocuts, woodcuts, drawings. In 1958 his print “On the Balcony”, from the series “Everyday Life in the Suburbs” (1955–1957), won a silver medal at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna. In 1970 a series of graphic works brought him a gold medal at the graphic art biennale in Kraków, and in the same year the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts held a solo exhibition of his work. Earlier still, in 1962, he had shown work at the editorial office of the magazine Yunost.

From the 1970s he painted a great deal in oil and watercolour, giving up graphic work as his main occupation but not abandoning it. In 1986 he made a series of woodcuts in memory of Vladimir Favorsky; for it, in 1987, the USSR Academy of Arts awarded him a diploma and the graphic art biennale in Varna a silver medal. Alongside this he wrote articles about art and artists, as well as stories; these were later collected in the book “Conversation About Art” (2015, over 600 pages). He was also a teacher: his pupils are named as his son Ivan Golitsyn, Aharon April, Valentin Korzhov, Raphael Canossa, Nikolaj Belkov and Leonid Borisov.

Exhibitions followed one after another: in 1979 at the exhibition hall of the Moscow Union of Artists of the RSFSR, in 1988 jointly with the artist Alla Pologova at the Moscow House of Artists, in 1993 “Watercolours from the Collection of the Pushkin Museum” at the Pushkin Museum, in 1999 “Watercolour” at the Tsarskoye Selo Collection museum, in 2001 “Light Canvases” at the State Institute of Art Studies, in 2002 “The Golitsyn House” at the Russian Academy of Arts. In 1997 he became a full member of the Russian Academy of Arts, and in 1998 he received the title of People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, the state’s highest honorary title for artists.

In 2003 he was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation in Literature and Art for the series of paintings and graphic works “House in Novogireevo”. In 2005 his work was shown at the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg and at the Radishchev Saratov Art Museum, and in 2006 at the Lipetsk Regional Art Gallery.

Golitsyn died on 14 March 2007 in Moscow: he was hit by a car in the street. Exhibitions continued after his death: for his eightieth birthday in 2008 at the Russian Academy of Arts and at the Novgorod State United Museum-Reserve, in 2009 at the Russian World gallery in Paris, and for his eighty-fifth birthday in 2013 at the Pushkin Museum and at the Tretyakov Gallery (“To Be Yourself”).