Ilya Glazunov

Biography

In early February 1957 an exhibition by Ilya Glazunov, a student at the Repin Institute in Leningrad, opened at the Central House of Art Workers in Moscow. Before this he had distinguished himself at an international competition of young artists in Prague. The exhibition was a great success, and his Moscow fame began with it.

He was twenty-six, and he had the siege behind him.

He was born on 10 June 1930 in Leningrad. His father, Sergei Fyodorovich Glazunov, was a historian who had fought in the First World War; his mother, Olga Konstantinovna, came from the Flug family, descendants of a St Petersburg manufacturer of German origin; an uncle on his father’s side, the pathologist Mikhail Glazunov, collected paintings. The boy attended a children’s art school. During the siege his father, his mother, his grandmother and other relatives died. In 1942 he was evacuated from the city across Lake Ladoga along the “Road of Life” and lived in the village of Greblo near Novgorod. In 1944, after the siege was lifted, he returned to Leningrad, finished the secondary art school, and from 1951 to 1957 studied at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the studio of Boris Ioganson. His diploma work was the painting “On the Collective Farm” (1957). On graduation he was assigned to Izhevsk as a teacher of drawing and trigonometry, from there he transferred to Ivanovo, and then to Moscow.

His early works of the mid-1950s and early 1960s are painted in an academic manner, but “Leningrad Spring”, “The Last Bus”, “Loneliness”, “Metro” and the portrait “Nina” show the influence of the Impressionists and of Western Expressionism. While still a student he began a graphic cycle about the modern city. The sheets, done in black sauce crayon, show the hero among Leningrad streets and interiors (“Two”, “The Quarrel”, “Love”), and in the later sheets the city and new building encroach on old architecture and on people. To my mind it is in this graphic work that he is at his freest. The painting “Roads of War” (1957), with the Red Army in retreat in 1941, has not survived; the artist later made an autograph copy of it, and in 1977 an exhibition that included it was closed as contrary to Soviet ideology. For many years he was supported by the poet Sergei Mikhalkov, to whom, in Glazunov’s own words, he owed literally everything.

From the 1960s he painted a great many portraits. In Italy Gina Lollobrigida and Anita Ekberg sat for him; his sitters also included Federico Fellini, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Mario del Monaco, Mireille Mathieu, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, the cosmonaut Vitaly Sevastyanov, and the politicians Indira Gandhi, Salvador Allende, Urho Kekkonen and Leonid Brezhnev. He made the series “Vietnam”, “Chile” and “Nicaragua”, illustrated Dostoevsky (the triptych “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”), and created graphic cycles on old Russia, “Rus” (1956) and “The Field of Kulikovo” (1980). For the UNESCO building in Paris he painted, in 1980, the panel “The Contribution of the Peoples of the Soviet Union to World Culture and Civilisation”. He also worked in the theatre, designing Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh” at the Bolshoi, “Prince Igor” and “The Queen of Spades” at the Berlin opera, and Khachaturian’s ballet “Masquerade” in Odessa. The interior of the Soviet embassy in Madrid is his work.

In the 1970s Glazunov spoke out against the general plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, which threatened to destroy a large part of the historic centre. Together with the composer Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov he collected the signatures of scientists and cultural figures under a letter to the Politburo; the plan was put on show in the Manege, criticised and withdrawn, and a public council was set up under the city’s architectural administration without whose approval historic buildings could not be demolished. He took part in founding the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments and campaigned for the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Among his best-known works are two historical compositions. “The 20th Century Mystery” (1978, second version 1999) gathers the events and heroes of the century, while “Russia the Eternal” (1988) spans a thousand years of Russian history and culture.

From 1978 Glazunov ran the portrait studio at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, and in 1981 he set up the All-Union Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art and became its director. In 1987, on his initiative, the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture opened, and he remained its rector until his death. He took part in the restoration of the Moscow Kremlin, including the Grand Kremlin Palace, for which he received the State Prize of Russia in 1997. He became an Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR in 1973, People’s Artist of the RSFSR in 1979 and People’s Artist of the USSR in 1980, and he received the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland” in all four classes (1995–2010). The minor planet 3616, discovered in 1984, is named after him. He set out his views on history and art in the book “Russia Crucified” (1996). On 31 August 2004 the Ilya Glazunov Picture Gallery opened in Moscow. At his last exhibitions, in the Manege in Moscow (2010) and in St Petersburg (2011), he showed the paintings “Dekulakisation”, “The Expulsion of the Traders from the Temple” and “The Last Warrior”, freely painted landscape studies and the self-portrait “And Spring Again”.

Ilya Glazunov died on 9 July 2017 in Moscow, in his eighty-eighth year. He is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery; a monument on his grave was unveiled on 2 October 2020.