Ivan Akhremchik

Biography

The first exhibition Akhremchik took part in was the First Minsk Art Exhibition of 1921. He was not yet eighteen. He showed a study and a self-portrait.

He was born in Minsk on 16 December 1903 (3 December, Old Style). He studied in Moscow, at the Higher Art and Technical Institute, from which he graduated in 1930; his teachers are said to have included Abram Arkhipov, Konstantin Istomin and Aleksandr Shevchenko. His diploma work was the painting “The First Congress of the RSDLP”. Earlier, in 1927, at the Second All-Belarusian Exhibition he had shown two portraits of men and the paintings “In the Tea House” and “Still Life”. In 1929 the Third All-Belarusian Exhibition included “The Signing of the Manifesto on the Creation of the BSSR”, “Portrait of a Composer, Aladov” (1928) and “Girl”. The manifesto picture received first prize. Almost all of Akhremchik’s pre-war paintings have not survived, so the early years have to be judged from descriptions and exhibition catalogues.

From 1931 he taught: at the Belarusian State Art Technical School (1931–1941), then at the Minsk Art School (1948–1952), at the Belarusian Polytechnic Institute (1953–1963) and at the Belarusian Theatre and Art Institute (1963–1967), where he headed the department of painting. He became a professor in 1964. He joined the Artists’ Union of the BSSR in 1940, and from 1947 to 1959 he was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR.

In the 1930s he was one of the first in Belarusian painting to turn to the themes of socialist construction and the establishment of Soviet power. The results were “Peat for Osinstroi” (1931), “Hydropeat” (1937), “The Arrival of the Red Army in Minsk” (1934–1935), which is held in the National Art Museum of Belarus, and “The Organisation of Soviet Power in Gomel” (1939–1940), which has not survived. For the All-Belarusian Exhibition of Agriculture and Industry (1930) he made two panels, and for the Belarusian pavilion at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow in 1939 he painted a decorative frieze, “The Festival of the Belarusian People”. During the war he contributed to “Let Us Crush the Fascist Vermin” (1943–1944), a publication of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Belarus. “The Face of the Enemy” (1942) and “The Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Belarus on 3 July 1941” (1944) date from the same time. After the war came panels in the conference hall of the Belarusian Society for Friendship with Foreign Countries (1955) and a ceiling painting in the Young Spectators’ Theatre in Minsk, which he decorated in 1955 together with Isaak Davidovich. His best-known easel work is thought to be “Defenders of the Brest Fortress” (1957–1958).

Portraiture held a special place in his work. He painted actors, musicians, scholars and writers: the actor Vladimir Golubok, a pianist named Stein, the writer Petr Glebka, the People’s Artist of the USSR Gleb Glebov (1943), Francysk Skaryna (1953), and “At the Piano” (1966), a portrait of his daughter. Of the landscapes, those most often named are “After the Rain” (1945), “A July Day” (1960), “Early Morning” (1963) and “From the Studio Window” (1971). To my mind, the lyrical landscapes of his later years are more interesting than his programmatic canvases, but it is hard to judge: much of his work is known only from reproductions.

Akhremchik died in Minsk on 9 March 1971. A memorial plaque was put up in 1976 on the house at 29 Ulyanovskaya Street, where he had lived since 1945. The Gymnasium-College of Arts in Minsk bears his name, and in 2003, on the centenary of his birth, Belposhta issued a commemorative envelope with a stamp.