Mikhail Chapiro

Biography

In 1981 Mikhail Chapiro’s first solo exhibition opened at Malaya Gruzinskaya 28, an exhibition hall in Moscow that was then a centre of unofficial art. He was forty-three years old and had lived in Moscow for seven years.

He was born in 1938 in Novozybkov, now in the Bryansk region, into a Jewish family. His father was a steam locomotive driver, his mother a chemical technologist. Part of his childhood was spent in nearby Gomel, where the family moved, by some accounts soon after his birth, by others after their return from evacuation.

During the war the family was evacuated to Siberia. His father served in the army and was killed in 1943 near Vitebsk. After their return the boy became absorbed in drawing and studied at the House of Pioneers (a state-run children’s club) under the artist Peter Chernyshevsky; there his drawings first appeared in city exhibitions for children. In Gomel he went on studying at the Railway Workers’ Palace of Culture under Boris Zvenigorodsky.

After school he entered the Mukhina Higher School of Art and Industrial Design in Leningrad (today the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design), in the department of industrial design. His studies went unevenly: he played saxophone in a jazz band, neglected his classes, was expelled and was called up into the army. He served in one of the towns of the Gorky region. After the army he was reinstated and graduated.

He was assigned to Novosibirsk and worked there for seven years in government service, by some accounts as a stylist. He painted in his spare time, at night.

In 1974 he moved to Moscow and began to paint portraits professionally. His sitters were friends from his own circle, the Moscow intelligentsia and well-known people of the country. He worked mainly in oil, but also made pencil drawings, graphic works and watercolours. He joined the unofficial avant-garde and exhibited at the centre on Malaya Gruzinskaya 28. The authorities were hostile to such art, and Chapiro, like many of his colleagues, was condemned by them, but he was recognised by the intelligentsia, including scientists, above all physicists. Wider fame came only with perestroika, the reforms of the late 1980s. In 1988–1990 his paintings were shown by the Moscow Modern Art Gallery MARS.

Among his early works is a series of portraits of Soviet physicists: Andrei Sakharov, Lev Landau, Evgeny Lifshitz, Mikhail Leontovich, Igor Tamm, Lev Artsimovich and Abram Ioffe. His portrait of the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya is now owned by the Saint Petersburg Museum of Theatre Arts. His portrait of Dmitri Shostakovich was shown at exhibitions in New York and New Jersey.

In 1992 Chapiro emigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal. Landscapes, cityscapes, animals, flowers and abstract works joined the portraits. His manner is described as a mixture of realism and abstraction; he paints mainly in oil on canvas. His work has been shown at the Museum of Russian Art in New York, solo exhibitions are held regularly in Montreal, and he also exhibits in the United States. One of his recent shows, at Galerie Michel-Ange, presented fifteen portraits of famous artists of the 19th and 20th centuries: Claude Monet, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Kazimir Malevich and others.