Nikolai Baskakov

Biography

Baskakov’s first exhibition took place not in Leningrad and not in Astrakhan, but in Moscow, in 1943. His canvas “Khabarovsk, the Year 1942” was one of thirty-eight brought there by artists of Khabarovsk. At the time the author was serving in the army in the Far East.

He was born on 8 May 1918 in a village seven kilometres from Astrakhan, now the settlement of Sovetsky. His father, Nikolai Evlampievich, was a carpenter; his mother, Evdokiya Vasilievna, raised nine sons and two daughters. From 1933 to 1939 Nikolai studied at the Astrakhan School of Art under Pavel Vlasov. In 1939 he was drafted, and his service in the Far East stretched through the war years.

He came to Leningrad in 1945 and entered the painting department of the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Ilya Repin. His teachers were Leonid Ovsannikov, Boris Fogel, Genrikh Pavlovsky and Alexander Zaytsev. He graduated in 1951 from the workshop of Boris Ioganson. His diploma work was “Lenin and Stalin in Smolny”. In the same class were Alexei Eriomin, Mikhail Kaneev, Maya Kopitseva, Anatoli Levitin, Avenir Parkhomenko, Mikhail Trufanov, Boris Ugarov and others; the friendships with his fellow students, as the article about him says, lasted for many years. That same year, together with Grigory Chepets and Mikhail Trufanov, he carried out his first large commission, the painting “Presenting of the Order of Lenin to the Kirov Factory”. After it he was admitted to the Leningrad Union of Soviet Artists. From 1951 he took part regularly in Leningrad exhibitions, painted in oil and drew. His subjects included wartime, historical-revolutionary and industrial scenes, as well as portraits, landscapes and studies from life. From 1960 to 1980 he worked several times at the Leningrad artists’ creative retreat at Staraya Ladoga on the Volkhov River.

The list of his exhibited pictures reads like an inventory of people and occupations: “On a Floating Fish Factory” (1954), “Masha” (1956), “Grandma and Granddaughter” and “A Teacher” (both 1960), “Pig Farm Workers” and “Chiefs on the Farm” (both 1961), “Plasterers” (1964). A separate group consists of works that go back to the war: “Music” (1957), “During the War” (1967), “On the Russian Land” (1968), “A Victory” (1974), “Conversation with Son” and “Day of Victory” (both 1980).

He returned to the figure of Lenin in different years. In 1956 he painted “Lenin in Gorki”: the leader sits in an armchair in a garden on a summer day. Then came “Lenin in Kremlin” (1960; a version is in the Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg), “Lenin on Vacation” (1970) and “At the Christmas Tree in Gorki” (1972). According to his biographers, he wanted above all to paint the man who had taken on responsibility for the fate of the country.

Portraiture, to my mind, is the most conspicuous part of his legacy. Here are “Guitarist” (1949), “Portrait of a Mother” (1955), “Portrait of a Tractor Driver” (1956), “Portrait of a Fisherman” (1959), “The Son of a Shepherd” (1962), “Girl with Willows” (1967). A large series of portraits of Kirov factory workers was made from the 1960s to the 1980s; “A Group Portrait of Kirov Factory Workers” (1985) belongs with it. There are also “The Guy from Dudinka” and “Old Nganasanka” (both 1973), “Portrait of an Old Uzbek Woman” (1977), “Portrait of a Welder” (1980), and portraits of Vasily Shukshin and of the poet Nikolai Rubtsov (1988). Landscape more often entered the composition of a picture or a portrait: so in “Maslenitsa” (1978) and in “On the Russian Land”. Separately there are studies from the Volga and from Staraya Ladoga, and “Istanbul” (1968), painted on a trip.

Baskakov was elected a full member of Peter’s Academy of Sciences and Arts and twice won prizes from the Kirov Factory association. In 1989–1992 his work was shown in France at exhibitions and auctions of Russian painting, “L’École de Leningrad” among them, and in 1989 in Paris the West saw him for the first time. Many works were afterwards bought by private collectors. In 1991 the publishing house Khudozhnik RSFSR issued a monograph on him by an art historian named Kirillov.

Nikolai Baskakov died on 14 October 1993 in Saint Petersburg. His works are in the State Russian Museum, and in museums and private collections in Russia, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, Turkey, France and the USA.