Nikolai Galakhov

Biography

In 1948, as a second-year student, Galakhov made his first voyage down the Volga on the steamer “Georgy Sedov”, stopping along the way to paint studies. Later he travelled by boat from Kazan upstream to Cheboksary and downstream to the landing of Tetyushi. He recalled it with sadness: the old paddle steamers and wooden barges had vanished, and where the flood meadows had been, a man-made sea had spread.

Nikolai Galakhov was born on 29 May 1928 in Kazan. In 1947 he graduated from the Kazan Art School and left for Leningrad, where he entered the painting department of the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Ilya Repin. His teachers included Leonid Ovsyannikov, Vasily Meshkov, Pyotr Belousov and Joseph Serebriany; in his fourth year Yuri Neprintsev taught drawing. In 1953 he graduated from the studio of Rudolf Frentz. His diploma work was the painting “Nikolai Nekrasov on the Volga”, now in the Research Museum of the Academy of Arts. The same graduating class included Orest Betekhtin, Mark Klionsky, Boris Kotik, Valentin Preobrazhensky and others; his friendships with them lasted many years.

From the autumn of 1953 Galakhov painted pictures under contract for the Combine of Painting and Decorative Art of the Leningrad branch of the Art Fund, the state body that supplied artists with commissions. In 1954–1956 he did postgraduate study at the institute. He first showed a work at an exhibition in Kazan in 1949, a jubilee show of artists of the Tatar Autonomous Republic. In 1951, still a student, he took part in the city exhibition of Leningrad artists at the Russian Museum with a work titled “A Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station Will Be Built Here”. From 1954 he exhibited regularly in Leningrad and at republic-wide and all-Union shows. He worked in oil, tempera and pastel, and drew in pencil. In 1955 he was admitted to the Leningrad Union of Soviet Artists for a series of Volga landscapes.

In the 1950s the Volga landscape remained his main subject: “Landing Stage on the Volga” and “Evening. The Kama Estuary” (both 1954), “July” (1955), “Flood Meadows on the Volga” (1956), “Autumn on the Volga” (1957). His painting of these years follows a strict, almost classical landscape tradition. In the middle of the decade he twice made long trips to the Vetluga and the Vyatka; one of them took him to the village of Istobenskoye, the birthplace of Arkady Rylov, whom he regarded as his chief teacher. He went back to his Volga, Vyatka and Vetluga impressions all his life, for example in “Summer on the Vetluga” (1972) and “Blooming Meadows Beyond the Volga” (1980).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s he twice visited Siberia and Lake Baikal. The trips produced “Village in Siberia” (1959), “On the Shore of Lake Baikal” (1960), “Soon the Timber Rafting” (1961) and “Construction in Siberia” (1962). They widened his palette and prepared the ground for Karelia.

He discovered Karelia in the late 1950s, and it became the turning point. He was drawn to the remote corners of the North untouched by civilisation; he painted the Kem River, the White Sea and the village of Umba. There are also quite a few genre pictures (“Yuma Logging Station in Karelia”, “For Our Construction Sites”, 1964), but landscape remained the core of his work. Among his paintings are “Rapids on the Kem River” (1962), “White Night in Karelia” (1974), “Northern Summer” (1977), “Kem. Old Church” (1982) and “Karelian Birches” (1985). By his own account, the main thing is to find “the right motif”; once he had found a view, he painted it again and again in different conditions. He brought plein-air studies back from his trips and in the studio composed the picture in a graphic sketch, removing the accidental. It seems to me that this path from study to sketch explains the composure of his northern canvases. The art historian Alla Vasilyeva described the surface of his paintings as nobly matt, woven from small layered brushstrokes.

He also painted Leningrad and its surroundings: “The Neva Is Freezing” (1963), “On the Moika” (1972), “Leningrad Sunday” (1975), as well as Lake Ladoga and the mouth of the Volkhov, where he worked at the artists’ creative base in Staraya Ladoga.

In the 1960s and 1970s Galakhov also made murals for public buildings: the mural “The Victory Parade on Red Square in Moscow, 24 June 1945” for the Naval Museum in Leningrad (1970, jointly with Nikolai Lomakin) and a series of panels for the Zoological Museum (1980), based on studies painted in 1961 at Baikal and on the taiga river Mamakan.

In 1985 he was awarded the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR, and in 2010 the Order of Friendship. Solo exhibitions were held in Leningrad (1988) and Saint Petersburg (2010, 2013). His works are in museums in Karelia, Irkutsk, Veliky Novgorod, Yakutsk, Volgograd, Bryansk, Krasnoyarsk, Ulyanovsk and Pskov, in the Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, and in private collections in Russia, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, the United States and China. Nikolai Galakhov died on 1 March 2022 in Saint Petersburg.