Piotr Belousov

Biography

Belousov’s diploma painting was called “Meeting of Lenin and Stalin”. He defended it in 1939 in Isaak Brodsky’s studio, in the same graduating class as Nikolai Andretsov, Gleb Verner, Aleksei Gritsai, Mikhail Kozell, Lev Orekhov, Lia Ostrova, Elena Skuin, Nikolai Timkov and Boris Shcherbakov.

He was born in Berdiansk, in Taurida Governorate, on 29 May 1912 (16 May, Old Style); the date differs between accounts, and I would give it with a reservation. In the late 1920s he studied in the studio of Yakov Khast, and in 1929 he met Brodsky, who also came from those parts. At Brodsky’s invitation the young man went to Leningrad and began to study drawing and painting with him. He attended studios attached to the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia and to the Community of Artists, and worked for OSVOD, the lifesaving society, and for the Artists’ Izokooperativ, an art cooperative: this was how he earned his living while he studied.

In 1932 Belousov entered the workers’ preparatory faculty at the Institute of Proletarian Fine Arts, and in 1933 he was admitted to the painting department of the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Besides Brodsky, his teachers were Mikhail Bernshtein, Pavel Naumov, Alexander Lubimov and Vladimir Serov. An early work from those years, “Portrait of a Young Woman” (1932), shows Tamara Myasoyedova-Brodskaya.

From 1939 he was a member of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists and a teacher at the same institute where he had studied. From 1956 he headed the department of drawing, and from 1961 he was a professor. Teaching occupied half a century of his life, and to my mind it is an important part of his biography, although catalogues say less about it than about his paintings.

He showed work at exhibitions from 1930. He painted portraits, landscapes, genre and historical compositions, and worked in oil, pencil, pastel, etching and lithography. The historical painting became his leading genre. He became best known for canvases on Lenin and the Revolution: “Sergei Kirov at the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” (1939), “Vladimir Lenin among the Delegates of the Third Komsomol Congress” (1949), “We Will Go Another Way” (1951), “The Attempt on Vladimir Lenin’s Life in 1918” (1957), “Vladimir Lenin in Switzerland” (1978). Beside them stand works of a different kind: “Patriot of Greece” (1954), “Reading” (1957), “Portrait of Lieutenant General Mikhail Remizov” (1972), “Kirov Workers” and “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” (1975), “Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter” (1977), “Portrait of a Surgeon” (1978). In 1980 came “From the Siege Diary” and “No One Is Forgotten”. His manner kept to the academic school, and he had complete command of drawing.

He was named Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR in 1970 and People’s Artist of the RSFSR in 1976, and in 1979 he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts. Solo exhibitions were held in Vologda (1959), Moscow (1982) and Leningrad (1987). His works are in museums and private collections in Russia, Great Britain, France, the United States and other countries.

Belousov died in Leningrad on 31 March 1989. He is buried on the Literatorskie Mostki (Writers’ Walkways) at the Volkovo Cemetery.