Rudolf Frentz

Biography

In 1916 Frentz returned to the Academy of Arts to paint his competition picture, “After the Battle”. He worked on it not in Petrograd but at a horse farm in Tula Governorate: horses were working material for him, as they had been for his father. The competition was cancelled when the Academy was abolished, and he received his diploma as an artist on 21 March 1918, under the new government.

He was born Rudolf August Leopold Frentz on 4 August 1888 (23 July, Old Style) in Marienburg, a suburb of Gatchina in Saint Petersburg Governorate. His father, Rudolf Ferdinandovich Frentz (1831–1918), was a well-known animal painter and became his first teacher. The family was of German origin.

In 1909, after finishing a secondary school with a modern curriculum (the realschule), Frentz entered the Higher Art School of the Imperial Academy of Arts. He spent a year and a half in the preparatory class and half a year in the studio of Vasily Savinsky, and in 1912 moved to Nikolai Samokish, to the battle-painting studio. The same year he travelled to Italy, France and England. He had been showing work at exhibitions since 1904, that is, while still a teenager.

The First World War gave him real material. In 1915 he was sent as a front-line artist to a cavalry corps in the area of the Western Dvina. A great many watercolours and drawings came out of that trip, and in 1916 they were printed on the covers and pages of the magazine Lukomorye. He was then called up into the active army, and with a group of artists led by Samokish he visited the Western Front, the fortress of Osowiec, the General Headquarters at Baranovichi, the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol and the Caucasus Front. In all he made up to a hundred watercolours. In the Civil War Frentz, as a former cavalryman, was drafted into the Petrograd separate cavalry squadron, which fought against the Northwestern Army, a White force. After two months at the front he became a cadet at the first Soviet cavalry command courses, and in 1920 he was transferred to lead an art circle at the Red Army cavalry school for commanding officers.

From 1918 to 1925 he worked in the agitational poster studio of the Decorative Institute: he made propaganda posters, painted designs on fabric and porcelain, and drew sketches for the festive decoration of city buildings. He also taught at the institute and in various studios around the city.

From 1929 Frentz taught at Vkhutein in Leningrad, the state art and technical institute, later renamed the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and then the Academy of Arts. He headed the battle-painting studio from 1935 to 1956 and became a professor of painting in 1939. From 1949 he also, in a part-time post, ran the department of monumental and decorative painting at the Vera Mukhina Leningrad Higher School of Industrial Art. Among his pupils were Yuri Belov, Mark Kremer, Yuri Neprintsev, Nikolai Ovchinnikov and Valentin Sidorov.

He belonged to AKhRR, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, joined the Society of Painters in 1929, and in 1932 became a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists and of its first board, elected on 2 August 1932.

The subjects of his pictures include “On Znamenskaya Square in the February Days of 1917” (1917), “The Storming of the Winter Palace” (1925), “The Defence of Petrograd from Yudenich” (1928), “The Storming of Kronstadt” (1935) and “Stalingrad. 2 February 1943” (1950). Beside them stand city scenes such as “Nevsky Prospect at Night. A Cabman” (1923) and “Carousel” (1922), “Portrait of His Wife” (1926), “Hounds” (1953) and “Horsewoman” (1925), in which a woman rides side-saddle. To my mind, these works are softer and freer than his battle commissions.

He is best known for his panoramas and dioramas: “The Storming of the Winter Palace” (1920; a second version in 1929, 6 × 25 metres), “The Defence of Petrograd” (1937, 7 × 32 metres) and “The Battle of Stalingrad” (1946). His manner is marked by a clear silhouette, saturated local colour and a somewhat stylised, constructed drawing, but from the 1930s it was gradually displaced by traditional plein-air painting.

Solo exhibitions were held in Leningrad in 1928 at the Central House of Art Workers and in 1970 in the halls of the Leningrad branch of the Artists’ Union, and in 2006 at the Russian Museum. His works are held by the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery and other collections in Russia and abroad.

Frentz died in Leningrad on 27 December 1956 and was buried at the Literatorskie Mostki, the writers’ section of the Volkovo Cemetery.