Sergey Vasilyevich Gerasimov

Biography

In 1915 Sergey Gerasimov built himself a house-studio in Mozhaisk. Next door stood the Luzhetsky Monastery; in 1926 it was closed and looted, and for decades afterwards the half-ruined cloister would keep returning in Gerasimov’s paintings.

Mozhaisk was his home town.

He was born on 14 (26) September 1885 into a peasant family in Mozhaisk, in Moscow Governorate. From 1901 to 1907 he studied at the Stroganov School, then, until 1912, at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Sergei Ivanov and Konstantin Korovin. Korovin’s Impressionism stayed with him for good. As early as 1912 he was teaching himself, at the art school attached to Ivan Sytin’s printing works.

In the 1920s Gerasimov belonged to Makovets, then to the Society of Moscow Artists and to AKhRR; he taught at Vkhutemas and designed posters. His “Front-Line Soldier” of 1926, now in the Tretyakov Gallery, was painted with an eye on Cézanne, in a spirit of moderate Cubism. In “The Oath of the Siberian Partisans” (1933, Russian Museum) he took on a task new to him, the large propagandist “thematic picture”, and the work stays in the memory for its hard severity. Four years later came “Collective Farm Festival” (1937, Tretyakov Gallery), which looks like a festive stage set assembled from juicy pieces of colour. Pictures of this kind are generally regarded as models of Socialist Realism. I think the difference between the two says more about Gerasimov than any label: the severity of the first looks imposed, while in the second the painter is plainly enjoying the colour. In 1937 he received a silver medal at the World Exhibition in Paris. He illustrated Gorky, Nekrasov and other writers.

The war found him teaching at the Moscow Art Institute. According to some accounts, in 1941–1943 he was evacuated to Samarkand with most of the staff and students and painted the old city; some of these works are now in the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1943 he was appointed director of the Surikov Institute. At the same time he began “The Partisan’s Mother”, which he went on working on until 1950. He remained director for five years. Among colleagues Gerasimov was known as a cautious but steadfast liberal, and in the second half of the 1940s a campaign against formalism unfolded that also caught Impressionism in its net. In 1948 he was removed from his post, and, by one account, his apprenticeship to Korovin, who had long been living as an émigré in Paris, was held against him. His aesthetic opponent was considered to be his namesake Aleksandr Gerasimov, president of the USSR Academy of Arts. Yet Sergey Gerasimov had been among the first full members of the Academy, in 1947.

From 1950 until the end of his life he headed the Moscow Higher School of Art and Industry, the former Stroganov School, where he had once studied himself. In 1956 he received a doctorate in art history, and in 1958 the title of People’s Artist of the USSR and a gold medal at the World Exhibition in Brussels. From that same year, 1958, he was First Secretary of the Board of the Union of Artists of the USSR; he also chaired the board of the Moscow Union of Soviet Artists. His pupils included Geliy Korzhev, Aleksei Gritsai, the brothers Aleksei and Sergei Tkachev, Vladimir Stozharov, Yury Kugach and Fyodor Zakharov.

The simplest of his subjects are, to my mind, the most alive. In the series “Mozhaisk Landscapes” (1954, Tretyakov Gallery) there are no slogans and no heroes, only the countryside around Mozhaisk and the memory of the old provincial world, and Gerasimov’s painterly Impressionism feels most at ease here.

Sergey Gerasimov died on 20 April 1964 in Moscow and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. The Lenin Prize, for the series of paintings “Russian Land”, was awarded to him posthumously, in 1966.

In 1985, for the artist’s centenary, a house-museum opened in his Mozhaisk home on the initiative of his granddaughter Lyudmila Gerasimova. A street in Mozhaisk is also named after him.