Svetlin Rusev

Biography

In 1985 Svetlin Rusev gave Pleven his collection of Bulgarian, African and Oriental art. A permanent gallery that bears his name grew out of it; today it holds more than four hundred paintings and sculptures that he gathered over many years.

At that moment he held one of the leading posts in Bulgarian art.

Rusev was born on 14 June 1933. The place of birth is given differently: Pleven, or the village of Varbitsa near Pleven. He studied painting at the Academy of Art in Sofia under Professor Dechko Uzunov and graduated in 1959. From 1960 or 1961 his work was shown at exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad. The first solo exhibition on record took place in Sofia in 1963, and later there were shows in Moscow, Leningrad, Mexico, Budapest, Warsaw, Bucharest, Berlin and Vienna. From 1967 he lived and worked in Sofia.

His subjects are most often drawn from the hard moments of Bulgarian history. “Before the Execution. 1923” (1963) is about the struggle for freedom in the 1920s. “The Oath” (1966) tells of the fight against the Ottoman conquerors; for it he received the Dimitrov Prize, which is dated 1968 or 1969. “The People Bid Farewell to Patriarch Euthymius” (1968) deals with Bulgaria’s loss of independence at the end of the fourteenth century. The painting “The Last Day” won a National Prize in 1972. Later came “Stadium in Santiago de Chile” (1974), about the military coup in Chile; “Samuel’s Warriors” (1975), about the massacre of Bulgarian prisoners after the battle of Belasica; “The Church in Batak” (1976), about the tragedy of that village during the April Uprising; and “Yastrebino. A History Lesson” (1976), about the fate of the village during the struggle against Nazism.

He has another line as well: portraits of Bulgarian scientists and artists, among them Kiril Petrov and Bogomil Rainov, the series “Bulgarian Women”, and townscapes of Balchik and Melnik.

He received the title of Honoured Artist in 1971 and that of People’s Artist of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in 1975, the year he also became a professor at the Academy of Art. In 1973–1985 he was chairman of the Union of Bulgarian Artists. In 1982–1984 he served as first deputy minister of culture, and in 1985–1988 as director of the National Art Gallery. From 1971 he was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, in 1976–1988 sat on its Central Committee, and until 1989 was a deputy in the National Assembly. In 1990 he was elected to the Seventh Grand National Assembly for the Bulgarian Socialist Party, whose supreme council he belonged to.

Rusev also worked as a muralist. For the railway station in Sofia he painted the fresco “Motherland” (1976, architect Milko Bechev). For the reception hall of the National Palace of Culture, where official delegations rested, he made the mural “Bulgaria”, measuring 17.3 by 5.1 metres (1981). In 1994 he painted the narthex and made icons for the church of St Petka of Bulgaria at Rupite, built by Vanga.

He was a member of the Paris Salon d’Automne and honorary president of the Paris organisation AIAP, an honorary member of the Japanese foundation Nika-Kai and of the Künstlerhaus in Vienna, and a corresponding member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. His other honours include the Paisiy Hilendarski prize, the grand prize of the Union of Bulgarian Artists (1986) and the Gabriel Olivier prize in Monaco. Shumen University made him an honorary doctor, and in 2003 he became a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Svetlin Rusev died in Sofia on 26 May 2018.