Vasily Golubev

Biography

In 1938 Golubev, then thirteen, finished school in Soligalich and left for Leningrad. His home village stayed behind.

He was born on 15 June 1925 (2 June, Old Style) in the village of Medvezhye in Kostroma Governorate, into a peasant family. By one account the birthplace was a different village in the Soligalich district, but Medvezhye is the name given more often. In Leningrad he finished a building college, and in 1941, straight after, he volunteered for the Red Army. In January 1942 he was enrolled at a flying school in Omsk, and then studied at a tank school in the same city. From March 1944 he served as a mechanic-driver in the 2nd Reserve Tank Regiment in Nizhny Tagil. In 1945 he fell seriously ill, was treated in a hospital in Nizhny Tagil and then in Leningrad, and was discharged as a disabled veteran.

In 1948 he entered the Art and Teacher Training School at 35 Tavricheskaya Street, and graduated in 1952 with a qualification as an artist and a teacher of drawing and technical drawing. Making a living from art did not come at once. After graduating he lived on a disabled veteran’s pension of the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet name for the Second World War) and on contract commissions from the Combine of Painting and Decorative Art. He painted landscapes and still lifes, more rarely genre scenes and portraits. He came to exhibitions late: in the early 1960s he began to take part regularly in Leningrad shows, where his works hung beside those of the city’s leading painters. The earliest of his known paintings, “A Village of Putiatyno”, is dated 1957. In 1964 he was accepted as a candidate member of the Leningrad branch of the Artists’ Union of the Russian Federation, on the recommendation of Boris Ugarov, Yaroslav Nikolaev and Mikhail Grachev. Two years later, in 1966, he became a full member of the Union, in the painting section.

Recognition came with his lyrical landscapes: modest, sometimes ordinary views of the Russian village. His manner is individual and faintly recalls Post-Impressionism. To my mind, the titles of his pictures show well what he lived by: “Spring Rain” and “Ladozhka River” (both 1963), “At the Fence” (1964), “Spring Brook” (1968), “Light-Blue Day” (1971), “Golden Russia” (1972). There are also works on other subjects: “Horses” (1962), “Geologists” (1976), “Autumn Harvest” (1977). In the 1970s and 1980s his brushwork became more generalised and emotionally charged, expressionist, with elements of primitivism. To this period belong “Green Spaces” (1977) and the group of 1980: “Green Lake”, “Summer Harvest”, “In the Northern Land”, “Light-Blue Spaces”.

Golubev died on 31 August 1985 in Leningrad and was buried at the Southern Cemetery. A solo exhibition was held in Leningrad in 1991, after his death. In 2005 the first monograph on him was published in the United States. His paintings are in museums and private collections in Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan, Italy and other countries.