Vladimir Begma

Biography

Vladimir Begma was born on 3 January 1941 in the village of Lvovka, in the Kalachinsky District of Omsk Oblast. His Siberian childhood left no trace in his best-known series: he found his subjects and material on the Don.

In 1964 he graduated from the painting department of the Grekov Rostov Art College, and in 1969 from the faculty of print design at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. His teachers are said to have included Andrei Goncharov and Volya Lyakhov. In my view, his printing education explains his interest in printed graphics: he regarded autolithography, that is, lithography in which the artist draws on the stone or plate himself, as his particular field, and he is credited with a notable contribution to it. In 1975 he was admitted to the Union of Artists of the USSR, now the Union of Artists of Russia. He lived and worked in Rostov-on-Don. He gave more than fifty years to the visual arts, thirty-five of them teaching at art schools in the city. His pupils are said to include Sergei Gavrilyachenko, later a People’s Artist of Russia, Nikolai Polyushenko, an Honoured Artist of Russia, Alexey Adamov and Viktor Koshlyakov, as well as his own children: Irina, Oksana, Elena and Georgy Begma.

A second line of his work concerns animals. Horses, dogs and forest game make up a notable part of his graphic work and painting; in 2009 his teaching manual “Drawing Animals”, illustrated with his own works, was published in Rostov-on-Don. His reputation rests on the series “Song to the Forest”, “Under the Don Sky”, “The Smell of Wormwood”, “Grass by the House” and “Hound Hunting”. An exhibition with a booklet was devoted to “Hound Hunting” in February 2006, and the subject appeared in Vladimir Donets’s album “The Great Hunt in Russia, Tradition and Modernity” (2006).

His largest literary undertaking is connected with Mikhail Sholokhov. For the writer’s centenary, a solo exhibition of paintings and graphics, “Under the Don Sky”, was held in 2004–2005, and the magazine “Donskoye slovo” printed his illustrations to “Quiet Flows the Don” (2007, no. 2) together with his article “My Sholokhov”. The Rostov newspaper “Kultura Dona” wrote about how he saw Aksinya. What is shown in these sheets is hard to make out from the descriptions; I have not seen the illustrations myself and will not presume to judge them.

He took part in the all-Russian exhibitions “Russia” (2004), “Victory”, marking the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad (2008), and “Fatherland” (2008), and in anniversary exhibitions of the Rostov branch of the Union of Artists. His works are held in the Arkhangelsk Regional Museum of Fine Arts, the Kustodiev Astrakhan Picture Gallery, the Kramskoi Voronezh Museum, the Mashkov Volgograd Museum, the Lipetsk and Oryol galleries, the Kamchatka and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk museums, and the museum of the town of Tiksi. On the Don these are the Rostov Museum of Fine Arts, the Sholokhov Museum-Reserve in the village of Veshenskaya, the Taganrog Art Museum and the Chekhov House Museum in Taganrog. There are also works in private collections in Australia, South Korea, Canada and Italy, and in the Museum Ludwig, the Peter Ludwig museum of contemporary art in Cologne.

His awards were of various rank: a silver medal of the Russian Academy of Arts (2008), a gold medal of the Union of Artists of Russia, the Moscow Government medal “For Valiant Labour” (2007), commemorative medals for the Sholokhov centenary (2005) and the 150th anniversary of Chekhov (2010), and the national prize “Family of Russia” (2006). He received the title of Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation in 2010.

Vladimir Begma died on 7 July 2025, in his eighty-fifth year.