Vladimir Chekalov

Biography

In February 1953 the magazine Soviet Union, which came out in six languages, gave a full spread to a colour reproduction of the diploma painting of an unknown graduate. The picture was called “Soldier Kitchen”, and its author was thirty.

Vladimir Chekalov was born on 6 July 1922 in the village of Novaya-Vyaltsevo in the Soligalichsky District of the Kostroma Region, into a peasant family. In 1926 the family moved to Leningrad. His father, Fyodor Nikolayevich, was a joiner; his mother, Apollinaria Mikhailovna, looked after the household and three sons. Vladimir started school in 1930, and in 1936 he was admitted, as a boy with a gift for drawing, to the Secondary Art School at the All-Russian Academy of Arts. There he studied under Pavel Naumov, Alexander Zaitsev, Samuil Nevelshtein and Mikhail Natarevich. In the same years the school's pupils included the future sculptor Mikhail Anikushin and the artists Evgenia Antipova, Vyacheslav Zagonek, Viktor Teterin, Alexei Yeryomin and Marina Kozlovskaya. Chekalov finished the school in 1941 and was preparing to apply to the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

The war got in the way.

In July 1941 he was drafted into the Red Army. He rose from cadet at a military engineering school to guards senior lieutenant, commanding a sapper company. He fought on the Southwestern and North Caucasian fronts and took part in the battles at Stalingrad. In 1944–1945, with units of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, he took part in the liberation of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Austria. He was wounded. His decorations include the Order of the Red Star, two Orders of the Patriotic War, 2nd class, and the medals “For the Defence of Stalingrad”, “For the Capture of Vienna”, “For the Capture of Budapest”, “For the Liberation of Belgrade” and “For the Victory over Germany”. He was demobilised in 1946 as a captain. During the war he lost his whole family: his parents died in the siege of Leningrad, and his two elder brothers were killed at the front.

In October 1946 Chekalov entered the painting department of the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Ilya Repin. He studied under Alexander Zaitsev, Boris Fogel, Genrikh Pavlovsky, Lija Ostrova, Semion Abugov, Mikhail Platunov and Joseph Serebriany. He defended his diploma in 1952. The sources name the workshop where he made it differently: that of Boris Ioganson or of Rudolf Frentz. At the end of 1952 the diploma painting “Soldier Kitchen” was shown in Moscow at the All-Union exhibition of diploma works by students of art institutes, and a few months later came that spread in the magazine.

From 1952 Chekalov took part in exhibitions, and in the same year he joined the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists of the RSFSR, the professional body of Soviet artists (by other accounts, in 1953). He painted landscapes, portraits, genre scenes and battle pictures; his main subject was the Soviet soldier as liberator, whom he knew at first hand. His works include “On the Gulf of Finland” (1954), “A Boy in Romanian Costume” (1955), “On a Halt. In Bulgaria” (1957), “A Letter from the Homeland” (1958), “A Letter from Home” (1959), “Meeting” and “News from the Motherland” (both 1960), “Rendezvous” (1961), “Junior Sergeant”, “Head of a Soldier in a Forage Cap”, “Pioneer Girl” and “Countrymen” (all 1964), and “The Battle of the Black Sea Fleet Sailors at Eltigen”. For each painting he made many studies from life; some of them, in the view of art historians, are better than the paintings themselves. To my mind, his manner is best judged by the studies.

In the late 1950s and the 1960s Chekalov travelled to the Crimea and worked in Staraya Ladoga and at the Academic dacha, giving a great deal of attention to landscape. His painting moved from a tonal style that followed nature strictly towards a more plein-air one, with a finely tuned colour scheme but a clear constructive basis to the composition. Colour and the rendering of light-filled air came to him especially well in landscape.

In the 1970s and 1980s he taught at an art school for deaf children in Pavlovsk, near Leningrad.

Chekalov died on 4 June 1992 in Saint Petersburg. His works are held in museums and private collections in Russia, France, the United States, Germany, Britain and other countries.