Vladimir Dimitrov

Biography

In the court of the town of Kyustendil, a sixteen-year-old clerk copied out records and in his free minutes secretly sketched his colleagues and the defendants. The drawings reached the president of the court, Nikola Chehlarov. One of the officials, Velichko Grablashev, sent twenty sheets to the drawing school in Sofia, addressed to Ivan Mrkvička.

Mrkvička recognised the talent, but there was no scholarship.

Vladimir Dimitrov was born on 1 February 1882 in Frolosh, into a family of refugees from Macedonia. Of six children, two survived. His father, unable to find a post as a priest, worked as a customs guard and was left disabled after a shoot-out with criminals. In 1889 the family moved to Kyustendil. Vladimir had to leave school because of poverty: he worked as a hotel servant, sold books and apprenticed with a house painter who imitated expensive woods on cheap timber. Chehlarov arranged the first exhibition of his drawings, on 11 May 1903, in the gymnasium of the teachers’ school, and persuaded well-off townspeople to contribute a fixed sum each month. After five years as a clerk, Dimitrov entered the drawing school as an irregular student. His teachers included Zheko Spiridonov, Anton Mitov, Ivan Mrkvička and others. He took first prizes in all the student competitions, and his fellow students began to call him Maystora. In 1909 he visited the Venice Biennale and travelled in Turkey, Russia and Italy. In 1910 the teaching staff, in view of his excellent marks, resolved to give him the certificate of a completed course as a regular student, although he had never finished secondary school; the Ministry of Education confirmed the decision.

From 1911 to 1918, with interruptions, he taught calligraphy and gymnastics at the commercial gymnasium in Svishtov. He went through the Balkan War of 1912–1913 as a volunteer, artist of the 13th Rila Infantry Regiment, and left hundreds of drawings. In the First World War he served as artist of the 7th Rila Infantry Division; in 1916 thirteen of his drawings were shown in Berlin, at an exhibition of artists from the allied armies. The front is the subject of “The Wounded”, “Along Belasica”, “Invalids”, “On the Front of the Struma River” and “Return from the Front”. The critics Nikolay Raynov, Sirak Skitnik and Geo Milev praised his innovation in graphic art and placed him at the head of the struggle against academicism. By some accounts he became the first official war correspondent in Bulgaria.

After the war Dimitrov grew close to the Tolstoyans, among them Nikola Venetov, Hristo Dosev and Dimitar Katsarov. In 1922 a solo exhibition in Sofia included the cycle “Harvest”, and in the same year in Rome he met the American John Crane. Crane, as the story goes, bought up his work and for several years, under a contract of 1924, paid in advance for everything the artist would paint over four years. In 1923 Dimitrov worked in Italy. In 1924, at the invitation of Andon Viyachev, he settled in the Kyustendil village of Shishkovtsi and lived there until 1951. The peasants called him “the Painter”, his landlord compared him to Saint John of Rila, and the children called him “Grandfather Frost”. He wore old clothes, did not shave, ate vegetarian food and gave away money and belongings, so that many people thought him a saint. From 1930 he taught in villages of the Kyustendil region.

The subject of these years was the people and nature of his native region: “Young Women” (about 1925–1935), “Young Sisters from the Village of Divlya” (about 1928–1930), “Palm Sunday” (about 1928), “Girl from the Kyustendil Region”, “Woman Reaper”, “Girl with Apples”, “Reapers at Lunch” and “Village Girl among Poppies” (1935–1938). The painting “Girl from Shishkovtsi” is called the “Bulgarian Madonna”. In my view, what matters in these pictures is colour: the figures are simplified, but the paints are bright, closer to Fauvism than to Expressionism.

In 1944 Dimitrov became an honorary citizen of Kyustendil. After 9 September 1944 he joined the Union of Bulgarian Artists, from 1946 he was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, and as a member of the National Committee for the Defence of Peace he took part in congresses in Wrocław, Paris and Warsaw. In 1950 he received the title of Merited Artist and the Dimitrov Prize, in 1952 he became People’s Artist and was awarded the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, First Class. Further honours followed: the Order of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, First Class (1957), and the Order of Georgi Dimitrov (1959).

He died in Sofia on 29 September 1960. More than 700 of his oil paintings are kept in the art gallery named after him in Kyustendil. His portrait appears on the 10,000-lev banknote (1996–1999), and in Antarctica, on Greenwich Island, there is a Maystora Peak.