27.01.1880–07.01.1937
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
28.05.1891–25.08.1961
Alexander Grigoriev
Alexander Grigoriev (1891–1961) was born in a Mari village into a family of rural teachers, studied in Kazan and Moscow, and in 1919 founded a museum with a picture gallery in Kozmodemyansk, which he called the “Small Tretyakov Gallery”. From 1922 to 1927 he headed the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, and was later arrested and spent almost nine years in a camp. He was rehabilitated in 1954.
08.11.1914–17.08.2007
Eduard Isabekyan
Eduard Isabekyan grew up in Yerevan in a family of refugees from Iğdır, studied in Tbilisi and became the author of large multi-figure historical canvases: “The Battle of Avarayr”, “Reply to Hazkert”, “The Revolt of Haghpat Peasants in 1903”. From 1967 to 1987 he headed the National Gallery of Armenia and opened nine of its branches. His last painting, devoted to his native Iğdır, was left unfinished.30.12.1882–19.08.1973
Artur Fonvizin
Artur Fonvizin began as a Symbolist painter in Mikhail Larionov’s circle and turned to watercolour only in the late 1920s, when he was already past forty. In 1937 the press named him one of the “three F’s” of the formalists, and in 1943 he was exiled to Kazakhstan because of his German descent. After the war he painted actresses in stage costume, the circus and flowers.22.04.1928–10.03.2002
Elguja Amashukeli
In the late 1950s Elguja Amashukeli (1928–2002) put up the statue “Mother of Georgia” above Tbilisi, first knocked together from planks and later clad in aluminium. He made the equestrian statue of Vakhtang I Gorgasali, the Victory monument in Gori and the memorial to sailors in Poti. From 1981 to 1996 he headed the Union of Artists of Georgia.24.05.1923–09.03.2013
Hakob Hakobian
Hakob Hakobian was born in Alexandria to a family of refugees from Antep, studied in Cyprus, Cairo and Paris, and moved to Armenia only at the age of forty. There he painted gardens, vineyards and mountain gorges, and received the title of People's Artist of the republic and the State Prize of the USSR. His work from 1962 to the 1980s centres on the series “My Land” and “My Homeland”.
04.02.1833–10.04.1900
Apolinary Horawski
Apolinary Horawski (1833–1900) came from an impoverished noble family of Minsk Governorate, studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and in 1861 became an academician for the painting “An Old Woman Praying”. He painted Belarusian and Russian landscapes and portraits of Glinka, Dargomyzhsky and his teachers; Pavel Tretyakov commissioned many of his works. Most of his paintings are now in Minsk.
12.01.1836–15.04.1884
Grigory Sedov
Grigory Sedov (1836–1884) grew up in a Moscow family of meat traders, and in his early thirties received a six-year stipend from the Academy of Arts to study abroad, but in Paris he went blind in one eye. He won the title of academician for “Ivan the Terrible and Malyuta Skuratov”, and his greatest success was the painting of the tsar and Vasilisa Melentyeva (1876). He did much work for Moscow churches.10.01.1903–03.07.1980
Anatoli Lvovich Kaplan
Anatoli (Tanchum) Kaplan (1903–1980), the son of a butcher from Rogachov, became in Leningrad a printmaker, an illustrator of Sholem Aleichem and the author of lithograph cycles, “Kasrilevka” and one on the siege. From the 1950s he worked almost entirely on Jewish subjects, and from 1967 he also made ceramics and sculpture, among them figures from Gogol’s “Dead Souls”.
1955–present
Irina Nakhova
Irina Nakhova (born 1955) turned a room of her Moscow apartment into a “total installation” in 1983–1987 and became one of the first to work this way in Soviet art. In 2013 she won the Kandinsky Prize, and in 2015 she became the first woman to represent Russia in a solo national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with “The Green Pavilion”.10.03.1889–17.07.1957
Alessio Issupoff
Alessio Issupoff left for Italy in 1926 officially to paint a picture of a sports parade, and stayed there for the rest of his life. Born into the family of a gilder in Vyatka, a pupil of Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin, he painted portraits, landscapes and genre scenes in Rome. His work was shown in Rome, Milan, Naples and other cities, and in 1930 at the Venice Biennale.03.01.1941–07.07.2025
Vladimir Begma
Vladimir Begma (1941–2025) was born in the Omsk village of Lvovka, studied in Rostov-on-Don and Moscow, and for thirty-five years taught at art schools in Rostov. He is known for autolithographs, animal subjects, the series “Under the Don Sky” and “Hound Hunting”, and illustrations for “Quiet Flows the Don”. His works are in museums from Arkhangelsk to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
10.02.1800–21.08.1860
Kanuty Rusiecki
Kanuty Rusiecki (1800–1860) studied in Vilnius, Paris and Rome, where he was the informal leader of the Polish artists, and from 1831 lived in Vilnius and taught drawing. He painted altarpieces, landscapes, watercolour portraits and scenes of peasant life. About 330 of his works were kept in the studio of his son Bolesław and later passed to museums.
28.08.1794–23.08.1873
Nikolay Maykov
Nikolay Maykov (1794–1873) came to painting from the army: he began to draw while recovering from a wound received at Borodino, and he never had a formal art education. In 1835 he was made an academician for an altarpiece in the Trinity Cathedral of the Izmailovsky Regiment. He painted icons and ceiling panels for Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, portraits and decorative murals, and a literary circle met in his house.14.04.1938–14.02.2014
Durdy Bayramov
Durdy Bayramov grew up in an orphanage in Kyzyl-Arvat, studied in Ashgabat and in Moscow under Dmitry Mochalsky, and then spent forty years on the series “Cultural Figures”, more than 150 portraits of his Turkmen contemporaries. His “Turkmen Carpet Makers” (1971) was bought by the Tretyakov Gallery. He did not show the photographs he took in the villages during his lifetime.02.04.1883–28.01.1977
Alexis Gritchenko
Alexis Gritchenko (1883–1977) graduated from university as a biologist, then took up painting in Kyiv and Moscow, where he painted in the manner of Cubism and Fauvism and wrote books on the Russian icon. In 1919 he left via Crimea for Constantinople, lived in France from 1921 and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. Part of his legacy was transferred to a museum in Kyiv in 2006.
02.10.1865–23.09.1918
Nikolai Clodt von Jürgensburg
Nikolai Clodt von Jürgensburg, grandson of the sculptor Peter Clodt, graduated from the Moscow School of Painting in 1886 and travelled widely with his sketching box: the Russian North, the Volga, the Caucasus and Crimea, then Europe. From 1901 he worked in the theatres of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, among others together with Konstantin Korovin. Igor Grabar called him an underrated master.23.07.1888–27.12.1956
Rudolf Frentz
Rudolf Frentz studied with his father, an animal painter, and in the battle-painting studio of Nikolai Samokish. In 1915–1916 he made watercolours on the fronts of the First World War for the magazine Lukomorye. Later he painted scenes of the Revolution and the Civil War and created the panoramas “The Storming of the Winter Palace” and “The Defence of Petrograd”. From 1935 he headed the battle-painting studio at the Academy of Arts in Leningrad.28.04.1915–15.06.1971
Fuad Abdurahmanov
Fuad Abdurahmanov (1915–1971) won a Stalin Prize in 1947 for his monument to Nizami in Ganja, and in 1949 put up a second Nizami, in Baku. He was the first Azerbaijani to become a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts. He also made the monuments to Samad Vurghun and Rudaki and the statues “Chaban” and “Liberation”.
02.12.1933–03.02.2015
Georgy Kovenchuk
Georgy Kovenchuk, known to everyone as Gaga (1933–2015), drew the poster “Not for Narrow Trousers, but for Hooligan Tricks” at twenty-four, and it appeared in a tear-off calendar printed in 1.5 million copies. He later designed Mayakovsky’s “The Bedbug”, won the diploma “Best Book of the Year” for it, and for many years worked in Paris, drawing at the Moulin Rouge. He was the grandson of Nikolai Kulbin.11.09.1946–present
Anatoliy Kryvolap
Anatoliy Kryvolap studied at the Kyiv art institute, took part in the Picturesque Reserve group in the 1990s and worked on the cycle “Ukrainian Motive”: fifty canvases for which he received the Shevchenko Prize in 2012. He began as a realist and later turned to Fauvist and abstract landscapes. Since the 2000s he has lived and worked in the village of Zasupoivka near Yahotyn.30.11.1898–03.12.1965
Solomon Nikritin
Solomon Nikritin (1898–1965) studied under Wassily Kandinsky at Vkhutemas, formulated “Projectionism” and founded the Theatre of Projectionism in the early 1920s, and from 1925 headed the Analytical Cabinet of the Museum of Pictorial Culture. In the 1930s he was chief artist of the Polytechnic Museum and the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition; his best-known painting is “The People’s Court” (1934, Tretyakov Gallery).
28.04.1865–25.11.1937
Mykola Ivasyuk
Mykola Ivasyuk, a native of Bukovina, spent two decades on the huge canvas “The Entrance of Bohdan Khmelnytsky to Kyiv”, whose reproductions hung in Ukrainian homes in Galicia. In 1919 he designed postage stamps for the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and in 1926 he moved to Soviet Kyiv at the government’s invitation. He was arrested in September 1937 and shot in November.21.03.1962–present