02.11.1938–26.03.2024
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
30.08.1748–29.12.1825
Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) painted “The Oath of the Horatii” and “The Death of Marat”, sat as a deputy in the Convention and voted for the execution of Louis XVI, and under Napoleon became the Emperor’s First Painter and the author of “The Coronation”. He spent his last ten years in Brussels. His pupils included Gros, Ingres and many others, and in the early nineteenth century no one had a stronger influence on French painting.
01.03.1716–27.10.1800
Itō Jakuchū
Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800) inherited his father’s grocery shop in Kyoto’s Nishiki market and gave up trade for painting only at forty. He learned above all from life: from the vegetables in the shop, the fish in the market and the chickens in his own garden. His cycle of thirty scrolls, the “Colorful Realm of Living Beings”, given to the temple of Shōkoku-ji, is designated a National Treasure of Japan.1958–present
Sokari Douglas Camp
Sokari Douglas Camp (born 1958) was born in Buguma, a Kalabari town in the Niger Delta, studied in Oakland and London, and has worked in London for many years. Her sculptures are mostly made of steel, and their themes come from Kalabari masquerade, Nigerian life and the experience of living in Britain. Her work is in the collections of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution; in 2005 she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
25.07.1844–25.06.1916
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) spent almost his whole life in Philadelphia and painted its people: rowers, boxers, surgeons, scientists, friends and pupils. He studied anatomy alongside medical students, was one of the first in America to work with motion photography, and was an influential teacher until in 1886 he was forced out of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Recognition came mostly after his death.
1390–09.07.1441
Jan van Eyck
Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441) was court painter and trusted envoy to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and from the late 1420s lived in Bruges. He completed the Ghent Altarpiece, apparently begun by his brother Hubert, and painted the “Arnolfini Portrait” and the “Madonna of Chancellor Rolin”. Some twenty surviving paintings are confidently attributed to him; ten are signed and dated, with the motto “As I can”.
0919–0967
Li Cheng
Li Cheng (919–967) lived at the close of the Five Dynasties period and in the first years of the Song, came from a scholarly family connected with the Tang imperial clan, and by some accounts kept away from official service. His landscapes, with their “level distance”, pale ink and mist, became a model for Guo Xi and many later masters. No originals seem to survive: copies of the 12th to 17th centuries are thought to come closest to them.
1953–present
Abdoulaye Konaté
Abdoulaye Konaté (born 1953), a Malian artist, studied painting in Bamako and Havana and in the 1990s moved from canvas to cloth. His large textile hangings and installations deal with the advance of the desert in the Sahel, AIDS, wars and human rights. He won the Grand Prix of the Dakar Biennale (1996) and took part in Documenta 12 and “Africa Remix”. He lives and works in Bamako.27.02.1961–20.07.2013
Georgy Guryanov
Georgy Guryanov (1961–2013) was the drummer and arranger of the band Kino from 1984 to 1990, and after Viktor Tsoi’s death he gave up music for painting. One of the first of Timur Novikov’s New Artists, he later became a Neo-Academist and an honorary professor of the New Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg. He painted athletes, rowers, sailors and pilots after Soviet sports photography.04.02.1981–15.06.2026
Semyon Skrepetsky
Semyon Skrepetsky (1981–2026), real name Robert Kuzovkov, was a caricaturist, performance artist, musician and blogger. His satirical paintings, which were classed as neo-primitivism, mocked the Russian authorities, part of the Russian opposition and the leadership of Ukraine. From 2021 he lived in Poland; he wrote the satirical book “Russia-2028” about a post-apocalyptic Russia.
20.06.1839–17.09.1915
Konstantin Makovsky
Konstantin Makovsky (1839–1915) began as one of the “rebels” of 1863 and a founder of the Society of the Peredvizhniki, and became the most fashionable salon painter of post-reform Russia. He painted boyar feasts and weddings, mythological ceiling paintings and formal portraits of the imperial family and the aristocracy. “Minin’s Appeal” (1896) is considered the largest easel history painting in Russia.10.06.1930–09.07.2017
Ilya Glazunov
Ilya Glazunov (1930–2017), a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and a pupil of Boris Ioganson, made his name in 1957 with his first Moscow exhibition. He went on to paint history pictures, among them “The 20th Century Mystery” and “Russia the Eternal”, portraits of politicians and stars, and illustrations to Dostoevsky. In 1987 he founded the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow and led it for the rest of his life.
25.12.1883–14.08.1939
Isaak Brodsky
Isaak Brodsky (1883–1939), a pupil of Repin, painted landscapes and portraits before the revolution and won medals in Munich; after 1917 he became one of the creators of the official Soviet portrait: Lenin in the Smolny, on the rostrum, against the Kremlin. From 1934 he headed the All-Russian Academy of Arts. He collected more than a thousand works by Russian artists, and his Leningrad flat became a museum.
08.04.1956–present
Nikas Safronov
Nikas (Nikolai) Safronov (born 1956), a native of Ulyanovsk, studied in Rostov, Vilnius and Moscow and became known above all for his portraits of celebrities and politicians. He calls his manner, which combines realism with symbolism and surrealism, “Dream Vision”. He is a People’s Artist of Russia (2021), a full member of the Russian Academy of Arts (2012) and a professor at Ulyanovsk State University.
09.07.1882–15.01.1967
David Burliuk
David Burliuk (1882–1967), painter and poet, gathered the Hylaea group around him and signed the manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”; he called himself “the father of Russian Futurism”, and Mayakovsky considered him his teacher. From 1920 he lived in Japan and from 1922 in the United States, where he painted, published the journal “Color and Rhyme” and exhibited to the end of his life.
05.09.1912–26.07.1975
Ariadna Efron
Ariadna Efron (1912–1975), the daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Efron, studied book design and art history in Paris, illustrated magazines and translated. After returning to the USSR she went through the camps and exile from 1939 to 1955; in Turukhansk she decorated the House of Culture and painted watercolours of the exiles’ life. Later she translated French poets, kept her mother’s archive and wrote memoirs of her.
04.05.1943–present
Mihail Chemiakin
Mihail Chemiakin (born 1943), a Leningrad nonconformist and former rigger at the Hermitage, was forced to emigrate in 1971 and lived in Paris, New York and then France. He is the author of the monument to Peter I in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the “Metaphysical Sphinxes” and the group “Children Are the Victims of Adult Vices”, and the designer of “The Nutcracker” at the Mariinsky Theatre. State Prize of Russia (1993).
26.01.1846–21.02.1920
Vladimir Makovsky
Vladimir Makovsky (1846–1920) painted scenes of town and village life in post-reform Russia, from “The Nightingale Lovers” to “The Collapse of the Bank”, and Pavel Tretyakov bought many of them straight from the Peredvizhniki exhibitions. For twelve years he taught the life class at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and from 1894 to 1918 he ran the genre studio attached to the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg.
24.07.1757–06.04.1825
Vladimir Borovikovsky
The son of a Cossack icon painter from Mirgorod, Vladimir Borovikovsky came to St Petersburg after Catherine II admired the allegories he had painted for her rooms in Kremenchug. In the capital he became one of the most sought-after portraitists at the turn of the nineteenth century: intimate portraits of Lopukhina and Arsenyeva, state portraits of Paul I and Prince Kurakin, miniatures on tin, and in his later years icons for the Kazan Cathedral.
10.10.1954–present
Dmitry Krymov
Dmitry Krymov (b. 1954) began as a stage designer: he designed his father Anatoly Efros’s productions at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre, then worked at the Taganka, and in all created sets for more than a hundred productions. In the 1990s he turned to painting, graphic art and installation, and since the 2000s he has directed his own productions. A five-time Golden Mask winner, since 2022 he has run a theatre laboratory in New York.14.07.1960–13.08.2022
Dmitri Vrubel
In 1990 Dmitri Vrubel (1960–2022) painted the “fraternal kiss” of Brezhnev and Honecker on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall, with the caption “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love”. Before that he had been a visible figure of the Moscow underground; later, with Viktoria Timofeeva, he made projects at the meeting point of Sots Art and the political portrait, and from 2010 he lived and worked in Berlin.05.07.1903–10.03.1993
Vladimir Suteev
Vladimir Suteev (1903–1993) came to children’s books from film: in the 1920s to 1940s he was one of the first Soviet animators and directed the first original Soviet animated sound film. His “tales in pictures”, from “Under the Mushroom” to “The Bag of Apples”, in which almost every sentence comes with a drawing, have been translated into dozens of languages, and about forty animated films were made from his scripts.
07.02.1780–04.12.1847
Alexey Venetsianov
Alexey Venetsianov (1780–1847) learned to paint outside the Academy of Arts and spent twelve years as a land surveyor before leaving in 1819 for the village of Safonkovo in Tver Province. There he painted “The Threshing Floor”, “Reapers” and “Sleeping Shepherd Boy”, making peasant life a full-fledged subject of Russian painting, and taught village boys to draw free of charge; from them grew the Venetsianov school.
22.06.1815–14.11.1852