Posts in Category: Russian
Abram Efimovich Arkhipov
Abram Efimovich Arkhipov, August 27, 1862 – September 25, 1930, was a Russian painter associated with the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) and later the Union of Russian Artists. Born into a peasant family in Ryazan Province, he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Vasily Perov, Vasily Polenov, and Vladimir Makovsky. He later became a professor at the Moscow School, where he taught many younger Russian painters.
Arkhipov first gained recognition for realist genre scenes depicting the lives of peasants, laborers, and workers, including his celebrated paintings of washerwomen and Volga boat travelers. Beginning around 1900, his work evolved toward increasingly brilliant color and expressive brushwork, especially in his portraits of peasant women in traditional dress from the Ryazan region. These later paintings remain among the most recognizable images of Russian Impressionism.
Today Arkhipov’s paintings are held by the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, the Scientific Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, the Belarusian National Museum of Arts, and numerous regional museums throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. His work forms an important link between nineteenth-century Russian Realism and the more colorful, painterly tendencies of the early twentieth century.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, Russian artist, February 23, 1879 - May 15, 1935
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky, Russian painter, December 4, 1866-December 13, 1944
Isaac Levitan
Isaac Levitan, August 30, 1860 – August 4, 1900, was a Russian painter associated with landscape painting and the Peredvizhniki.
He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where his teachers included Alexei Savrasov and Vasily Polenov. He was closely associated with Anton Chekhov and with painters including Valentin Serov.
Levitan is best known for Russian landscape paintings often described as “mood landscapes,” including Birch Grove, Evening Bells, The Vladimirka Road, March, and Twilight. Haystacks
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin
Ivan Bilibin, August 16, 1876 – February 7, 1942, was a Russian illustrator, stage designer, and graphic artist.
He is best known for his illustrations of Russian fairy tales and epic subjects, using strong outlines, patterned surfaces, and motifs drawn from medieval Russian art and folk design.
Bilibin also designed sets and costumes for opera and theater. He worked in Russia, traveled in North Africa and the Middle East, lived abroad after the Russian Revolution, and returned to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall, Russian-French painter, July 6, 1887 – March 28, 1985.
Chagall was born Moishe Shagal near Vitebsk, then in the Russian Empire, now Belarus. He first studied in Vitebsk with Yehuda Pen, then in Saint Petersburg, and later in Paris at the Académie de La Palette. His teachers and artistic contacts included Pen in Vitebsk and, in Paris, exposure to Cubism, Fauvism, and the wider avant-garde.
Chagall lived in Vitebsk, Saint Petersburg, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and again Vitebsk before leaving Soviet Russia in 1922. He lived in France for much of his mature career, spent the Second World War years in the United States, and returned to France after the war, eventually settling in the south of France.
His work combines modernist color and form with imagery drawn from Jewish life, Russian village memory, folklore, dreams, lovers, animals, musicians, and biblical themes. His major genres include painting, drawing, printmaking, book illustration, stained glass, tapestry, stage design, and large decorative commissions.
Chagall served briefly as Commissar of Arts for Vitebsk after the Russian Revolution and founded the People’s Art School there. He had major exhibitions in Europe and the United States and later received large public commissions, including stained glass windows and ceiling decorations. He was more important as a founder and artistic leader than as a formal teacher; artists associated with the Vitebsk school included El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich.
Ilya Repin
Ilya Yefimovich Repin, August 5, 1844 – September 29, 1930, was a Russian painter and draftsman associated with realism and the Peredvizhniki.
Repin studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg and worked with Ivan Kramskoi and other artists connected to the reformist Russian art movement. His subjects included portraits, historical scenes, genre paintings, literary subjects, and scenes of contemporary Russian life.
His work is held by the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; State Russian Museum, St Petersburg; Ateneum, Helsinki; and other public collections.
