Description
Ivan Alekseevic Vladimirov (1869 Vilnius – 1947 Saint Petersburg)
At a Distant Native Tomb
Material: Oil on carton / panel
Dimension: 26,7 x 37,1 cm
Frame: Yes
Dated: 1909
About the Artist:
Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov is a Russian and Soviet painter and draftsman, Honored Artist of the RSFSR. Known as an artist of the realist school of painting, battle-painter and author of a cycle of documentary sketches of the revolutionary events of 1917, the everyday life of military communism in 1918-1921.
Early life
Ivan Alexeevich was born on January 10, 1870 in Vilna (Vilnius) in the family of priest Alexei Vladimirov (b. 1830) and an Englishwoman Kate Vladimiroff (Waghorn) (b. 1834). His father, at one time worked as a librarian at the Moscow English Club. His mother was a watercolorist.
At the age of 12, Ivan was already working as a coal miner. Traveled a lot on his own in England and Polesie. Received art education in the Vilna drawing school of Ivan Trutnev. He studied at the St. Petersburg Junkers’ School, left the service because of illness. In 1891-1893 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he specialized with Bogdan Villewalde, Alexey Kivshenko and Franz Roubaud.
He volunteered for the 210th Izhora Battalion of the Russian Army. In 1894 he attended the Military Infantry School.
Life as a painter
Every year he spent the summer in the Caucasus in the mountain villages, bringing from there the material for paintings, which were awarded large and small silver medals: “The capture of the Turkish redoubt”, “Dressing Point during the Caucasian War”. For the painting “Dressing Point during the Caucasian War” in 1893, he received the title of class artist of the second degree, which enabled him to start an independent art. In 1897 he was awarded the title of class artist of the first degree for his painting “Fight of Adygeans on the river Malka.
He was an art correspondent of “Niva” magazine during Russian-Japanese (1904-1905), Balkan (1912-1913) and First World Wars. As he wrote, “In all my artistic works, the main idea was to express the aspiration of our brave soldiers to the reflection and destruction of hateful, but strong and vicious enemies of the Motherland. The author of cycles of paintings dedicated to the Russian-Japanese War (“The Gun in Danger”, “Artillery Battle”, “Returned from the War”, “In Manchuria”, “Reconnaissance in a pouring rain”, “The interrogation of a prisoner”, “Reinforced Reconnaissance”), the revolutionary events of 1905 (“Near the Winter Palace, “Fight on the Presnya”, “On the barricades in 1905”), life compositions (“At the wood yard”, “Charity”, “Grief”, “Inventor and capitalist”, “Grandfather’s birthday”), the First World War, sketches of military operations for the magazine “Niva”, watercolors, photographs. Until 1918 he was a correspondent artist for the English magazine The Graphic, the world’s first art illustrated magazine, and collaborated with the French Illustration and several American magazines.
Vladimirov owns copies and sketches of the remains of the X-XI century painting of the Sintin Temple in the Teberda Gorge in Karachay-Cherkessia.
Being an opponent of modernism in art, he offered his paintings for the exhibition of artists “World of Art”, but was rejected as an outdated realist. Then he painted several pictures on Finnish subjects in the manner of the World of Art, and gave these paintings for the exhibition under his Finnish pseudonym. He was received and complimented by Alexander Benois, and the pictures were sold. And only at the end of the exhibition Vladimirov, in a letter to the newspaper exposed the intrigue. The painter received a lot of sympathetic letters, even a postcard from Ilya Repin, who congratulated Vladimirov on his successful practical joke on the modernists: “Dear Ivan Alexeyevich, I hasten to salute you for your excellent joke on the impudent dudes and pathetic pygmies, who imagine themselves the innovators of our native art. Your joke dealt a killing blow to all the Decadents and other dabblers – the enemies of realism in painting”.
In the 1910s he lived with his wife and two daughters at his dacha on Morskaya Street. Nowadays the territory of the former Vladimirov’s dacha is part of the Governor’s dacha in the village of Komarovo.
In 1917-1918 years, working in the Petrograd police, he painted portraits of wanted criminals. Made a great cycle of documentary sketches of the events of 1917-1918 (“The Arrest of Tsarist Generals” (1918), “Petrograd. Spring 1918”. (1918), etc.).
In 1921 he cooperated with Frank Golder and Donald Renshaw of the American Relief Administration (ARA), which provided aid to the starving in Russia, and also had connections with Spurgeon Milton Keeney and Ethan Theodore Colton of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). All four bought his drawings, which were then transported to the United States.
He was a member of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. Since 1932, a member of the Leningrad Union of Soviet Artists. He painted pictures on historical-revolutionary and battle themes (“V. I. Lenin at the Rally” (1923), “The Taking of Melitopol by Budyonovtsy” (1925), “Flight of the Bourgeoisie from Novorossiysk” (1926), “Liquidation of the Wrangel Front” (1932), “Barricades in Spain” (1936), “V. Lenin and Stalin in Razliv in 1917” (1937), “Foreigners in Leningrad” (1937). Participated in exhibitions “The Red Army in the Soviet art” (1930), “15 years of the Red Army” (1933), in the work of the World exhibition in Paris (1937).
During the Soviet-Finnish War, due to his age he could not go to the front and created paintings “The Entry of the Soviet Troops into Vyborg” (1939), “Surrender of the Finns” (1940) based on newspaper reports.
During the Great Patriotic War, was in besieged Leningrad, prepared posters, made sketches and sketches, painted (“Fight for Tikhvin,” 1943; “Fight on the streets of Berlin,” 1946), kept a diary of the blockade.
He died on December 14, 1947 in Leningrad at the age of 78. He was buried at the Seraphim Cemetery in St. Petersburg.
Works in Mueseums
Works by I.A. Vladimirov are stored in the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, in museums and private collections.
