Alexander Michailowitsch Gerasimow

Postage stamp from the Soviet Union dedicated to AM Gerasimov, 1981 (Michel 5101, Scott 4970)

Aleksandr Gerasimov ( Russian Александр Михайлович Герасимов ; born July 31 ^{. Jul} / 12. August  1881 ^greg. In Kozlov , Tambov Governorate ; † 23. July 1963 in Moscow ) was a Soviet artist. He was considered a leading artist of socialist realism and painted Stalin as well as other socialist leaders.

Gerasimow studied at the Moscow Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1903 to 1915. There he championed traditional, realistic, representative art against the avant-garde . He served in the army during World War I and the Russian Civil War . After the civil war he returned to his hometown to become a set designer. As such, he helped with stage plays extolling the revolution and the Soviet government. In 1925 Gerasimov returned to Moscow, where he opened a studio. He practiced an academically realistic technique, with an impressionistically bright cast. He preferred a style known as heroic realism , which characterized revolutionary leaders like Lenin as greater-than-alive heroes.

After the purges in the 1930s, when Stalin tightened his grip on the country, Gerassimov's work quickly transformed into “great” official portraits, such as B. "Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin Wall ", for which he received his first Stalin Prize in 1941. In 1943 a second Stalin Prize followed for the painting Hymn to October . This was followed by the Stalin Prize in 1946 and in 1949 that for the painting JW Stalin on Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov's grave .

He produced a variety of heroic portraits of Kliment Voroshilov, which is why Nikita Khrushchev later accused Voroshilov of having spent much of his time in Gerasimov's studio, to the detriment of his responsibility as People's Commissar of Defense. His leadership of the Committee of Artists of the USSR and the Soviet Academy of Art was notorious and has been described as leadership with a strong hand, and he was at the forefront of the attacks on cosmopolitanism and formality during the so-called Zhdanovshchina . Although his overly ingratiating portraits of Soviet leaders and his political activities against artists who would not support his line had earned him a reputation as a to be reckoned political figure, he did not completely lose the mark of his genuine artistic ability. Even at the end of his career, he continued to follow a melancholy, almost impressionistic treatment of landscapes .

literature

• Alexander Gerassimow , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 23/1973 of May 28, 1973, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Jan Plamper : The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power . Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. 2012.

Web links

• Website about Gerasimov (Russian)
• Biography on krugosvet.ru (Russian)
• Biographies on hrono.ru (Russian)