Gerasimov, Alexander

Gerasimov, Alexander (1881–1963). Russian painter, stage designer, architect, and administrator, a dominant figure in Soviet art. He was born in Kozlov (later renamed Michurinsk), the son of a cattle dealer, and studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, 1903–15. After army service he returned to Kozlov and worked as a stage designer at the town theatre, which had been erected to his design in 1913 (this was his only executed architectural design, apart from a house he built for himself in the 1930s). In 1925 he settled in Moscow, where his friendship with Kliment Voroshilov, the Red Army chief, helped his career to prosper. However, even with friends in such high places, he sometimes had to tread warily; one of his large military pictures, shown at the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, included portraits of army personnel who were imprisoned or executed in one of Stalin's purges soon after it was completed, so when the picture came back from Paris, he removed it from its stretcher and kept it under a carpet on his studio floor for twenty years.

Gerasimov painted various types of picture, and his most admired works are now perhaps those in which he recalled his peasant upbringing, notably The Slaughter (Gerasimov Museum, Michurinsk, 1929), a powerful scene of a bull being killed. In Russian Art (1949) Tamara Talbot Rice wrote: ‘Gerasimov is one of those Soviet artists whose work will sooner or later come into its own in the West. There is nothing startling about it, nothing striking beyond its quiet excellence. He works with equal success in water-colours and in oils. He is an admirable portraitist, and the creator of some lovely still-lifes and flower pictures; his gifts are, however, perhaps more to the fore in his landscapes. Their gentle quality and crystalline colours have captured the spirit of Russia with amazing success.’ However, he has in fact become best known for his hagiographical pictures of Stalin (Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin Grounds, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1938), indeed as the archetypal artist of the repressive Stalinist era (see SOCIALIST REALISM): ‘Gerasimov was president of the Academy of Arts of the USSR from 1947 to 1957; and also dominated the USSR Union of Artists, showing an implacable hostility towards the slightest signs of advanced art and meriting the epithets of “sinister” and “evil” which were showered upon him by Western critics and the more courageous of his countrymen’ ( Alan Bird, A History of Russian Painting, 1987). After Stalin had been denounced by his successor Khruschev in 1956, Gerasimov was out of official favour. He had a heart attack the same year and never recovered his health. See also AKHRR.