Merkurov, Sergei

Merkurov, Sergei (1881–1952). Russian sculptor. He was born in Armenia, studied in Zurich and Munich, and lived in Paris for several years before settling in Moscow in 1909. His best-known works are his enormous statues of Lenin and Stalin in Moscow and elsewhere, many of them now destroyed. Most typically he worked in granite, but his largest statue of Stalin in Yerevan (1950, destroyed) was in copper. The statue itself was about 16 metres high, and Matthew Cullerne Bown (Art Under Stalin, 1991) writes that ‘It stood on an ornate pedestal as big as a house.’ The pedestal, like those of some of the Soviet war memorials of the time, contained a museum, and Bown comments that ‘It seems likely that the model which Soviet artists and architects had in mind when devising schemes of this kind was New York's Statue of Liberty (of which they were acutely aware)'. The Russian art historian Mikhail Sokolov writes that ‘In spite of the pompously apologetic intention behind these official commissions, Merkurov managed to convey in them the cruel, despotic character of Stalin's rule'. From 1945 to 1950 Merkurov was director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. See also SOCIALIST REALISM.