Category Archive: Soviet Art

Hallmarking silver in the USSR how to read the signs on the marking

Assay Office building in Moscow. Hallmarking silver in the USSR.

Hallmarking of silver in the USSR has changed more than once in its history. Immediately after the revolution of 1917, most of the jewelry factories and workshops were closed in Russia. Fearing robberies, the owners of large and small enterprises fled abroad. Assay offices, which were previously engaged in hallmarking silver, ceased their work with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks.

Hallmarking of silver at the dawn of the USSR was of little concern to the Soviet government. The main goal of the authorities was the requisition of jewelry and their further sale abroad, since the state needed funds to finance the world revolution. The first steps to put things in order in the jewelry business were made in 1918, when a commission formed under the Council of People’s Commissars assumed control functions.

Yuri Petrovich Kugach

Yuri Petrovich Kugach was born in 1917 in Suzdal.

In 1936 he graduated from the Moscow Fine Art School in memory of 1905. He studied under N. P. Krymov and K. F. Morozov. In 1942 he graduated from the Moscow State Art Institute, in the same place in 1945 postgraduate studies with S. V. Gerasimov, N. K. Maksimov, I. E. Grabar.

Taras Guryevich Gaponenko

Taras Guryevich Gaponenko was born on March 5, 1906 in the village of Staraya Zavoron (Smolensk region) into a poor peasant family. Lost his parents early. His mother died when he was 5 years old, his father – when he was 8 years old. They stayed alone with their sister, who was 6 years older than Taras, and they went to the people. In the summer, my sister, a thin girl, labored in the surrounding villages, and Taras grazed pigs, receiving one measure of rye and 5-6 measures of potatoes per season. In winter, interrupted than necessary. One winter Taras had to drive two blind beggars, trampling down half of the country roads of the Elninsky district of the Smolensk province with his little sandals. Lapti Taras wove himself.

Nikolai Petrovich Glushchenko

People’s Artist of the USSR Nikolai Petrovich Glushchenko is a legendary person. He spent most of his life in Berlin and Paris, was friends with famous artists Fernand Leger, Andre Matisse, Pablo Picasso And no one even knew that he, a post-impressionist artist, was also a counterintelligence agent.

Today, Nikolai Petrovich Glushchenko ‘s paintings adorn more than 8 world-famous museums, it is fashionable to collect his works among the Ukrainian establishment, and an active struggle is going on for his legacy.

Mylnikov Andrei Andreevich

Mylnikov Andrei Andreevich (1919-2012) the largest Soviet painter, People’s Artist of the USSR, professor, vice-president of the Russian Academy of Arts.
A. A. Mylnikov was born in Pokrovsk in 1919. In 1946 he graduated from the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He was a student of I. Grabar and inherited the best traditions of Russian art in all the variety of images and pictorial techniques. In 1948, here he entered the graduate school of the Academy of Arts and continued his studies in a creative workshop.

Simon Bagratovich Virsaladze

Biographical data on the life of Simon Virsaladze

Simon Virsaladze the artist who dresses the dance Simon Bagratovich Virsaladze was born in Tiflis on December 31, 1908. Already in childhood, he combined choreography lessons and drawing. Determining his future path in life, Virsaladze gave preference to painting.

Ervand Kochar

Ervand Semyonovich Kochar is a great Armenian experimenter. He was a student of Yeghishe Tadevosyan and Pyotr Konchalovsky. And then he left for Paris to join the circle of those who, at the beginning of the 20th century, formed a new language of art. Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Leger and Chirico – with these renowned masters, Kochar regularly exhibited in Parisian salons and even became one of the ideologues of the “Manifesto of Dimansionism” – a kind of artistic program of the European avant-garde.

Soviet Art

USSR Culture