Soviet artist Georgy Alekseev 1881-1951

Soviet artist Georgy Alekseev
Famous Soviet sculptor, painter and graphic artist, Georgy Dmitrievich Alekseev (1881-1951) was one of the most passionate and talented propagandists of the Marxist-Leninist ideas of the 1920s-1930s. He was not only a witness, but also a living participant of the Russian revolution. Alekseev graduated from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he studied in the workshops of I. Repin, S. Korovin, and N. Kasatkin. In 1907 he became the creator of one of his first busts of Karl Marx, commissioned by the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1924 he became the author of his most famous work – “The Calling Leader”, replicated in hundreds of copies in the squares, railway stations, museums and squares of many cities of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, in the early 1920s he collaborated with V.V. Mayakovsky and M.M. Cheremnykh in the “Windows of Satire ROSTA”. Noteworthy, in 1923 he created the poster “Ultimatum”, mentioned by N. Ostrovsky in the novel “How the Steel Was Tempered”.

The work of Georgy Alexeyev “Triumph of the masses” is a rare example of the painter’s creative work, one of the earliest illustrations of the canon of socialist realism that just appeared in the 1930s. The color scale of the picture, made by K. Korovin’s pupil, still lives with the breath of impressionistic shades, but the internal monumental system and rhythm are in tune with those who have been optimistic and believe in the bright ups and downs of Soviet songs and marches of the 1930s. Walking at the head of a huge innumerable people, Comrade Stalin, surrounded by easily recognizable companions, against the background of the famous sculpture of the “Leader of the Caller”, somewhat resembles the iconography of the prophet Moses, who brings his people out of the desert.

Soviet artist Georgy Alekseev