The ‘Soviet Matisse’ was born in Lipetsk, near Moscow. He studied in the town’s Free Art Studios between 1919 and 1922, and at the Higher Technical workshops in Moscow between 1922 and 1930 under Sergei Gerasimov, Ilya Mashkov and Pyotr Konchalovsky. Despite these years of study, Rublev was essentially self-taught, citing as major influences Modigliani (whose work he encountered at an exhibition in Moscow in 1922) and Pirosmani, the Georgian naïve painter. Rublev’s work of the 1930s is unlike any other in the Soviet canon, and his 1935 portrait of Stalin reading Pravda is one of the most famous non-objective images of the dictator ever painted. >> Read more
The ‘Soviet Matisse’ was born in Lipetsk, near Moscow. He studied in the town’s Free Art Studios between 1919 and 1922, and at the Higher Technical workshops in Moscow between 1922 and 1930 under Sergei Gerasimov, Ilya Mashkov and Pyotr Konchalovsky.
Despite these years of study, Rublev was essentially self-taught, citing as major influences Modigliani (whose work he encountered at an exhibition in Moscow in 1922) and Pirosmani, the Georgian naïve painter.
Rublev’s work of the 1930s is unlike any other in the Soviet canon, and his 1935 portrait of Stalin reading Pravda is one of the most famous non-objective images of the dictator ever painted. Doused in red, depicting Stalin with a serpentine dog at his feet, this almost diabolic portrait was never intended to be satirical but may have resulted in Rublev’s almost complete conversion to Monumentalist painting.
The artist also completed a series of commissions for work on the mosaics of metro stations in Moscow and Leningrad, as well as teaching between 1946 and 1952 at the Moscow Institute of Applied and Decorative Art, and, between 1952-1975, at the Mukhina School for Higher Industrial Art School in Leningrad.
It was only in the 1990s that his revolutionary work of the 1930s was discovered, and in 2002 he was awarded a personal exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
