Art in Evacuation

On 22 June 1941 the inhabitants of Moscow were shocked by the announcement that the German Army had invaded the USSR. Thousands of people heard foreign minister Molotov’s address on the radio, or over loudspeakers in the streets, and were unable to believe that the country had been plunged into war.

Vasily Kirikov was a famous restorer and a well-known researcher of ancient Russian painting who worked at the State Tretyakov Gallery and the Center named after I. Grabar. He also experienced the hardships of war at first hand.

Yuri Pimenov, one of the leading painters of that time, was among those who chose to stay in Moscow. He combined his work on stage sets for the Lenkom and Maly theatre companies with a series of paintings on military themes.

The first trains of students, professors and their families began to arrive in October 1941. One of the first to arrive was the group from the Moscow Art Institute. It took them an entire month to reach Samarkand due to frequent stops to let military trains pass and to wait out air raids.

During the evacuation, Robert Falk taught at the Uzbek Art College and the Moscow Art and Technical College. Falk continued to paint. In Samarkand, he created a number of amazing landscapes and portraits.

The students would decorate tea rooms and paint portraits of the locals. The key request from the clients was for the portraits to be en face and with all the minute details of the costumes, in line with Eastern miniature traditions.

But it was perhaps Sergey Gerasimov who contributed the most to creating a scientific and creative atmosphere in Samarkand. As well as teaching, he had to take care of administrative matters, while continuing to paint himself.

In 1943 there was an important exhibition of works by Igor Grabar and Sergey Gerasimov, while the Pushkin Museum displayed 50 graduation works from students at the departments of painting, graphic art, sculpture and architect at the Moscow Art Institute, all of them produced in evacuation in Samarkand.

In 1941 in Tbilisi Igor Grabar’s created a portrait of Sergei Prokofiev, who was composing his “War and Peace”

The Moscow Secondary Art School for Gifted Children was evacuated ti Bashkiria. It had the support of outstanding cultural figures such as Igor Grabar, Sergey Gerasimov, Ivan Moskvin, and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.

Later many of young artists, such as Gely Korzhev, Viktor Ivanov, Pyotr Ossovsky, Pavel Nikonov, Igor Popov, Ivan Sorokin and Vladimir Stozharov, went on to become great Russian painters

“When you get to the point when black paint turns blue, and sienna into cadmium, when one paint takes on a different shade next to another, that’s when you will understand what it is all about, what it is like to create complicated colour combinations on a canvas". Vasily Pochitalov.

One of the most talented students was Viktor Ivanov.

A month after getting back to Moscow, Igor Grabar organized an exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery called “Two Years in Bashkiria”.

The artists’ works are not linked by a solemn heroic-patriotic theme alone. They are all attuned to universal human values, inextricably connected with personal life and spiritual experience.

The art of wartime enriched Russian art. Artistic expression matured, and the power of the figurative and symbolic message is testimony to the deep emotions, true power and sincere feelings of masters who overcame severe trials and, together with their country, conquered them.

The centre of the Soviet filmmaking was established in the “Asian Hollywood”, the Central United Film Studio in Alma-Ata.

The biggest hall of the Central United Film Studio was where Ivan the Terrible was shot. Eisenstein’s film was the most important project of the war years.

During the Great Patriotic War, he spent the first few months in the besieged Leningrad where he continued to work on the famous "Seventh Symphony" ("The Leningrad Simpony"), which he started to write a year earlier. In October 1941, he was evacuated to Kuibyshev, where in late December completed symphony.

During the evacuation Bolshoi staged nine operas (six of them premieres) and five ballets (three premieres) at the theatre in Kuibyshev.

A production of Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki was staged before the war and awarded the Stalin’s prize during the evacuation.

The sets were by Petr Williams and Olga Lepeshinskaya the title role. Later Galina Ulanova competed with her in this part.