April 3, 1862
Born in Odessa Leonid Pasternak — an impressionist artist. A first-wave emigrant. The writer's father. Boris Pasternak.
My art has one advantage over words and literature: it is understandable in all languages. A painting, a drawing, a landscape, a portrait—whether painted by a Swede, a Frenchman, a Russian, or a Jew—is understandable to everyone.
My father rented an eight-room house, which he rented out to peasants and shepherds—it was called an inn.
Birth name - Avrum Itskhok-Leib Iosevich Posternak. He's been drawing since childhood. At the age of six, he completed his first commissioned drawing: a local janitor asked him to create sketches on hunting themes.
He studied at the Odessa Drawing School. At 19, at his parents' insistence, he entered Moscow University and spent two years studying to become a medical doctor.
I studied the part of anatomy that an artist needs—namely, osteology and myology, that is, the study of bones and muscles—with great interest and even passed with an “A.”
At 21, he transferred to the law department of the university in Odessa, Ukraine (Studying gave the right to travel abroad). At the same time, he studied at the Munich Academy of Arts, taking lessons from Shishkina.
At 26, he painted the canvas "News from the Homeland" (the subject was inspired by his years of service in the artillery) for a traveling exhibition. He became famous after it was purchased. Tretyakov. He spent the money he received on a trip to Paris, where he continued to study painting.
Upon returning, he married a pianist Rosalia Kaufman. At 28 he became the father of the future writer Boris Pasternak.
Together with the portrait painter Viktor Shtember He opened a school of painting and drawing and edited the literary and artistic magazine "Artist." He taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He participated in the annual exhibitions of the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) movement.
Was a member of the circle Polenovs, talked to Levitan, Serov, Korovin, Vrubel (the future "Union of Russian Artists"). The circle's members advocated complete creative freedom—Pasternak was the first Russian artist to call himself an impressionist. Some of his works—for example, "Rügen Island"—resemble paintings Van Gogh.
Was friends with Leo Tolstoy. One of the Romanov princes purchased his painting "Tolstoy with His Family at Yasnaya Polyana" for the Russian Museum. Pasternak's illustrations for the novel "Resurrection" won a medal at the World's Fair in Paris.
In 1905, the Imperial Academy of Arts awarded him the title of academician. Amidst the revolutionary unrest, he briefly left Russia with his family—by then he already had two daughters and two sons.
Author of portraits Gorky, Scriabin, Balmont, Bryusov, Mechnikov, Kropotkin.
In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, he was commissioned by the State Duma to draw a poster of a wounded soldier with a bandage on his head, "leaning against a wall and about to fall." It was posted throughout Moscow to collect donations, but Nicholas II saw this as a "discrediting" of the army.
In conversation he [the adjutant] informed me that the Tsar was dissatisfied with my poster; he said that "his soldier behaves bravely, and not like this!"
He rejected the October Revolution of 1917. However, he was the first of the academic artists to begin sketching Lenin and other revolutionary figures at congresses and meetings. He was one of the founders of the so-called Leniniana movement.
In 1921, he left for Germany with his wife and daughters for treatment. He organized solo exhibitions abroad and painted portraits. Albert Einstein, Rainer Rilke и John Osborne.
In the late 1930s, when the Nazi regime in Germany tightened its grip, he and his wife moved to England to live with their daughters. He never returned to the USSR. He last saw his son Boris in 1923. After his wife's death, he remained with his daughter.
He died in 1945, at 83, in Oxford. His last unfinished work was a portrait of Vladimir Lenin (the first exhibition in the USSR took place only in 1979).
I have to burn with shame when my role [in comparison to my father's] is so monstrously inflated and overestimated. Ultimately, he [the father] triumphs, having lived such a true, genuine, interesting, active, rich life.
(Boris Pasternak)
