January 2, 1928
He was born in Moscow into a family of doctors. Oscar Rabin — Soviet and French artist. A member of the sixties, he founded pop art in Russia and author of the "Bulldozer Exhibition."
He lost his parents early: his father at 5, his mother at 13. He was raised by an artist Evgeny Kropivnitsky.
Under Soviet rule, he taught freedom from all kinds of patterns and dogmas. In his home, the oppression of the times was absent; breathing was easy and free.
He studied at art school in Moscow, then at the Riga Academy of Arts. His classmates called him "our Repin."
In 1948, he was invited to study as a second-year student at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, but was expelled a year later "for bourgeois formalism." He worked as a loader and foreman on a construction site.
In 1957, at the age of 29, he exhibited his works for the first time at an exhibition of young artists.
These were greatly enlarged children's drawings. They were unlike anything else. They were the first works of pop art in Russia. The confused committee members nevertheless selected a couple of canvases and exhibited them, unaware that the artist had used drawings by his daughter, Katechka, as models.
(Genrikh Sapgir)
For me, this kind of painting became almost like a game. It allowed me to unwind, to free myself from everything that had previously constrained me.
After the exhibition at the World Festival of Youth and Students, he began to earn money through painting – he worked at a decorative and applied arts factory.
In the late 50s, together with Kropivnitsky, he founded the unofficial group of avant-garde artists "Lianozovo" (named after the village near Moscow where Rabin lived; members gathered at his home, where he also held shows and sold paintings).
The "heroes" of his paintings are symbols of the unsettled Soviet world: lamps, barracks, fish, stamps, labels, coins, passports. These objects were valuable in themselves for the artist, revealing the seamy side of life.
His most famous works in the USSR are “Dump No. 8” (1958), “Passport” and “Three Roofs” (1964), “Still Life with Herring and Onions” (1965), and “Ruble” (1966).
I paint what I see. I lived in a barracks, and many Soviet citizens lived in barracks too, and still do. Now I've moved into a block of flats and paint the blocks of flats that surround me.
Among his buyers were not only Soviet collectors, but also foreign diplomats and journalists. The paintings were exhibited in London, But in his homeland, exhibitions featuring Rabin were quickly shut down. The artist was criticized in the press for denigrating the Soviet Union, the depressing nature of his paintings, and playing into the hands of bourgeois critics of socialism.
Rabin's "works" evoke genuine physical disgust; their very subject matter is a sign of his spiritual poverty.
(Moskovsky Komsomolets, 1960)
In 1974, he staged the "Bulldozer Exhibition" of nonconformist artists in a vacant lot near new buildings. It became the most famous public performance of unofficial art in the USSR. The event was dispersed with bulldozers and water sprinklers. Paintings were smashed, and participants were detained and beaten. Rabin, hanging from the bulldozer's bucket, was dragged across the exhibition grounds.
It was more of a political challenge to the repressive regime than an artistic event. I knew we would have problems, there would be arrests, beatings. We were terrified for the last two days before the exhibition.
Two weeks later, after an open letter from the artists against the "hooligans" and a furor in the Western media, the exhibition was allowed to be held in Izmailovsky Park.
In 1975 he painted one of his famous paintings, “Untruth,” a parody of a newspaper that can only be used to wrap fish.
In 1977, he was arrested on charges of parasitism. He soon left for France and was deprived of Soviet citizenship.
Lived and worked in Paris The most famous works of recent years are “Emigrant Still Life” (1990), “Visa to the Cemetery” and “Icon, Vodka and Democratic Caviar” (2006).
The first exhibition of his works in Moscow took place only in 1991. The first film appeared in the Tretyakov Gallery only in 1994.
He died in 2018. Florence, on the eve of the opening of his exhibition. He was 90.