Aleksey Ilych Kravchenko

V.S.Kemenov, Alexei Kravchenko. Zhivopis'. Grafika. Leningrad: Aurora, 1986

The board is slightly bowed. The surface of the painting is slightly dirty and there are some light scratcehs in the lower right corner. There are horizontal and local lines of craquelure and evidence of paint shrinkage throughout. There are flecks of paint loss throughout and in patches in the upper half and lower left edge. UV light reveals areas of retouching to these patches. Held in a wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Executed in 1920.

The art of Alexei Kravchenko is firmly rooted in the nineteen twenties and thirties. In 1904 Kravchenko was admitted to the Moscow Art School, where he studied under Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin and Apollinary Vasnetsov, and graduated with distinction in 1910. He then travelled in Italy and Greece, researching large-scale painting and frescoes. His Italian and Russian landscapes received much public recognition and were exhibited by the Union of Russian Artists, the World of Art movement, and the Moscow Artists' Fellowship.

Kravchenko's later travels in India, Japan and Sri Lanka revealed new possibilities for his painting and colour engraving. On his return to Russia at the beginning of the First World War, Kravchenko served as a war artist, sketching for newspapers and magazines.

In 1921 he moved from Saratov to Moscow, and devoted more time to sketching, engraving, etching and aquatint. He also illustrated editions of Pushkin, Gogol', Leskov and Hoffmann, and quickly established himself at the forefront of Russia's Romantic engraving tradition. In 1925, Kravchenko became one of the organisers of the '4 Arts' movement, uniting architects, sculptors, painters and graphic artists. Later he became a professor at the Surikov Art Institute, Moscow. Despite his multifaceted activities, Kravchenko always continued painting, successfully uniting Russian and European classical traditions in his work.