Viktor Leonidovich Templin

At the height of Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937, the 17 year old Templin was accused of engaging in counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activities and sentenced to five years of hard labour in a camp in Kolyma. Whilst serving his sentence he produced stage and costume designs for the Magadan Theatre then under the artistic direction of Vasily Shukhaev, a fellow inmate. In the early 1960s, he left the world of theatre to focus on easel-painting, executing idealised landscapes of Podmoskovye, of which the present lot is a very early and fine example. Regularly excluded from exhibitions and publications on account of his criminal record, Templin was not given his first solo exhibition until 1980.