A painting with a difficult fate

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Igoshev, People's Artist of the USSR and Russia, who captured metro construction workers in the work process, showing how backbreaking human labor gives birth to beautiful underground palaces.

Vladimir Igoshev against the backdrop of the painting “Underground. Metro builders." Work on it was carried out from 1969 to 1972.

Vladimir Igoshev’s daughter Natalya recalls how her father got ready at the first glimmer of dawn and went to the construction of the Kuznetsky Most and Ploshchad Nogina stations. There, even before the start of the work shift, he painted portraits of tunnel workers, miners, and foremen, and over time he collected a whole gallery of representatives of metro construction professions.

“For dad, the man himself came first. He was often commissioned for portraits of leaders and bosses. But he was not interested in writing such works. He traveled a lot throughout Russia and abroad and found heroes for his paintings, as a rule, from ordinary workers,” says Natalya Vladimirovna. “If he was fascinated by his work, he could disappear for days in the workshop, forgetting about lunches and dinners. Pictures have surrounded me all my life. It still feels strange to me when I walk into a house with empty walls.

Vladimir Igoshev became famous for his series of portraits of the Khanty and Mansi, for which he received the nickname “singer of the North.” Once in the Urals, the artist was fascinated by the work of Sverdlovsk metallurgists, dedicating to them a canvas entitled “Facing the Fire. Open-hearth furnaces of Uralmash." Well, in the capital, of course, the attention of Vladimir Alexandrovich was attracted by the metro builders.

The idea of a painting dedicated to subway builders was liked by metro construction worker Tatyana Fedorova. With her support, the artist received a permanent pass to construction sites, a uniform, and every day he went to work.

For some time, the builders avoided the artist, but not for long. They saw how seriously he wanted to delve into their more than difficult matter. How is he able to stand a full shift with them in a wet, cold, dimly lit mine, without leaving his notebook, constantly making endless sketches in it, meticulously inquiring into the intricacies of technology and working methods.

In 1970, an exhibition of canvases was held at the Metrostroy club, from which the foreman of the tunnelers V.I. Golubev and Anton Kruglov, the tunnelers Nikolai Karazev, Leonid Lomakin and Nikolai Povetkin, the electric mechanic Anisim Kvachev, and the electric locomotive driver Vasily Grib looked at them. And soon a special room was allocated for paintings. There the artist stretched out a huge canvas and began to realize his plan. Almost three years in total were spent on this work.

“There were no poster Stakhanovites here with jackhammers at the ready, but there were strong, stubborn people whom the subway exhausted to the limit during their shift, so that every next day had to begin at a different point, shortening their earthly existence with shagreen skin. In this group portrait, with its unusual coloring and unusual setting of the underground world, there was something unsaid and, perhaps, menacing...” – wrote about the painting “Underground. Metro builders" Boris Melentyev, Minister of Culture of the RSFSR from 1974 to 1990.

In 2006, while preparing a publication for Metrostroevets, our correspondent Yuri Petrunin met with Vladimir Igoshev. He found out what happened to that grandiose painting. After finishing the work, representatives of the exhibition commission appeared in the artist’s studio and rejected the painting. Igoshev showed too realistically the hard work of the metro builders, which did not correspond to new times.

The audience never saw the painting and for a long period it was stored in Vladimir Alexandrovich’s workshop on Taganka. There were proposals to sell it abroad. But the artist decided to keep his work in Russia. Now the painting is in the possession of the artist’s daughter.

Natalya Igosheva provided several sketches from a series about metro builders for the new exhibition at the Mosmetrostroy Museum.

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Soviet and Russian artist-painter, professor Vladimir Aleksandrovich Igoshev was born in 1921. In 1940 he graduated from the theater and art school in Ufa (teachers: I.I. Uryadov, A.E. Tyulkin). From 1944 to 1950 he studied at the Moscow State Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov. Participant of the Great Patriotic War. Since 1944 - member of the Union of Artists of the USSR.

From 1951 he worked as a teacher at the Ural Polytechnic Institute, and from 1968 to 1980 he taught at the Moscow Architectural Institute and the Moscow State Pedagogical University. In 1991 he received the title of People's Artist of the USSR. In 2001 he became a Laureate of the State Prize of Russia named after I. Repin.

Held numerous exhibitions in Russian and foreign cities. Paintings by Vladimir Igoshev are in museums and private collections of collectors.

Vladimir Alexandrovich died in 2007 in Moscow. The artist is buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.