"Bringing the Museum to You"

By permission of the artist’s gallery, The Cyber Art Show continues our study of Russian landscape painters with a 12-piece Exhibition of works by the late contemporary artist Yuri Petrovich Kugach (1917-2013), one of the premier 20th century Russian Realist painters.

 

Yuri was born in the Old Russian city of Suzdal, located in the Vladimir region. He began his art studies in 1931 at the "1905" Moscow Art School. When the school established a painting department in 1934, he was afforded the opportunity to study under the great master Nikolai Petrovich Krymov. Two years later Yuri studied at the Moscow Art Institute (known today as the Surikov) under the highly revered I.E. Grabar and S.V. Gerasimov. While studying painting at the Surikov, Yuri fell in love with Olga Grigoryevna Svetlichnaya a fellow artist and classmate. They married in 1937 and were blessed in 1939 with a son, Mikhail, who would later carry on the artistic tradition of his parents.

 

Yuri graduated from the Institute in 1942 and from 1948 to 1951 he taught at the Surikov. Yuri Kugach’s talents were considered so valuable that, during World War Two, the Soviet government evacuated him and ten other artists to Uzbekistan to escape the Nazi onslaught. After the war, Yuri was honored with a teaching and tutoring position at the Academicheskaya Dacha School for artists. Yuri was the founder and a member of the Moscow River School, a school steeped in the academic tradition. 

 

In 1951 Yuri and Olga moved to the Tver region-renowned for its scenic countryside-to instruct at the House of Artists of Russia. Yuri and Olga moved to the countryside of the Tver region, where they lived in close proximity to the Academicheskaya Dacha (House of Artists of Russia), which blessed by the presence of other great artists such as Ilya Repin and Isaac Levitan.

 

Yuri Kugach is known in Russia and around the world for his paintings of the Russian countryside, having received the USSR's highest honors for his amazing work. Kugach was awarded People's Artist of the USSR, and was a full member of the USSR Academy of Arts. He was a Winner of the USSR State Prize and Winner of the Repin State Prize of RSFSR.

 

His works are displayed in the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Museum of Art of the Uzbek SSR, the art museums in Gorky, Sumy, Rostov, Irkutsk, Kharkov, and Lvov. They are also in the Art Museum of the Turkmen SSR, the Kazakh SSR and Tyumen region Picture Galleries and those in Astrakhan and Odessa, the Republican United Museum of the Tadzhik SSR, the Taganrog Museum of Local Lore, the Museum of Russian Art Kiev, the Altai Museum of Local lore.