Sitnikov Vasily Yakovlevich

August 15, 1915 (the village of Novo-Rakitin Lebedyanskiy County Tambov province) - November 28, 1987 (USA)

painter and graphic artist.

In 1933 he studied at the Moscow ship & mechanical college. Attempt to do in VHUTEMAS in 1935 failed. Worked on the construction of the underground, animators and the director patternmaker AL Ptushko, showed slides of the lectures of professors of the Art Institute. VISurikova (for which he received the nickname "Vaska lamplighter", which was known in the informal circles). Becoming a victim of libel, in 1941 he was arrested, declared insane and sent to compulsory treatment in Kazan. Back in the capital (1944), odd jobs.

During the "thaw" joined the movement of unofficial art.

Since 1951, the artist actively taught, realized his dream of "home academy. Its educational system included many controversial paradoxes (advice on how to learn tone, "rastushevyvaya" newspaper photos, or how to write landscape broom from the trough with a colorful solution).

«... What is drawing? How should we draw? Drawing must be in the mind. That is, I teach drawing, the vision, imagination. We must learn to draw - not see the horizon of your drawing object, and it before. On the line you should forget and do not even know what it is. Like a cow. She does not know what a line. Lines do something and not. There is a horizon, ie the inversion of the invisible side. Before the forms - that's landmarks, and they can be any number. ... Corrode everything, except the only concern about the form and space, and this we must learn first. And all the rest: and proportions, and composition, and rhythm, and harmony - everything, everything, everything will come by itself ... » (V. Sitnikov).

With "school Sitnikov was linked - as a direct apprenticeship, and creative contacts - a number of prominent artists.

Since 1956 has participated in numerous exhibitions in Russia and abroad, including:

1970 - Nuove correntia Mosca (Museo Belli Arti, Lugano, Switzerland);

1975 - Exhibition of works by Moscow artists in the pavilion "Culture House" (VDNH, Moscow);

1976 - Exposition au Musee russe en Exil (Montgeron, France);

1979 - Progressive Strömungen in Moskau 1957-1970 (Museum Bochum (Bochum, Germany);

1988 - Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany).

favorite topics V. Sitnikov - nude, scenes from the life, monasteries, air landscapes, still lifes with a geometrical figures or Russian fields, stretching into the distance and merging with the sky, a horse pulling a cart on which yokel sitting (sometimes very Sitnikov) and play the balalaika virtuoso ..., Sitnikov liked to work the dry brush on canvas or paper, and then again and again addressed the surface so that paint shone through one another.

In 1975 he emigrated via Austria to the United States, leaving Russia in the collection of Oriental art and Russian icons, the most valuable part of which he gave to the Museum of Early Russian Art. Andrei Rublev.

creative legacy Sitnikova highly fragmented and hardly systematized. Some of the work is in the museum Zimmerly (piece of New Jersey, USA).