The last big Soviet art Promi-Diepresse.com
After 1970, the Georgian became sought -after monument artist. In Postsowjetic Russia there was protest against its gigantic statues.
With the Surab Zereteli (English: Zurab Tsereteli), who worked as a monumental sculptor in his last decades, one of the last great art celebrities of the Soviet Union died on Tuesday night. The Zereteli from Georgia served until the end as President of the Russian Academy of Arts in Moscow. After a comet -like career in the USSR, his gigantic statues in Postsowjetic Russia ensured protests.
On January 4, 1934 in Tbilis (Tbilissi), born in a Georgian family of artists, Zereteli had become famous in his Georgian Soviet Republic in the 1960s with mosaic work and as a result throughout the Soviet Union. « The artist tries to express the life happy of the Soviet person in his works, » wrote the « Prawda » in 1970 on the occasion of the awarding of a Lenin prize.
« /> One of his statues by Josef Stalin. Reuters / Alexander Demianchuk
In the following decades, the sought -after monument artist, whose oversized sculptures with the support of the Soviet state should also be exported to the West. In 1990 the sculpture « Good Defeats Evil » was unveiled in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York. When Moscow Mayor Juri Luschkow had an approximately 100 meter high monument for Peter the Great in the center of the Russian capital, there were protests in the art scene, which, however, could not harm the monument.
Zereteli, who liked to give the old school patriarch, also worked as President of the Russian Academy of Arts since 1997. However, his death will not only mean a cut for the academy: the future of the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, which he founded, is also questionable, which is led by Zereteli’s grandson Wassili.
« /> Tsereteli in front of his monument ‘The Big Three,’ Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin (VLNR) Unknown
