How Rodin's pupil became the chief sculptor of the socialist revolution: Ivan Shadr

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

"Girl with an Oar", "Cobblestone - the Weapon of the Proletariat" … These sculptures became symbols of Soviet art, common names, standards, which many artists were equal to. They have only one author - the Ural sculptor Ivan Shadr. Rodin's student, a frustrated street singer, an avid traveler - and a man who once decided to glorify his hometown of Shadrinsk to the whole world …

In fact, he was born and was baptized in the village of Taktashi in the Orenburg province - there his father, Dmitry Ivanov, seasonally worked as a carpenter, and his mother followed her husband, although she was about to give birth to her third child (there will be twelve children). But most of the year the family lived in Shadrinsk, and therefore Ivan - that was the name of the boy - always considered this city his homeland. In 1898 he ended up at the Panfilov merchants' woolen factory in Yekaterinburg. His life there was not easy. An errand boy, a watchman, a loader … Miserable pennies, boredom, cold - these three years were torture for him. However, he became friends with the son of the factory owner, who immediately saw in him a "divine spark" and insistently urged him to look for a business to his liking. In 1901, Ivan succumbed to persuasion and fled the factory. There is a legend that he escaped with the aim of … suicide. Exhausted by the hardships of work and the meaninglessness of existence, he intended to end everything in the icy waters of the Iset, but he met a charming girl on the embankment, got into conversation with her and changed his mind about drowning. The girl was the daughter of Mikhail Kamensky, the founder of the art and industrial school in Yekaterinburg. Soon Ivan, without any preparation, passed the exam at that very art-industrial school and … entered! For five years he successfully comprehended the secrets of drawing and painting, perspective and colorism under the supervision of the monumental artist Theodor Zalkalns.

In those years, the young artist became famous for his irreconcilable attitude towards injustice. He went to rallies and processions, protested against the Black Hundred pogroms, created a political caricature for magazines … He left school with a certificate of incomplete education, but, it seems, not too upset by this fact. Together with a former classmate, he undertook an amazing journey across the country - to the "Gorky places". And, in the end, Ivan walked alone to St. Petersburg with the firm intention of entering the local Academy of Arts, and then luck for a moment turned away from him. Ivan failed his exams. Trying to "gain a foothold" in St. Petersburg, he began to work as a street singer - he dabbled in physical work in his youth. His voice made an impression on the director of the Alexandrinsky Theater Mikhail Darsky. And instead of the Academy of Arts, Shadr (then still Ivanov) enters the Higher Drama Courses. True, she does not leave dreams of fine arts and continues to improve her skills. His drawings were highly appreciated by Repin himself, and the Shadrinsk City Council, at the request of many of Ivan Ivanov's St. Petersburg friends, gave him a scholarship for further education. Around the same time, he was thinking about changing his name. Ivanov is, of course, a wonderful surname, but not for someone who dreams of being famous! So Ivan thought, choosing a creative pseudonym for himself. There are too many Ivanovs, but not to break the roots because of this? And then the young sculptor decided to name himself in honor of his hometown of Shadrinsk - "to glorify it." So in 1908 Ivan Ivanov became Ivan Shadr - and remained in history with this name.

Then there was a year of military service and … Paris! There Shadr took lessons from Rodin himself, who sent him for an internship in Rome. Then, for another year, Shadr studied at the Moscow Archaeological Institute. He was not seduced by European experiments, his heart was not in Russian academism … Shadr was looking for his own way to reflect reality - the complex, saturated, ambiguous reality of pre-revolutionary Russia. And he actively criticized his modernist contemporaries.

However, this same reality did not dispose to a long search for oneself. Shadr worked a lot - he taught drawing to children, as they would say now, with special educational needs, took on any orders, worked in the film industry.

After the revolution, he went to Omsk to bring the whole family to Moscow, but he got stuck there for several years. In Omsk, an acquaintance with Kolchak took place, who offered Shadr several orders. After Kolchak's defeat, Shadr found himself under a cruel interrogation at the Cheka, but … the "reds" decided that a living sculptor could be useful. And now, a couple of months later, Shadr is working on a sculpture in memory of the victims of the White Terror by order of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee, making bas-reliefs and monuments with images of the fathers (and mothers) of the revolution …

Shadr also created the images of “ordinary Russian men” to be depicted on banknotes at the request of the State Sign - together with his wife, he traveled around Russia in search of sitters. Then came sixteen sculptures of Lenin, monuments to Pushkin and Gorky … The first marked postcards and envelopes in socialist Russia came out with stamps based on his sketches.

The iconic "Girl with an Oar" appeared in 1934 (however, many "girls" in Soviet parks are copies of a sculpture by another author; Shadr's work was destroyed by bombing in the first year of the war). And the famous proletarian lifting a cobblestone, inspired by the images of Michelangelo's "slaves" and antique sculpture, settled in many cities throughout the Soviet Union …

Ivan Shadr died in April 1941. His wife survived him by thirty years and contributed a lot to the preservation of his creative heritage. Today, some of the sculptor's works are carefully kept in museums, while others, created for the streets of Soviet cities, are mercilessly dismantled. The fate of the Ivan Shadr memorial complex in his hometown is also unenviable, but the memory of the main revolutionary sculptor is immortalized in the names of streets and educational institutions, and the images he created have become canonical for Russian art.