Famous Uzbek painters Plan

Dyers.1932. Oil on canvas. 76 x 76cm

Zinaida Kovalevskaya

By the Khauz (Pond). Oil on canvas. 83 x 83.5cm

Zinaida Kovalevskaya (1902-1979)

Kovalevskaya studied at the Kazan Art School (1922-1927) under P. P. Benkov. In 1943, she graduated as an external student from the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad. Since 1930 in Uzbekistan. Kovalevskaya worked as a teacher at the Samarkand Art School.

Mikhail Kurzin

Capital. Paperoncarton, gouache. 42 x 67cm



Mikhail Kurzin(1888-1951)

Kurzin studied at the Kazan Art School from 1904 to 1907, and in 1908 moved to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. From 1910 to 1912 he studied in the private studio of M. Bernstein in St. Petersburg.After a visit to China, Kurzin became a teacher at the Higher Art and Technical Workshops (VKHUTEMAS). In 1922, he moved to the Crimea (Simferopol) with E. Korovai, and in 1923-to Tashkent.

In Tashkent, he worked at the Opera and Ballet Theater, in newspapers and as a teacher. In 1927, Kurzin was one of the founders of a group of artists called "Masters of the New East". The artist was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to five years in prison and three years in exile on charges of hostility to the Soviet government, making statements about terrorist intentions against Stalin, and anti-Soviet propaganda.
In the 1930s, critics dismissed Kurzin's works as "formal" and argued that they distorted Soviet reality, that the artist deliberately portrayed a Soviet person so ugly.The artist was serving time in Kolyma. At the end of 1945, Kurzin moved to Bukhara. In 1948, he was again arrested for unauthorized arrival in Tashkent and again accused of anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to exile in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. He died in 1951.