Vasily
Nikolayevich Chekrygin

(1897, Zhizdra, Kaluga province – 1922, stretch Pushkino – Sochi)

A distinctive representative of symbolism in Russian art, the main inspiration of the society "Makovets". In 1907 he enrolled as a student in the iconographic school of Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. Escaped

from school, at the age of thirteen became a student of the Moscow College of painting, sculpture

and architecture. Said of himself: "I'm not a genius, but genius."

Creativity is based on Chekriguina – experience of Renaissance painting, primarily painting of Tintoretto and El Greco, as well as the teaching of N.F.Fedorov on the universal resurrection of the dead

as the Supreme creative task of mankind. The main work of the artist – a huge series of drawings "the Resurrection" – is a set of sketches for the decoration of an imaginary "Cathedral", where the whole human race, risen from the dead, begins "migration in space".

In 1922 Chekrygin took an active part in the organization of the society of artists "Makovets" (the name of the hill of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra), the magazine and the program for society the exhibition "Art – life".

At the age of twenty five years died under the wheels of a train. The artist's works are kept in many museums of Russia, as well as in Karakalpak GMI them. I. V. Savitsky.

V. I. Chekrygin grew up in Kiev, and the boy was adopted in the iconographic school of Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. At the age of thirteen, accompanied by older brother went to Moscow to enroll in the school and easily won the competition.

In 1912, three students of the school have made a book of poems that was written by one of them Chekrygin rewrote poems on special paper with which they can be translated into lithographic stone, and added a few drawings. It was the first book of poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky - "I am!". A talented young man is friends with senior colleagues, passionate about finding new forms, new ways in art. He writes angular, sharp, full of internal drama portraits, evoking the displeasure of the teachers.

In 1914, out of school, involved in one of the famous "leftists" exhibitions - No. 4 (1914). The first world war found him abroad, by a circuitous route he returned to Russia, was at the front.

The beginning of the 1920s - the heyday of the artist. From this time came to us almost fifteen hundred of his drawings. He worked most often pressed charcoal, soft, velvety patches of the bed on the paper. And out of these swirling spots forming on the sheet a vague, mysteriously pulsating dark space, are unclear, but imbued with a passionate dramatic tension figures and faces. The drawings are sketchy, fluent. The artist does not give them names - they are just a long continuous chain, particles of a single, enormously the design, the outline of individual characters and episodes, which still have to get his final sense, United into a coherent whole.

In fact, the artist dreamed of a Grand mural dedicated to the future destiny of mankind. At the heart of this utopian idea - the philosophical doctrine N. Fyodorov about the resurrection of past generations and the relocation of mankind in the space provided, which made Chekriguina a lasting impression. But the mastery of space, the way to the stars is for the artist, not a technical problem, but a spiritual feat, performed heroic impulse and inspiration. Leaves Chekriguina with their shining from the darkness of naked bodies have nothing to do with science fiction. "Don't take these figures for the body, they do not have to be anything physical, it is only the images of the spirits", - said the artist.

But next to this philosophical utopia arises in the drawings chekrigina a completely different topic, topical, directly with a newspaper page: "the Famine in the Volga region" (1922). And here is the same interest is not the fact, although terrible, but the internal drama, the spiritual tension of time. Turning from painting to drawing, which allowed almost instantly throw the sheet this bursting of its storm of passion, Chekrygin remained a painter throughout his creative warehouse. These modest material the leaves seem to be painting, they are not graphical, non-linear, and filled with the mighty mass of colors (even just black and white), radiance of light and depths of darkness. And in their tragic power of these works resonate with the most dramatic images of the great masters of the past-with the mighty drawings of Tintoretto, inspired by the graphics of Rembrandt, tragic grotesques by Goya.

Passionate obsession with art penetrating in the fate of suffering and great humanity, made a very young Chekriguina the mastermind of a group of artists with similar spiritual aspirations. They called her "Art - life" or the title of its magazine "Makovets". The artist-thinker who sought and theoretically to determine the meaning of his art, Chekrygin was the ideologist of the group. But the way it ended tragically early: at the age of twenty-five years, the artist died under the train.