Mitrofan Grekov

Mitrofan Borisovich Grekov was one of the founders and most prominent representatives of the battle genre in Soviet painting. The work of this artist became a transitional stage between the realistic traditions of the 19th century and the art of socialist realism. Grekov saw the Civil War with his own eyes and captured it in numerous paintings. His battle paintings are distinguished by dynamism, clear composition, high reliability and attention to detail.

Mitrofan Grekov ‘s youth
Mitrofan Grekov was born in 1882 in the family of a Don Cossack. Grekov grew up on a farm, where there were no conditions for serious drawing. I had to study on my own until I entered the Odessa Art College at the age of 15. After another 5 years, exams were successfully passed at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.
At first, Grekov studied in the workshop of Ilya Repin, and then moved to the battle workshop of Franz Roubaud, the famous classic battle painter. From him, the young artist learned to achieve incredible realism of images. During his studies, he worked on Roubaud’s panoramas “Defense of Sevastopol” and “Battle of Borodino”.

In 1912, Grekov went to military service, and with the outbreak of the First World War, to the front. For three years he served in the 19th Cossack Hundred, and even in the difficult conditions of a soldier’s life, he found the opportunity to make sketches. As a result of a serious injury and health problems in 1917, he mobilized. But the military theme remained the main one for him until the end of his life.
The Greeks met the arrival of the revolution with enthusiasm and in 1920 volunteered for the Red Army. In the first half of the 1920s, he created a series of battle paintings dedicated to the victories over the White Guards and imbued with the romance of the revolutionary element. In many early works, an anti-militarist theme is noticeable, and the depiction of military everyday life is distinguished by deep truthfulness.

Grekov’s mature years
In 1927, the first personal exhibition of Mitrofan Grekov was held in Novocherkassk, and in 1930 he became one of the founders of the Union of Soviet Artists. During this period, he was fascinated by the ideas of developing diorama and panoramic works. For several months, Grekov and his assistants worked hard on “The Capture of Rostov” – a canvas measuring 4 by 8 meters.
This work undermined the health of the artist, but the result was admirable: to see the grandiose diorama, the audience lined up in a long line. Unfortunately, in World War II, the canvas burned down during the bombing of the train on which it was evacuated. Also, Grekov was the leader of the groups that wrote “Egorlyk battle” and “Near Warsaw”, but was forced to leave work due to health problems.

In the early 1930s, the artist worked on two dioramas: “Perekop” and “Defense of Tsaritsyn”. They also remained unfinished, but many sketches and large-scale paintings for them have been preserved. In 1933, Grekov learned of plans to arrange his solo exhibition the following year.
In order to most fully represent the events of the Civil War on it, he worked day and night, and only during the winter months creates more than 10 canvases. The exhibition opened on November 12, and two weeks later the battle painter died of cardiac arrest in Sevastopol, where he and a group of colleagues were going to paint sketches for the panorama “Storm of Perekop”.
Paintings
The real national fame came to the master after the posthumous exhibition, where more than 300 works were presented. Now many of his paintings are exhibited in the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum and the Grekov House Museum in Novocherkassk.















