Brodsky I.I. (1883 (1884 New Style)-1939), artist

Categories / Art/Fine Arts/Personalia
BRODSKY Isaak Izrailevich (1883-1939, Leningrad), painter, Ph.D. (Arts History) 1939, honoured art worker of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1932. He studied at the Odessa Art School in 1896-1902 and under Ilya Repin at the Academy of Arts in 1902-08. He painted portraits and lyric landscapes evoked by the poetic style of symbolism and the art nouveau, such as Grey Day painted in 1909 and exhibited in the Russian State Museum and Portrait with a Daughter painted in 1911 and exhibited in Brodsky’s Memorial Flat. A keen follower of the socialist realism in the Soviet time, he painted large-scale historical-revolutionary pictures and portraits of party and government leaders, which were widely used for replication and propaganda, such as Lenin in Front of the Kremlin, V. I. Lenin Addressing the Meeting of Putilov Plant’s Workers, and V. I. Lenin in Smolny, painted in 1924, 1929, and 1930 respectively, and exhibited in Lenin’s Museum, Moscow (today, in Leninskie Gorki); I. V. Stalin, painted in 1937 and exhibited in the State Russian Museum; and K. E. Voroshilov Skiing, painted in 1937 and exhibited in the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, Moscow. He was a teacher in the Institute of Art, Architecture, and Sculpture in 1932-39, professor and the director from 1932 and 1934, respectively. He became the director of the All-Russian Academy of Arts in 1934. He was buried at Literatorskie Mostki. The present-day Mikhaylovskaya Street bore his name from 1940 to 1991. Brodsky’s Memorial Flat was opened in the house where Brodsky lived in 1924-39 at 3 Iskusstv Square (memorial plaque) in 1949.

Works: My Creative Development, the second supplemented and revised edition published in Leningrad in 1965.

Reference: Бродский И. А. Исаак Израилевич Бродский. М., 1973.

O. L. Leikind, D. Y. Severyukhin. Brodsky Isaak Izrailevich
Iskusstv Square/Saint Petersburg, city, house 3
Мой творческий путь. 2-е доп. и перераб. Л., 1965
Бродский И. А. Исаак Израилевич Бродский. М., 1973 Academy of Arts
Academy of Arts
Brodsky's Memorial Flat
Russian Museum, State
Repin Academic Institute Of Painting, Sculpture And Architecture, St. Petersburg State
Literatorskie (Literary) Mostki, the museum-necropolis