Kim Britov (1925-2010) Landscape Oil On Panel Russian School

Oil on Bristol board (cardboard) by Kim Britov, a Russian figurative painter born in Sobinka in 1925 and deceased in Vladimir in 2010, who, along with Vladimir Yukin and Valery Kokurin, was one of the three founders of the Vladimir school of landscape painting.
Signed lower left.
Very good condition.
Painting dimensions : 25 X 19 cm.
Frame dimensions : 32 X 26 cm.
Kim Nicolaevich Britov spent his childhood until the age of thirteen in Kovrov, where his father was the director of a spinning and weaving factory. The year 1938 was marked by the arrest of his parents. He and his sister were taken in by their older brother in the city of Vladimir, where they worked as a turner and electric welder.
Kim Britov volunteered for the artillery during the Second World War; the hand injury he received there would prove a serious handicap in his early days as a painter, earning him the Medal of Courage of the Great Patriotic War.
After being a student of Nikolai Petrovich Sychev (a specialist in the icon tradition) at the Mstera Art School (ru) until 1948, Kim Britov was, along with the painters Vladimir Yukin (1920-2000), Valery Kokurin (1930-), and Mikhail Izotov, one of the main founders in 1952 of the Vladimir School, which consisted of a circle of artists who, in a classical figurative style, devoted themselves to landscape painting.
In 1954, Kim Britov became a member of the Union of Painters of the USSR (for ten years, from 1956 to 1965, he chaired the regional branch of artists in Vladimir) and participated in its Moscow exhibitions from 1957, having his first solo exhibition in 1975.
In 1981, he moved into a "welcoming country house", where he lived and painted until the end of his life, located in the Trinity-Tatarovo district of Mstera (a house identifiable by the commemorative plaque affixed in 2015 as part of an event dedicated to the ninetieth anniversary of his birth: Here, from 1981 to 2009, lived and worked the Russian painter Kim Nikolaevich Britov).
Kim Britov is seen as breaking away from the classical or post-impressionist figuration stemming from socialist realism through his "fauvist," even "incendiary" intentions. It is perceived that the painting of the Vladimir School of Landscape Painting is a manifesto: the Vladimir Fauves load their palettes with pleasureful colors. The intensity of the reds and blacks is highlighted by brilliant yellows. An instinctive artist, Kim Britov is not afraid to throw pure colors onto the canvas.
The fall of communism resulted in Kim Britov spending several months in Easton, Maryland, in 1991, at the invitation of the Academy of Arts, where he painted street scenes. He gave a lecture at the Academy on June 26, attributing "the brightness and boldness of its vivid colors" to the influence of Russian painters Constantin Youon, Boris Kustodiev, Igor Grabar, and Isaac Levitan, and also expressed his admiration for Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Vincent van Gogh, and Amedeo Modigliani.
From 1997 to 2003, Kim Britov was a professor at the Department of Graphic Arts at Vladimir State Pedagogical University. After more than sixty years of pictorial activity, in which it is estimated that he painted three to four thousand paintings (most of them urban or rural landscapes related to the cities of Suzdal, Vladimir, Rostov-on-Don, Borisoglebsk, his visits to Karelia, Mordovia and the Urals) and participated in approximately two hundred and twenty exhibitions, he died on January 5, 2010, three days before his eighty-fifth birthday. The Vladimir Oblast Fine Arts Center is maintaining the retrospective exhibition planned to celebrate the artist on this occasion, inaugurated on January 12 as a posthumous tribute.
Public Collections :
- Belgorod State Art Museum.
- Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
- Institute of Russian Realist Art, Moscow, March – The Guests Have Arrived, oil on canvas, 87x112cm.
- Museum of Russian Impressionism, Moscow, Winter in the Urals, oil on cardboard, 1972.
- Novokuznetsk State Art Museum.
- Pereslavl-Zalessky State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum-Reserve.
- Rybinsk State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum-Reserve.
- Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, Autumn near Mstera, oil on cardboard, 1976.
- Mordovia State Museum of Fine Arts, Saransk.
- Chuvash State Museum, Cheboksary (Chuvashia).
- Museum of Contemporary Realism, Togliatti.
- Tomsk Regional Art Museum, Autumn in Mstera, painting.
- Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Conservatory of History, Art, and Architecture, Vladimir.
- Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland.
- Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
- Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster University.
- Collection of the Russian Museum of Malaga (es).
Awards and distinctions :
- Honored Painter of Russia, 1978.
- People's Artist of the Russian Federation, 1995.
- Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, 1997.
- Pushkin Gold Medal, 2000.
- Isaac Levitan Prize, 2002.
- Honorary Citizen of the City of Vladimir, 2003.