Peter Utkin was born on October 9, 1877 in Tambov, Russia.
1877 - 1934
A Russian Symbolist painter, restorer, graphic artist and teacher.
Born into the family of a railroad worker who was a station manager. After moving to Saratov, he stayed with his mother Olga Varfolomeevna (his father left the family) and helped her, willingly making ornaments of flowers, herbs and foliage. In the 1890s, he studied at the Saratov studio of the Society of Fine Arts Lovers and at the Bogolyubovo drawing school.
One of the organizers of the first exhibition of the Symbolists «Scarlet Rose» in Saratov; Moscow exhibitions “Blue Rose”. He was a professor at the painting faculty of the All-Russian Academy of Arts. He worked in the genres of landscape, still life, decorative panels, magazine and book graphic illustration. The works, most of which were destroyed in the Moscow fire and in besieged Leningrad, are in the main museums, galleries and private collections in Russia.
Key ideas:
– The creative talent of Peter Utkin was distinguished by a special lyricism, the musical spirituality of works that sound in unison with the era of the Silver Age in Russian art. The fragile dreamy-sad, often melancholic intonation is characteristic of the series “Seasons”. The artist prefers cloudiness or twilight and is rather indifferent to the generous sunshine.
– Only a few canvases of the Blue-Roze period are preserved. Their figurative meaning is deliberately unclear. These pictorial mystic and symbolist impersonations are sometimes irrational, but they possess a great power of involuntary suggestion. Peter Savvich said that everything is meaningful, mysterious and deep for an artist,. The phenomena of life are not traceless, because they are beautiful.
– The material in the Utkin pictures is light and not loud, as the artist chooses a gray-blue tonality. It dominates, but includes brownish and ocher, subdued-blue, olive, lilac shades. The soft radiance of the surface of paints gives that feeling of sad tenderness, which art critics call the “Utkin’s mood”. Made in the blue-lilac favorite of the Symbolists tones, bizarre in composition, sometimes reminiscent of frosty patterns on the glass, Utkin’s picturesque canvases created his reputation as of the most consistent of the Symbolists.
– In the Crimean suite, which was created in the period of the general attenuation of Symbolism, the mystic disappears and the clarity of vision is restored. However, enlightened and elegiac intonation remains here. Departing from the “dreamy and allegorical worlds”, Utkin turns to the lyric plein air of pre-Blue-Rose works.
1877
1897
1902
1904 - 1910
1916
1917
1918 - 1931
1931
1934
Peter Utkin was born on October 9, 1877 in Tambov, Russia.
Entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he studied for 10 years in classes of A. Arkhipov, N. Kasatkin, L. Pasternak, I. Levitan, then at the workshops of V. Serov and K. Korovin.
Together with Kuznetsov and Petrov-Vodkin, he worked on the creation of frescoes in the Saratov church of the Kazan Mother of God, for retreating from the destroyed canons.
Participated in the exhibitions “Scarlet Rose”, “Blue Rose”; together with Matveyev and Kuznetsov he continued to make design for the villa of J. Zhukovsky in the Crimea.
In the almanac “Moscow masters”, one of the program pictures “The Glow of the Sea” was published.
Together with P.Z. Kuznetsov, he entered the organizational council of the emerging Union of Moscow painters.
The artist was commissioned, together with A. Kravchenko, to organize a collegium of fine arts in Saratov and to direct schools of painting and drawing. He became the first ombudsman for the affairs of the Free State Art Studios, the head of one of the workshops and the studio of fine arts, a member of the expert-commission at the Radischevsky Museum; He received the title of the Honored Hero of Labor (1922).
Left his job due to a conflict with the director of the Saratov Art College. Moved to Leningrad; at the invitation of the Academy of Arts, he became a professor in the painting department of the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.
He died on October 17, 1934 in Leningrad, Russia.