Chekhonin Sergei Vasilyevich
(1878-1936)

Son driver Nikolaev railway, SV Chekhonin with fifteen years was to earn a living - served as a clerk, a draftsman, a cashier at the steamboat station. The love of art led him to St. Petersburg, where he studied at the School of Drawing at OPH (1896-97) and the school Tenisheva (1897-1900), and also thoroughly studied the art of ceramics.

And he began his career as a ceramic artist, having to take part in the decoration of many large buildings of the century (in particular, the hotel "Metropol" in Moscow).

Insatiable curiosity led him to master some other decorative crafts - interior design, painting on porcelain, enamel, miniature painting, and everything is so thoroughly that almost in each of these areas, he has managed to leave its mark.

Not content reached, Chekhonin addressed the chart. At first he worked as a cartoonist in the satirical journals of the first Russian revolution, then engaged in the design of books, and a very successful: in the 1910s. he was one of the few artists whose work has identified a high level of Russian art book (book covers Moravian M. "orange peel", 1914 S. Makovsky and H. Radloff "Contemporary Russian graphics", 1917, etc.). Impeccably owned font and ornament Chekhonin, along with D. Mitrokhin and G. I. Narbut , belonged to the "younger generation" of "World of Art", raised book graphics to new heights. Virtuoso, dekorativist and esthete, he is its spectacular and sophisticated style failed to respond to requests from the elite of the Russian society and became popular, even fashionable.

But paradoxically Chekhonin could be needed and a new society, after the outbreak of the social disaster of 1917. His life was now even richer. He was engaged in social activities, served the artistic director of the State Porcelain Factory in Petrograd-Leningrad (1918 - 23 and 1925-27). However, the main thing for him is still left to individual creativity. He changed his style considerably, bringing it dynamism and emotion. This new style - the "Soviet Empire" (by definition, the witty critic AM Efros) - Chekhonin used in everything he did: in portrait and commercial graphics, emblems, and numerous paintings on porcelain, which make an interesting chapter in the history of this art .

He was again fashionable, his work gave rise to a lot of imitations, followed by many professional artists, and hundreds of non-professional designers replicated his findings across the country in countless slogans, banners, headlines of newspapers and magazines, etc. With the new chehoninskim style became firmly associated Revolutionary era - dramatic, but still capable of awakening a sense of pathos.

The era has passed, and Chekhonin left Russia (1928). He lived in France and Germany, was still indefatigable, worked in the theater, almost has neither painted porcelain, or a book designer, but perfectly mastered the decorative painting of fabrics, even managed to invent a completely original way of multi-color printing on fabric. He died, apparently far from exhausting its amazing features.