Chekrygin Vasili Nikolayevich
(1897-1922)

VI Chekrygin grew up in Kiev, and the boy was admitted to the icon-painting school of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. At thirteen years old, accompanied by his older brother went to Moscow to study at Moscow School of Painting and easily withstood the competition.

In 1912, three students from the school with their hands produced a book of poems that were written by one of them-Chekrygin rewrote the verses on special paper with which they could be transferred to lithographic stone, and added a few pictures. It was the first book of poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky - "I". The talented youngster is friends with older students, enthusiastic search for new forms, new ways in art. He writes, angular, sharp, full of internal drama portraits, causing dissatisfaction of teachers.

In 1914, out of school, participates in one of the famous "left" exhibition - "№ 4" (1914). The First World War found him abroad, by a roundabout way, he returned to Russia, was at the front.

Beginning of the 1920s. - The flowering of the artist. From that time, came to us almost fifteen hundred of his drawings. He has worked most often pressed charcoal, soft, velvety patches of the bed onto the paper. And from these swirling spots forming on the sheet indefinitely, mysteriously throbbing dark space, act vague, but imbued with a passionate dramatic tension figures and faces. Sketchy drawings, escaped. The artist does not give them names - they are just endless links of the chain, a single particle, a colossal plan, an outline of individual characters and episodes, which still has to get his final sense, united into a harmonious whole.

In fact, the artist dreamed of a grand mural dedicated to the future destinies of mankind. At the heart of this utopian idea - the philosophical doctrine NFFedorova the resurrection of past generations and the relocation of mankind in the space provided, which made a lasting impression on Chekrygin. But the mastery of space, the path to the stars - it is for the artist is not a technical problem, but a spiritual feat, performed heroic impulse and inspiration. Sheets Chekrygin with their shining from the darkness of naked bodies have nothing to do with science fiction. "Do not take these figures for the body, they do not have to be anything physical, it's just the images of the spirits," - said the artist.

But along with this philosophical utopia arises chekryginskih figures quite different topic, topical, straight from the pages of newspaper: "The famine in the Volga region" (1922). And here is the same no interest to the fact, though terrible, and to his inner drama, the spiritual tension of time. Turning from painting to drawing, allows almost instant splash out on a sheet that breaks the storm of his passions remained Chekrygin painter throughout his creative temperament. These modest in material and sheets seem to be painting, they are not graphically, not linear, full of mighty masses of color (even if only black and white), the radiance of light and the depths of darkness. And in his tragic power of these overlap with the most dramatic images of the great masters of the past, with the mighty drawings Tintoretto, graphics inspired by Rembrandt, Goya tragic grotesque.

Passionate obsession with the art of penetrating the fate of suffering and beautiful humanity has made quite a young Chekrygin inspired a whole group of artists with similar spiritual aspirations. They called it the "Art - life" or, from the title of his magazine, "Jack of Diamonds". Artist-thinker who sought to theoretically determine the meaning of his art, Chekrygin was the ideologue of the group. But the way it was tragically cut short early: at the age of twenty-five years, the artist was killed by a train.