Mihail Chemiakin

Chemiakin was born to a military family. His father, a Kabardian from the Caucasus Mountains Mikhail Petrovich Kardanov, had lost his parents and was adopted by a friend of his father's, White Army officer Piotr Chemiakin. The artist's father eventually became a Soviet Army officer. He received one of the first Orders of the Red Banner at the age of thirteen. Chemiakin's mother was an actress and poet Yulia Nikolaevna Predtechenskaya of Russian noble heritage. She met her future husband in 1941 with the start of the Great Patriotic War and asked him to take her to the front line. She served in cavalry under the command of Lev Dovator and took part in battles alongside her husband.[1]

Mihail Chemiakin spent his early years in East Germany where his father served. His family returned to the Soviet Union in 1957. He studied at the secondary school of art affiliated with the Il’ya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad, but was expelled from it in 1961 for «aesthetic deprivation» of classmates and failing to conform to Socialist Realism norms. Between 1959 and 1971 he worked various niche jobs, in-between which he participated in different art projects.

He later got a job at the Hermitage Museum. With his colleagues from the museum Chemiakin organized an exhibition in 1964, after which the director of the museum was fired and all the participants forced to resign. In 1967 he founded the group of artists called St. Petersburg. Together with the philosopher Vladimir Ivanov he created a treatise called Metaphysical Synthesism dedicated to «new forms of icon painting based on studying of religious art of all epochs and nations». He was subjected to forced psychiatric treatment and in 1971 he was exiled from the Soviet Union.[2] According to Chemiakin, the KGB officer behind this actually saved him by offering to «quietly leave the country» with $50 in the pocket, because some people from the Artists' Union of the USSR insisted on his isolation.[3]

• List of Russian artists

• The Grove Dictionary of Art, by Jane Shoaf Turner (Ed.), Grove's Dictionaries. ISBN 1-884446-00-0
• Kolodzei Art Foundation
• Kolodzei Art Foundation and Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mikhail Mikhailovich Shemiakin.

• Mihail Chemiakin; Vol. 1: Russian Period, Paris Period; Vol. 2: Transformations, New York Period, 1986 by Mihail Chemiakin, Mosaic Press, NY, 1986.. ISBN 0-88962-327-9
• M. Chemiakin: A View of the Artist Through the Media, 1962–1999, by Ilya Bass and Alan Lamb, Woollyfish Imprints, 2000. ISBN 0-9705728-0-8
• Staging the Nutcracker, by Mihail Chemiakin, Rizzoli, 2001. ISBN 0-8478-2346-6
• Heike Welzel: „Michail Šemjakin: Malerei und Graphik. Von der inoffiziellen sowjetischen Kunst zur russischen Kunst im Exil". Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 2006. ISBN 978-3-7861-2531-0