Ilya Glazunov

The Return of the Prodigal Son from 1977, probably the most controversial picture displayed in Moscow since the revolution, showed a youth in jeans, kneeling before a Christ-like figure standing in front of great men from Russia’s past, including Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky. In the foreground were grotesque, Orwellian-looking pigs, with a background of broken churches and concentration camps.

He overstepped the mark with The Mystery of the Twentieth Century, a monumental work featuring many figures from the 20th century including Lenin, Hitler and Einstein all overshadowed by the figure of Christ and an exploding atomic bomb. What upset the authorities was the inclusion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident, in prison garb. Yet even now Glazunov was shown relative leniency: instead of being sent into exile, he was briefly dispatched to Siberia to paint workers on the Baikal-Amur railway.

Communists condemned him as pessimistic and anti-Soviet; dissidents distrusted him because of his western suits, comfortable lifestyle, apparent closeness to the Kremlin and claims that he had spied for the KGB while overseas; and intellectuals viewed him as little more than an ambitious opportunist. Yet the masses loved him. Glazunov drew crowds in their thousands, touching a nerve with a Russian public who were eager to “take back control”.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union there emerged from this seemingly simplistic artist a crude and banal form of Russian chauvinism, which went hand in hand with his antisemitism. Although he had painted Leonid Brezhnev and his cronies and approved of Mikhail Gorbachev’s tolerance of religion, it was President Putin’s nationalism that truly appealed to Glazunov. As Leonard Bershidsky wrote for Bloomberg News, it had finally all come together for the artist: “the power of the Church, Putin’s near-monarchy, the fuzzy warmth of Soviet nostalgia and the celebration of iconic Russianness — in contrast to the ‘Sunset of Europe’, depicted by Glazunov as the arrival of feral-looking immigrants with their non-white faces”.

Ilya Sergeievich Glazunov was born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in June 1930, the son of Sergei, a historian, and Olga (née Flug), who were both descended from nobility. After watching helplessly as his parents starved to death in 1942 during the siege of Leningrad, the sickly orphan, now aged 11, was taken by an uncle, a Red Army doctor, to the farming village of Greblo, 100 miles to the south. After the war he returned to the city, where he studied at Leningrad Secondary Art School, later moving to the Ilya Repin Institute under Boris Ioganson. He contemplated entering the Orthodox priesthood at a monastery in Kiev, but was dissuaded and given the church’s blessing to live in the outside world.

In 1956 he won first prize at a young artists’ competition in Prague for a painting of Julius Fucik, a communist executed by the Nazis, and soon had his first solo exhibition in Moscow. Yet, in a sign of future controversies, his graduation work was rejected by the Repin Institute because it depicted a humbled Red Army retreating in the face of the Nazis’ advance in 1941. Only the patronage of Sergei Mikhalkov, who wrote the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem, saved him from oblivion.

Thanks to Mikhalkov he received commissions to paint a series of foreign ambassadors, Soviet celebrities and even Brezhnev. At the same time he put on a small exhibition in Moscow where one picture, of a naked girl lying on a bed with a young man gazing out of her window over a sun-drenched Leningrad, caught the attention of western reporters. A breathless journalist wrote: “The little gallery is jammed with artists and critics passionately arguing about this latest example of the artistic revolt against the old conservatism.”

In 1956 he had married Nina Vinogradova-Benois, a fellow former student who claimed to be related to Peter Ustinov. She was a costume designer and worshipped her husband, even selling her blood to buy his paints. She committed suicide in 1986, an event that Glazunov could not bring himself to address in art until Our St Petersburg in 1994, depicting a melancholic pierrot doll sitting by candlelight with the silhouette of St Isaac’s Cathedral in the distance. He is survived by their children Ivan and Vera, who are also artists.

His 1964 exhibition was swiftly closed on account of its “vulgar decadence”, but by the 1970s Glazunov was alarming the Kremlin with his ability to awaken Russians to the glories of their past. They bought his relative silence for some years with official commissions from the diplomatic community in Moscow and state-sanctioned visits overseas, such as to Austria to paint Kurt Waldheim, to Italy for a portrait of Gina Lollobrigida, or to Paris to create a panel for the Unesco headquarters. His visit to India to paint Indira Gandhi, a work given to her by Brezhnev, was the first time he was permitted to leave the country with his wife.

A visiting Times journalist described how Glazunov had turned his Moscow studio on the top floor of an apartment building into “an image of Holy Russia that the sons of the Bolshevik revolution would most like you to forget”. A huge portrait of Tsar Alexander III, rescued from a cellar in the Hermitage museum, dominated one wall, while others were covered with magnificent icons, crucifixes and pictures from Russia’s imperial past. The family lived on the floor below in an apartment packed with Russian bric-a-brac and looking like a set for Anna Karenina, heavy with drapes and atmosphere.

The intelligentsia, particularly in the west, dismissed him as a Kremlin sycophant. An exhibition at the Barbican concourse in London in 1987 drew derision from John Russell Taylor, the art critic of The Times: “Here and there one can detect tiny little points which might be considered daring, but it does not amount to anything much, and does not in any way interfere with his accessibility for a mass public and philistine administration.” The international art market seemingly shared that view at Sotheby’s in Moscow a year later when all four of his canvases failed to reach their reserve price while Soviet modernists sold well.

However, he was always ready to appeal to downtrodden patriots who yearned for the certainty of the tsarist era with its faith, autocratic leadership and fierce Russian identity. He mounted his own exhibition at the Palace of Youth in Moscow in 1988, holding a weekly question and answer session. “I think like you, and you think like me,” he roared to tumultuous applause. “If you want to become a member of the Artists’ Union, write an article against me; you’ll be admitted right away.”

His later works were, if anything, even more direct. The Market of Our Democracy from 1999 and seen at his God Save Russia exhibition in 2000, depicts Russian refugees standing near a transvestite; lesbians have sex near by, while junkies shoot up. In a blatant display of antisemitism children hold up a sign reading “Thanks to Uncle Soros . . .”, borrowing from the Stalinist slogan “Thanks to Joseph Stalin for our happy childhood”, while Boris Berezovsky poses with a poster that says “I’ll buy Russia”. An erotic television talk-show host poses near the refugees with a microphone portrayed as a phallus.

Glazunov claimed not to care what anyone thought. “I only tell the truth,” he would insist with a shrug. “Nobody likes to hear the truth. That’s why I’m controversial.”

Ilya Glazunov, Russian artist, was born on June 10, 1930. He died of heart failure on July 9, 2017, aged 87