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Oskar RabinArtist
Country:
 France |
Content:
- Biography of Oscar Rabin
- Early Life and Education
- Artistic Career and Recognition
- Later Years and Legacy
Biography of Oscar Rabin
Oscar Yakovlevich Rabin was a Soviet and French artist, renowned as one of the founders of the unofficial art group "Lianozovo". He organized the famous "Bulldozer Exhibition" in 1974. Rabin was awarded the Order of the Russian Academy of Arts "For Service to Art" in 2013.
Early Life and Education
Oscar Rabin was born on January 2, 1928, in Moscow, to parents Yakov Rakhmilovich Rabin and Veronika Martynovna Anderman. His parents were doctors, graduates of the University of Zurich, with his father hailing from Ukraine and his mother from Latvia. Rabin's father passed away when he was 5 years old, and his mother when he was 13 years old in 1941.
In the early 1940s, Rabin lived in Trubnikovsky Lane and studied at Eugene Kropivnitsky's art studio, where he developed a passion for romanticism. From 1946 to 1948, he attended the Riga Academy of Arts, focusing on a strict realistic method and producing numerous still life works. Rabin was referred to as "our Repin" by his Latvian classmates.
In 1948, he was admitted to the Moscow State Surikov Institute of Fine Arts by Sergey Gerasimov. However, he was expelled a year later for "bourgeois formalism" and returned to his first teacher, Eugene Kropivnitsky. During this period, Rabin worked as a freight handler for a waterworks construction site near Moscow. He described this period as a time of struggle and work rather than education.
Artistic Career and Recognition
From 1950 to 1957, Rabin worked as a loader in the railway and as a master in the construction industry. In 1950, he married Valentina Kropivnitskaya, who was also an artist. In the late 1950s, Rabin, along with E.L. Kropivnitsky, co-founded the unofficial art group "Lianozovo". In 1957, he participated in the III Exhibition of Young Artists of Moscow and Moscow Region, where he presented his first avant-garde works. These were greatly different from the traditional landscapes and still lifes, as they were enlarged drawings made by his daughter Katya. This was the first appearance of Pop Art in Russia.
In the following years, Rabin held personal exhibitions and sold his artworks to both Soviet and foreign collectors. He faced criticism from the Soviet press for his paintings, which were seen as a tarnishment of the Soviet Union and as supporting bourgeois critics of socialism.
In 1964, Rabin's works were exhibited for the first time abroad at the "Aspects of Modern Soviet Art" group exhibition in London. In 1965, Eric Estorick, owner of the Grosvenor Gallery in London, organized Rabin's first solo exhibition, featuring 70 of his works. During this time, Rabin moved from Lianozovo to Moscow.
In 1967, he joined the Artists' Committee for Book, Graphics, and Poster in Moscow. However, a group exhibition organized by Alexander Glezer on Shosse Entuziastov was shut down two hours after its opening. Rabin struggled to secure illustration jobs from publishers, unlike El Lissitzky or Viktor Pivovarov, and turned to selling his paintings in his own apartment.
In 1969, the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party decided that any exhibition could only be allowed after approval by the Moscow Union of Artists. Rabin proposed the idea of taking the paintings to the streets instead of organizing official exhibitions. In the fall of 1974, Rabin became the initiator and one of the main organizers of the famous "Bulldozer Exhibition" held in Bittsevsky Park.
Later Years and Legacy
In January 1977, Rabin was arrested on charges of parasitism and put under house arrest. After refusing to emigrate to Israel, his house arrest was replaced with nighttime detention in a pre-trial detention center. A few days later, he was offered a tourist visa to Europe and decided to leave the Soviet Union. He lived in France for six months before receiving an invitation from the Soviet consulate to return. However, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in June 1978.
Rabin spent the following years living and exhibiting in various countries, including the United States, France, and Russia. His artworks were included in major collections, and he participated in retrospective exhibitions. Rabin passed away on November 7, 2018, in Florence, just before his own exhibition titled "Two Paths" at the Florentine branch of the St. Petersburg Institute of Painting.
Oscar Rabin's contributions to the art world, his involvement in the unofficial art movement, and his role in organizing the "Bulldozer Exhibition" have left a lasting impact on the history of Russian art.
Rabin was survived by his second wife, artist Tatiana Lysak-Polishchuk, his son Alexander Rabin, and his daughter Ekaterina Kropivnitskaya.
