Painting. Russian artists. Yevgeny Lansere (1875-1947)

Yevgeny Yevgen'evich Lansere, a remarkable painter and draughtsman, from 1892 to 1895 studied in St.Petersburg at the School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. He spent the winter of the years 1895-7 in Paris, attending the studio of Filippo Colarossi and the Academie Julian.
Benois exerted a great influence on Lansere's art, their reconstructions of the eighteenth century life had much in common with. Due to Benois Lansere became member of the World of Art group in 1899. In the gouache Empress Yelizaveta Petrovna at Tsarskoe Selo, of 1905, Lansere used a linear pattern and bright colours to recreate a scene from eighteenth century Russia. It resembled the reconstruction of the life of Versailles by Benois.
As a draughtsman and illustrator Lansere was affected by Japanese prints. It is evident in his pen-and-ink vignettes for the World of Art Journal. Lansere's best-known book illustrations are those for the works by Tolstoy, particularly for the short novel Khadzhi Murat, of 1912-5. Like several of his friends in the World of Art group, Lansere granted drawings to the satirical journals that appeared in 1905 as a reaction to the government's brutal repression of the revolutionary uprisings.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Lansere was defiant towards new authority. He made anti-Bolshevik posters in 1918-19 for OSVAG, a propaganda agency of the White Army. However, this episode was forgiven. In the 1930s Lansere became one of the most prominent painters under Stalin, depicting activity and leisure of the Soviet Modern Men in a monumental bravura style in patriotic murals for the Kazan Railway Station in Moscow, of 1933-4, and the Moskva Hotel, of 1937.
 

Literature: Book "Russian art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva