Rusakov Nikolay Afanasyevich

Painter. Teacher, member of the Union of Artists of the USSR (1936). The first Chelyabinsk artist to receive a capital education, he made a huge contribution to the development of painting in his native city and became one of the founders of the Chelyabinsk Union of Artists. He studied with N.I. Feshin at the Kazan Art School and K.A. Korovin in MUZHVZ. During his years of study in Kazan, he became friends with A. M. Rodchenko. Portraits of Rusakov by Rodchenko (1912), as well as a portrait of Rodchenko by Rusakov (1915) are in the collection of the Chelyabinsk Regional Art Gallery. Travels by ship from Odessa to Kyoto (1915) and through the mountainous part of Central Asia (in the 1920s) filled the artist’s work with oriental subjects. Rusakov possessed compositional thinking and combined realistic, neoclassical, expressive-impressionist plasticity in his method. The author's works are in many regional museums in Russia.