Yuri Eremin (Russian: Юрий Ерёмин; 1881,Yuri Eremin // RKDartists (Dutch) Kazanskaya, Voyskoy Donskoy Oblast — 1948, Moscow) was a Russian and Soviet artist and photographer, a representative of pictorialism.
Eremin studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the class of Apollinary Vasnetsov, attended drawing classes at the private Julian Academy in Paris, and after the October Revolution at the Higher Art and Technical Studios in Moscow. In photography, Eremin emerged as a creative personality before the Revolution, but became widely known in the 1920s and 1930s as a master of architectural and landscape photography, as well as for his nude photographs. During this period, he was an active participant in national and international exhibitions and professional discussions. From the late 1920s, his work was repeatedly criticized, but he continued to teach at universities and in Moscow photographic circles, held important positions in the civil service, and published photographs in major Soviet publications.
Interest in Yuri Eremin's work continued in Soviet art history even after his death in 1948. In 1966, a monograph on the photographer's life and work was published, and in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of articles appeared in prestigious professional and socio-political publications. Interest in his work intensified at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, when personal exhibitions of Eremin's photographs were held in Paris and Moscow.
Biography
Childhood and youth
Yuri Eremin was born in 1881 in the village of Kazanskaya in the Don Host province, in a poor family of a Cossack peasants. At a young age he lost his parents, and from the age of two his education was taken over by his grandfather Pavel Petrovich Besschetnov. According to one version, Eremin is the illegitimate son of a Don Cossack and an Italian painter, who came as part of an artel to paint the Stanitsa church. After the boy's birth, his father and comrades fled, fearing reprisals from the mother's compatriots. The child's surname was invented and he received his patronymic from his great-grandfather.
Eremin studied at the and was successful in all subjects. At that time, he began to draw secretly. As a young man, Eremin attended a short course for drawing teachers at the Novocherkassk Teachers' Seminary. For some time after that he worked in a small school on the Verkhnechirsky farm in the village of Migulinskaya stanitsa. The salary was low, and he took papers for rewriting, moonlighted as a reader for the local landowner, and in the summer worked in the coal mines of Donbass. According to Valery Stigneev's version, Eremin used this money to go to Moscow for education. In 1900, the young man entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the class of Apollinarius Vasnetsov. Simultaneously with his studies, Eremin collected and edited works of oral folk art, composed poems and stories.
According to some sources, Yuri Eremin graduated from the school in 1905, received the title of independent artist, and then worked professionally in the Crimea: he made commissioned portraits, painted rich mansions, and designed sets for an amateur theater. According to others, he was forced to leave the school due to lack of funds for his studies (the historian and theorist of photography, Honored Cultural Worker of the RSFSR Sergey Morozov in his book Artistic Photography gives another reason — illness, although in an earlier book, published in 1955, he wrote that Eremin graduated from the school) and began to work as an office clerk on the Moscow-Kursk railway.Юрий Еремин «Старая Москва, избранное». Музеи России.
First steps in photography
In 1909, Yuri Eremin successfully married, and thanks to his dowry he received funds for traveling in Europe. In 1910–1914, (there is an opinion that he made his first trip in 1907) he traveled through Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Italy, Greece. During his travels he practiced self-education. In Paris, Eremin took drawing classes at the private Académie Julian and philosophy classes at the Sorbonne. He visited archaeological sites, museums, and exhibition halls. He was seriously impressed by the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, Jacques-Louis David, Titian, Paolo Veronese, but his greatest admiration was for the paintings of the French impressionists.
During his travels, Eremin took many photographs (Valery Stigneev dates the beginning of his passion for photography to 1905). Among the pictures was a technically difficult photograph Bridge in Verona, taken during a heavy fog. He showed this photo to Apollinary Vasnetsov. On his recommendation, the photograph was sent to the International Exhibition of Art Photography in Nice in 1907, where it received the highest award — the Honorary Diploma. Later the photograph was shown at exhibitions in Antwerp, Rome, Berlin and Moscow. Sergei Morozov wrote about this photograph: "Almost devoid of subject matter, it created a mood. Yuri Eremin's landscape was perceived by the heart much warmer than carefully executed architectural photos with an abundance of details".
In 1908, on his own initiative, Eremin presented his photograph the Calm, stylized as a graphic, at the International Photographic Exhibition in Naples. In 1910, he became a member of the Russian Photographic Society where he initially joined the formalist group.
Eremin's teachers at the Russian Photographic Society (RPS) were the photographers Anatoly Trapani and Sergei Savrasov (nephew of the painter Alexei Savrasov). They adhered to the pictorialist direction in art photography and were active participants in a small creative group called Molodoye Iskusstvo (Young Art). Its members saw the quality of the pictures in their closeness to painting. Eremin regularly attended the meetings of this group. From Trapani he learned how to stylize a photograph under the artist's brushstrokes, charcoal drawing, gouache, etching. From Savrasov, Eremin learned the simplicity and wholeness of the composition of photography. At that time he considered photography to be "the art of small forms", so he paid great attention to the careful finishing of the print and its external design. In 1913, Eremin took a course in copper and zinc engraving; he turned some of his photographic landscapes into etchings. In 1914, Eremin opened a photographic studio in Moscow called Secession, which was engaged in the creation of artistic pavilion portraits.
According to Anatoly Fomin, Yuri Eremin was recruited into the active army in 1915 as a photo correspondent for the Third Army. During this time, he was forced to abandon his poetic view of the world around him and emphasize the documentary character of photography. After the October Revolution, Eremin was demobilized and returned to Moscow. He returned to his profession as a photographer and to his usual style of photography. The biography of photographer Valery Stigneev tells a different story. According to his version, Eremin worked as an X-ray technician in a Moscow hospital during World War I, and since 1915, in one of the organizations of the All-Russian Zemsky Union. Art historian, candidate of philosophy Valery Stigneev was surprised that the only mention of Eremin in connection with photography in the press at that time was his election as a member of the board of the RPS for the period 1915–1918. Eremin's surname, he says, had not appeared in the pages of Vestnik Photographii (Photography Herald) before, and his pictures were not published in the following period. He did not participate in the monthly competitions of the RPS and did not appear on the lists of the winners of the photographic competitions.
After the October Revolution In 1918, Eremin worked as a photographer for the Moscow Provincial Commission for the Protection of Antiquities. From 1919 to 1928, he was head of photography at the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. He organized the photographic museum of the MUR. He also studied for some time at Vkhutemas (according to Valrand, Eremin did not graduate), worked at the Press-Klishe Agency (the predecessor of TASS Photochronicle), at Exportizdat, and was on the editorial board of Photographer magazine (1926-1929). After that, Eremin became a teacher of photography at universities. Among them: Leningrad Higher Art and Technical Institute, Moscow Polygraphic Institute, and Moscow Architectural Institute.
In 1924, Eremin traveled to the Crimea, and from then on the peninsula became a favorite subject in his work. As a member of the photographic section of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, Eremin regularly sent his works to foreign photo salons and exhibitions. As late as 1928, Eremin took part in seven international exhibitions in Europe and America.Юрий Еремин. Photographer.Ru. In 1926, he became the chairman of the art photography section of the Russian Photographic Society. In 1925–1928, he took part in four Art of Movement exhibitions. In the 1920s, Eremin created cycles of photographs: Russian Estates, Old Moscow, Crimea, Caucasus, and Volga. They were shown at the exhibition Soviet Photography for Ten Years in 1928, where 135 photographs by Eremin were presented. He was awarded the diploma of the 1st degree. The press was highly critical of the exhibition, and publications spoke of "aesthetic counterrevolution" and "artists who take the stand of the bourgeoisie". Both landscapes and nudes by Yuri Eremin were severely criticized. In the article "On 'right-wing' influences in photography" (Soviet Photographic Almanac, 1929), the art critic L. Mezhericher wrote: "I would strongly attribute nude pictures to the legacy of bourgeois pictorial art. This motif turns out to be a favorite of those photographers who are furthest removed from the image of modern reality". In this article, in the list of "right-wing" photographers, Yuri Eremin's name was in fourth place.
Despite criticism, the major Soviet magazines USSR on Construction, Ogoniok, Our Achievements, Thirty Days, and Sovetskoe Foto continued to publish Eremin's photographs in the late 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. In the late 1920s, Eremin traveled to the Volga, the Urals, the Altai, and Central Asia. In 1932, together with Alexander Grinberg, he led the work of enlarging portraits of Lenin and Stalin and images of the largest construction sites of the time to decorate 25-meter high facades of buildings in the center of Moscow for the May Day holiday, for which he was awarded the gratitude of SOYUZPHOTO.
In 1935, at the Exhibition of Masters of Photography each master had the right to exhibit no more than 20 pictures. Eremin's works were criticized for ideological reasons (neutrality, formalism, distortion of national life). At the same time, he was praised in connection with the return to the classics. After the exhibition, three of its participants —Alexander Rodchenko, Anatoly Skurikhin, and Yuri Eremin— were invited to Izvestia for a conversation with its editor-in-chief, Nikolai Bukharin. Rodchenko did not show up for the meeting; he spoke with the party figure the next day. After a two-hour conversation, Bukharin offered Eremin a one-month trip from the newspaper to Dagestan, and then a three-month trip to Svaneti and Armenia. Photographic historian Vladimir Levashov pointed out that the three photographers invited by Bukharin represented different and contradictory trends of the time: Rodchenko was a "left" radical, Skurikhin a representative of documentary photo reportage, and Eremin a "right" conservative.