Ilya Slonim

Sculptor, applied artist. Born in Tashkent (1906) in the family of Jewish engineer Lev Slonim (1883–1954) and his wife Anna (1887–1954), who rented a room to writer Isaac Babel in Petrograd (1916). Moved with his family to Moscow (1921), where he studied under Marina Ryndzunskaya (early 1920s) and under Ivan Yefimov and Josif Chaikov at the VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN (1924–29). Member of the Society of Russian Sculptors (1931). Sculpted faience and porcelain statuettes of actors performing theatrical roles (early 1930s) and majolica bas-reliefs at the Mikhail Kalinin Faience Factory in Konakovo (1934–35). Decorated the Main Entrance and Mechanisation and Electrification of Agriculture Pavilion at the All-Union Exhibition of Agriculture in Moscow (1938–39). Conscripted into the Red Army (1941), but transferred to cultural duties through the intervention of Dmitry Shostakovich (1941). Married writer and artist Tatyana Litvinova (1918–2011, daughter of Soviet minister of foreign affairs Maxim Litvinov and English writer Ivy Lowe) and had two daughters called Maria (born 1945, married Baron Robert Godfrey Phillimore in 1983) and Vera (born 1948, married Georgian human-rights activist Valery Chalidze before 1972). Sculpted portraits of Dmitry Shostakovich (1941–42), Robert Falk (1944), Sergei Obraztsov (1948), Sergei Prokofiev (1940s), Viktor Shklovsky (1955), Ilya Ehrenburg (1960) and Anna Akhmatova (1964). Worked at the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory (1940s–60s), where he sculpted a series of porcelain figurines called Masters of the Bolshoi Theatre. Contributed to the bas-reliefs in the vestibule and statues of Belorussian partisans in the passageway of Belorusskaya underground station in Moscow (early 1950s). Sculpted a commemorative plaque to Reinhold Glière (1957) and the tombstones of Maxim Litvinov (1950s), Ilya Ehrenburg (1969, after a drawing by Pablo Picasso), Kornei and Maria Chukovsky (1970–73), Sarra Dormilatova (1971) and Pavel Kuznetsov (1973). Worked in wood and marble (from 1950s) and addressed ancient, mythological and biblical themes (late 1960s–early 1970s). Died in Moscow (1973). Contributed to exhibitions (from 1931). Contributed to the fourth exhibition of the Society of Russian Sculptors at the State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (1931), Artists of the RSFSR Over Fifteen Years at the State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (1933), Exhibition of Works by Sculptors Alexei Zelensky, Grigory Kepinov, Sarra Lebedeva, Vera Mukhina, Ilya Slonim, Vladimir Favorsky, Isidor Frich-Har and Josif Chaikov at the Union of Artists in Moscow (1935), Exhibition of Moscow Sculptors at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (1937), Exhibition of Sculpture of the Moscow Union of Soviet Artists at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (1940), All-Union Art Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (1946), All-Union Art Exhibition of 1947 at the Tretyakov Gallery and Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (1947), Exhibition of Soviet Graphic Art and Sculpture in Lviv and Uzhgorod (1947), Russian Ballet in Painting, Graphic Art and Sculpture at the Central House of Workers of the Arts of the USSR in Moscow (1948), Alexander Pushkin in Works of Artistic Porcelain at the State Museum of Ceramics and the Kuskovo Eighteenth-Century Estate in Moscow (1949), All-Union Art Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (1950), All-Union Art Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, House of the Artist and Union of Artists at 25/9 Gorky (now Tver) Street in Moscow (1955), Exhibition of Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Art and Works by Artists of the Theatre and Cinema of Moscow and Leningrad at Gorky Park in Moscow (1955), Exhibition of Works by Artists Andrei Goncharov, Vitaly Goryayev, Konstantin Dorokhov, Sulamith Zaslavskaya, Sarra Lebedeva and Ilya Slonim (Graphic Art, Painting, Sculpture and Textiles) in Moscow (1956), Socialist Moscow in the Works of Moscow Artists at the House of the Artist, Academy of Arts of the USSR and Union of Artists at 20 Kuznetsky Most and 17 Yermolai Lane in Moscow (1957), Exhibition of Works by Yury Pimenov, Ilya Slonim and Orest Vereisky: Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Art at the Academy of Arts of the USSR in Moscow (1968), Twosome at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg (2002–03), Gifts of Moscow Artists to the Museums of Russia in the Moscow House of the Artist at 11 Kuznetsky Most in Moscow (2004), Porcelain, Faience and Majolica at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (2008–09), Svyatogorsk Gallery at the Alexander Pushkin Memorial Museum Complex of History, Literature and Natural Landscape in Mikhailovskoe (2011), “I Will Eternally Imagine...” Exhibition on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Osipova-Wulf House Museum in Trigorskoe at the Alexander Pushkin Memorial Museum Complex of History, Literature and Natural Landscape in Mikhailovskoe (2012), The Joy of Labour and the Happiness of Life: Ideals of a Departed Epoch at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (2012), Russian Decorative and Applied Art of the Twentieth Century: Porcelain and Fabrics at the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus in Minsk (2012–13), Exhibition of Soviet Art in Warsaw and Copenhagen (1933), Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris (1937) and a one-man show at the Union of Artists in Moscow (1976).