Ural Tansykbayev

Ural Tansykbayev was born in Tashkent on 14 January 1904 (1 January Old Style) into a working-class family of Kazakh origin. After a seven-year school he worked at a tobacco factory and then at a winery. He took up painting in earnest at about twenty, and his first pictures were shown in the factory club.

From 1924 to 1928 he studied at the art studio of the Tashkent Museum of Arts under Nikolai Rozanov, and in 1928–1929 at the Penza Art and Pedagogical College under Ivan Goryushkin-Sorokopudov and Nikolai Petrov. In 1929 he visited Moscow, where the museums showed him recent Western European, above all French, painting — an encounter that shaped his early experiments. He began to exhibit that year, and in 1932 he joined the board of the newly founded Union of Artists of Uzbekistan.

His canvases of the late 1920s and early 1930s — “Portrait of an Uzbek” (1927), “Nomad Camp” (1931), “Crimson Autumn” (1931) — reflect Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, with resonant decorative colour and simplified forms. They earned him the nickname “the Uzbek Gauguin”, and after the exhibitions of Uzbek art in Moscow and Philadelphia in 1934 critics called him the leader of the Uzbek colourists. In 1938 he designed the sets and costumes for the first Kazakh ballet, Vasily Velikanov's “Kalkaman and Mamyr”, at the opera and ballet theatre in Alma-Ata.

From the later 1930s landscape became his main genre, and his manner grew more restrained and realistic. In 1942 he went to the front near Moscow with a delegation from Uzbekistan and afterwards painted the series “On the Roads of War”. He was named an Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR in 1943 and a People's Artist of the Uzbek SSR in 1944. After the war he painted mountain and rural landscapes, among them “Native Land” and “Evening on Issyk-Kul” (both 1951), and in 1952–1955 he worked with other artists on murals for the Uzbek SSR pavilion at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow.

He was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts in 1954 and a full member in 1958. He chaired the board of the Union of Artists of the Uzbek SSR in 1956–1960, was secretary of the board of the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1957–1968 and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR in 1959–1972. His “Morning at the Kairakkum Hydroelectric Station” (1957) is in the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow. He won silver medals at the All-Union Art Exhibition of 1957 and at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, became a People's Artist of the USSR in 1963 and received the Order of Lenin in 1964.

In the 1960s and 1970s he painted the mountains of the Pamirs, the Alai and Kyrgyzstan and the construction sites of Uzbekistan: “The Mountain Road from Angren to Kokand” (1962), “At the Charvak Construction Site” (1970) and “My Song” (1972) from the series “Native Uzbekistan”. In 1973 he received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR. Tansykbayev died on 18 April 1974 in Nukus, where he had come to choose works from the Karakalpak art museum for a solo exhibition, and was buried at the Chigatai cemetery in Tashkent.

More than five hundred of his works are held by the Savitsky State Museum of Arts of Karakalpakstan in Nukus; others are in the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow and the Kasteyev State Museum of Arts of Kazakhstan in Almaty. In 1981 the house in Tashkent where he lived from 1967 to 1974 opened as the Ural Tansykbayev Memorial House-Museum, with his widow Yelizaveta Tansykbayeva as its director. In 2001 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit”. A college of decorative and applied arts in Almaty bears his name.