Pavel Benkov

Pavel Petrovich Benkov was born in Kazan on 20 December 1879 (8 December in the old style) into a family of craftsmen whose parents ran a furrier’s workshop. In 1895 he entered the first intake of the art school that had just opened in the city.

From 1901 Benkov studied at the Higher Art School of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, in the studio of Dmitry Kardovsky, and on his own initiative also attended Ilya Repin’s classes. He took lessons at the private Académie Julian in Paris and travelled in Italy and Spain.

In 1909 the artist returned to Kazan to teach at the art school, where he worked, with interruptions, until 1929 and, together with Nikolai Feshin, was regarded as its leading teacher. In 1913–1918 he designed productions for the Kazan City Theatre and gave private lessons — among his pupils was the future poet Velimir Khlebnikov. In 1919 Benkov left for Siberia with the retreating troops of Admiral Kolchak and worked as a theatre designer in Irkutsk and Omsk until 1920; he returned to Kazan in 1921 and in 1922 joined the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia.

In 1928 he first travelled to Bukhara, in 1929–1930 he also visited Khiva and Samarkand, and in 1930 he moved to Samarkand for good. There he taught at the art school and took part in founding the Union of Artists of the Uzbek SSR (a member of the board of its organising committee in 1932–1938 and of the board of the Union of Artists of Uzbekistan from 1938). His pupils included Abdulhaq Abdullayev, Yusuf Yelizarov, Zinaida Kovalevskaya and other painters of the republic.

In his Samarkand years Benkov painted scenes of everyday life (bazaars, tea houses), compositions about women’s work in factories and cotton fields, portraits, and city views with old mosques, pools and courtyards with irrigation channels. The discipline of academic drawing and painting from life were combined in his work with Impressionist techniques. His paintings, among them “Khivan Girl” (1931), are held by the Tretyakov Gallery and by museums in Kazan, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Nukus.

In 1939 Benkov was given the title of Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR. He died in Samarkand on 16 January 1949 and was buried in the city’s Central Cemetery. That year the street where he had lived and the art school were named after him; merged with the Tashkent art technical school, the school kept his name for decades.