Ioganson, Boris Vladimirovich

Boris Ioganson attended the Moscow School of Art and was trained by the leading Russian Impressionist and modern painter Petr Ivanovich Kelin. From 1918 to 1912, Ioganson studied at MUZhVIZ (Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture). In 1922, he helped found A.Kh.R. (Association of Artists of the Revolution) where he adopted the principles of Socialist Realism emerging during the 1930s in the USSR.

From 1937 to 1961, Ioganson was on faculty at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. His approach to painting was inspired by the works of Ilya Repin, the preeminent Russian Realist painter of the nineteenth-century. One of Ioganson's most famous paintings, An Interrogation of the Communists (1933), is a quintessential example of Socialist Realism defined by its dramatic use of light and dark. The painting was subsequently featured on a 1967 USSR postage stamp.

During World War II, Boris Ioganson created a single poster for the TASS (Soviet Telegraph Agency) Window collective in June 1941. After the war, he assumed the position of vice-president of the Academy of Arts of the USSR (1953-1958). In 1964, he taught at the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named for V.I. Surikov. For his art, Ioganson was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1941 and again in 1951. He earned the title People's Artist of the USSR in 1943, and he was named a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1968.