Dmytry Dmytrievich Zhilinsky

(b Volnovka, Krasnodar region, 25 May 1927). Russian painter. He trained in Moscow at the Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (1944–6) and the Surikov Art Institute (1946–51) under Pavel Korin and others, while Vladimir Favorsky was particularly influential in shaping his talent. Zhilinsky was a member of the generation of the so-called Severe (or Austere) Style (Rus. Surovyy Stil’), a movement in Russian art in the 1960s that sought to endow images with a new integrity and strict verism, thereby overcoming the decrepit standards of Socialist Realism, and he has always been distinguished by the refined aestheticism of his paintings. Working in tempera on levkas (the gesso-like priming typical of Russian medieval painting), he drew stylistically on the heritage of the Italian Quattrocento and the German Renaissance. Touches of a sort of Art Nouveau revival are also manifested in his precise, rhythmical use of line and in the exquisite details of his works. One of the most talented Russian portrait painters, he often turned his portraits into extended metaphors of human life (e.g. Under the Old Appletree, 1969; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.) or into a ‘focus of beauty’, full of historical detail and stylization, as in Two-sided Portrait of Irene and Peter Ludwig (1981; Cologne, Mus. Ludwig). His painting 1937 (1987; Moscow, artist’s col.), depicting the arrest of his father during Stalin’s Great Terror, became one of the popular artistic symbols of the era of glasnost’.