(b. 1904, Odessa – d.1975, Moscow)
Painter, graphic artist, illustrator, creator of applied art objects
Emmanuil Pavlovich Vizin was born into the family of a harbour steward on January 9, 1904. In 1917 the family moved from Odessa to Ekaterinoslav (from 1926 on called Dnepropetrovsk). From 1919 Vizin took part in the Civil War and worked as a political education officer in the border security forces in Bessarabia. In 1921 he came back to Odessa and after having worked some time as a longshoreman, joined, in 1923, the painting department of the Odessa Institute of Arts where he attended Theophile Fraerman’s classes. In 1926 Vizin moved to Moscow and got accepted to the graphic art department of the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vkhutemas) where he had Vladimir Favorsky and Nikolay Kupreyanov for teachers and also took additional classes from Alexander Osmerkin and David Shterenberg. In 1930 he graduated from the Moscow Publishing Institute and in 1938-1939 worked at the Monumental Painting Workshop of the Academy of Architecture. Vizin fought in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945, was badly wounded in March 1945 and sent to the military hospital. It was when he began to dedicate a lot of time to painting. He created several series of Moscow landscapes and illustrated various books, including Pushkin’s Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1947), Isaac Babel’s short stories (1959), Gogol’s Overcoat (1960), Nose (1965) and Diary of a Madman (1970), Russian Fairy Tales (1960), Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of a Town and Dostoyevsky’s Possessed (both 1968), Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Master Flea (1974). Emmanuil Vizin passed away in Moscow on the 2nd of December 1975.
