Misha Brusilovsky

His father, Shaya Shevelevich Brusilovsky (1904–43), was a military engineer who was killed in the war, and his mother, Frida Abramovna Goldberg (1906–89), worked in trade.

Misha Brusilovsky (born Mikhail Brussilovsky; 7 May 1931 – 3 November 2016) was a Russian artist, painter and graphic artist.

He was a Member of the Russian union of artists, an honored artist of the Russian Federation, a distinguished member of Russian Academy of Arts, a laureate of the "G. S. Mosin prize" and a winner of the Sverdlovsk region Governor's prize "For outstanding achievements in literature and art".

Misha Brusilovsky was born on 7 May 1931 in Kiev.

He had one brother Seva – Vsevolod Brusilovsky (born 1936).

In 1938 Misha's father was sent on an extended mission to the Far East, where he went with his whole family.

They lived on the In Station in Birakan and Birobidzhan.

At the beginning of 1941 the Brusilovsky family returned to Kiev, and the war broke out that June.

Misha and his brother Seva were sent to the town of Troitsk in the South Urals to their aunt Raya, their father's sister.

Their father went to the front, and their mother stayed in Kiev and joined them later.

In 1943, their aunt Raya, a general practitioner and surgeon, was mobilised, and Misha went with her on a medical train.

On the medical train he helped the doctors and the injured, and when it would stop for long periods he would go to the nearest villages to exchange salt for groceries for them.

Six months later, Brusilovsky returned to Kiev, which had been liberated from Germany.

In an attempt to earn some money, he joined a group of boys who shined shoes on the square in front of the train station.

Every evening, a grown-up lad with the nickname Kot (Tomcat) would come to the square.

He was connected with the local criminal class, and he would take most of the money the boys had earned.

If they tried to hide what they had earned, the boys were dealt with harshly.

Once, for Kot's birthday, Misha drew his portrait with coloured pencils, and showed it to him.

Kot took the drawing, and a while later he brought Brusilovsky to a boarding school for gifted children.

In 1944, Brusilovsky started going to classes in the "Kiev boarding school for gifted children".

Brusilovsky spent one year in the boarding school for gifted children.

In 1945, he got a place in the Kiev Shevchenko State Art School, which was situated at the time in the building of the Kiev Art Institute.

In 1952, he graduated from the art school and applied to the Kiev Art Institute, but he did not get a place because admissions were strictly regulated according to ethnicity.

He began earning some money by making copies of pictures by well-known Soviet artists for palaces of culture and other similar state institutions.

In 1953, Brusilovsky went to Moscow.

He worked as an artist and designer in the All-Russia Exhibition Centre but he decided to further his education and went to Leningrad, where he began studying in the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the graphic design department.

He studied with artists such as Ostap Shrub and Minas Avetisyan.

He graduated from the Institute in 1959 (his thesis supervisor was Alexei Pakhomov) and then he was assigned a job in the city of Sverdlovsk.

In Sverdlovsk, Misha Brusilovsky began teaching drawing in Shadr Art College, and he also began working with the Central Ural Publishing House as an artist-illustrator.

He met Vitaly Volovich, Herman Metelev, Andrei Antonov, Anatoly Kalashnikov and other Sverdlovsk artists, and he also met the artist Gennady Mosin with whom he had been friendly back in the Repin Institute.

He worked with Mosin on mounted pictures.

He also took orders for monumental pieces.

The chairperson of the Sverdlovsk Union of Artists A. G. Vyaznikov, who in the interests of his own career was waging a wide-scale war against formalism and some bureaucrats in the Sverdlovsk branch of the communist party had a negative reaction to Brusilovsky's work.

In 1961, for Brusilovsky's thirtieth birthday, the Sverdlovsk Union of Artists organised an exhibition of painting and graphic art in the Sverdlovsk House of the Artist, together with an exhibition of another Sverdlovsk artist K. Zyumbilov.

On 10 May 1961, the newspaper "The Ural Worker", in "The audience responds" column, published a note by the name of "An unnecessary enterprise", signed by a certain "public servant N. Efimov" in which all of Brusilovsky's pieces which had been presented at the exhibition came under criticism.

In 1962 Brusilovsky began working in collaboration with Gennady Mosin on the painting "1918".

The decision to paint the painting was a provocation to the chairman of the Union of Artists RSFSR Vladimir Serov, who did Historical-Revolutionary paintings and specialised in portrayals of Lenin.

In 1963 a sketch of the painting was presented to the arts board of the organising committee of the "Socialist Ural" art exhibition.

The board approved the sketch, and signed a contract with the artists.

When the painting was almost complete, Mosin and Brusilovsky rolled up the canvas and painted an alternative version, portraying Lenin as a decisive person who was capable of doing anything in order to achieve his goals.