Mochalskii, Dmitrii Konstantinovich

Born Feb. 2 (15), 1908, in St. Petersburg. Soviet painter and graphic artist. People’s Artist of the RSFSR (1969); member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR (1973).

From 1929 to 1936, Mochal’skii studied at the Academy of Arts in Leningrad. In 1937 he became an instructor at the V. I. Surikov Moscow Art Institute, receiving a professorship there in 1950. During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 and in the immediate postwar years, Mochal’skii did a series of pictures devoted to Soviet soldiers and partisans (Victory: Berlin, 1945, 1947, Tret’iakov Gallery). In 1949 he painted the work After the Demonstration (Tret’iakov Gallery). Since 1954 the artist has worked on a series of lyric genre scenes devoted to the labor and life of Soviet youth on virgin lands (the cycles People of the Virgin Lands and Pioneers in the Virgin Lands). He received the I. E. Repin State Prize of the RSFSR in 1967.