Dmitry Isidorovich Mitrohin, also Mitrokhin (; 15 May 1883 – 7 November 1973) was a Russia and Soviet graphic artist, illustrator, master of easel engraving, etching and lithography, author of many book illustrations, a huge cycle of miniatures in the genre chamber still life. Art critic, member of many art associations, Professor of the Higher Institute of photography and photographic technique (1919-1926), Professor of the Printing Department of the Higher Artistic and Technical Institute (1924-1930 a course in book graphics) in Leningrad. Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1969).
Biography
He was born in Yeysk, Krasnodor Krai, Russia. In 1902, he joined the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and transferred to the Stroganov Art School in 1904 to study book illustration. In 1905, Mitrohin moved to Paris and attended drawing classes by Eugène Grasset and Théophile Steinlen. He returned to Russia in 1908, and settled in Saint Petersburgh between 1912 and 1914, illustrating children's books (including Arthur Ransome's Old Peter's Russian Tales) and other Russian books such as Lukomorie.
From 1919 to 1923, Dmitry Mitrohin was a custodian in the drawings and engravings department of the Russian Museum. In 1919, he also started teaching at the Higher Photography Institute, and then at the Academy of Arts from 1924 to 1934. In 1944, he moved back to Moscow to do book illustration until the 1960s. He died in Moscow in 1973.
Creation
Dmitry Isidorovich Mitrokhin, who lived a great creative life, had the good fortune to study, to cooperate, to be in close relations, to be in associations and societies with many artists, among whom there were those whose trace in the art of the 20th century is comparable to the influence on the course of history of the most important discoveries of the era. The first lines of the artist's autobiographical notes contain the names of M.F. Larionov, N. S. Goncharova and A. V. Fonvizin, who studied side by side and were friends with him - S. T. Konenkov and S. V. Malyutin, with whom he worked in the ceramic artel "Murava".
In Paris, Dmitry Mitrokhin, despite the constrained circumstances and constant employment with work ("high life was not for me"), communicates quite a lot. Almost seventy years later, he recalled his visits to the salon of E. Kruglikova, which, like her Paris workshop, turned into a kind of Russian cultural center, where the "high society" gathered, "but for all those present, art was the main thing", - visits to Maximilian Voloshin, in whose house, according to the artist, he felt "more at ease", where many compatriots who were flying around Lutetia also dropped in, and where he once had a chance to meet with Konstantin Balmont (they were briefly acquainted with 1904), "who brought his daughter, a girl, in a red coat" - here she is in memory of a 90-year-old artist! And these memories are filled with vivid content, visible images of sketches, when he talks about the immediate purpose of his stay in the then capital of arts.
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Talking about his Parisian times, it is not by chance, and not without a tinge of pride, he notes that posters of Toulouse-Lautrec were still hanging on the streets of the French capital - according to D.I.Mitrokhin himself, who had a strong influence on him - as, indeed, and on Paul Klee, with whose influence, for some time, was bizarrely combined in the line of the artist's work that he was aware of - as well as the impact, at certain stages, of his great interest in the art of Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne, Constantin Guise.
In different periods of comprehending the paths of expressiveness and mastery, this interest was focused on their different manifestations, and with a different measure of their impact on the artist's worldview, - then ephemeral and almost opportunistic, and therefore easily and painlessly overcome, what were, for example, salon, beardsley, modern trends, - those that required a longer "neutralization", purely decorative, stylized ornamental, popular prints and printed motifs, or, on the contrary, in the form of a deep, essential understanding, which was realized in the artist's system of views - Western European and Japanese engraving - on fundamental principles that were not limited to an understanding of technology - engraving in general, drypoint, chiaroscuro, lithography, in particular. "But, having gone through these hobbies," M.V Alpatov squeals, "he returned to such values of art that outgrow the boundaries of time and space and exist everywhere".