Mikhail Greku

Born Nov. 9 (22), 1916, in the village of Faraonovka, in present-day Odessa Oblast. Soviet painter.

Greku studied at the Academy of Arts in Bucharest (1937–40) and at the I. E. Repin Republic Art School in Kishinev (1945–47). He created a series of pictures on themes of the history of the Moldavian people, marked by deep dramatic effect and by heightened emotional expressiveness of color (The Tatarbunar Uprising, 1956–57). With the early 1960’s a yearning for a poetic understanding of the life of the contemporary Moldavian village and its socially significant phenomena predominates in Greku’s works (genre compositions, landscapes). His Chadyrlung Girls, 1960; The Send off, 1964–65; and the triptych The Story of a Life, 1966. are all in the Art Museum of the Moldavian SSR in Kishinev. Greku has been decorated with the Order of the Badge of Honor.