Benkov, Pavel

Born Dec. 8 (20), 1879, in Kazan; died Jan. 16, 1949, in Samarkand. Soviet painter. Honored Artist of the Uzbek SSR (1939).

Ben’kov studied with D. N. Kardovskii at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (1901–06) and at the Julian Academy in Paris (1906). In 1922 he became a member of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. He taught in art schools in Kazan (1909–29) and, beginning in 1930, in the Samarkand Art School. He played an important role in the development of Soviet art and in the education of ethnic artists in the Tatar ASSR and the Uzbek SSR. In his works, which are marked with traits of the plein air school (genre and historical compositions, portraits, landscapes), he depicted the colorful ethnic way of life, urban architecture, nature, and images of the new people of Uzbekistan (Bazaar in Bukhara, 1929, Museum of Art of the Uzbek SSR, Tashkent; Girl from Khiva, 1931, Tret’iakov Gallery; Portrait of a Kolkhoz Shock Worker, 1940, Museum of Art of the Eastern Peoples, Moscow; A Letter From the Front, 1945, Museum of Art of the Uzbek SSR, Tashkent).