Nikolai Kormašov

Nikolai Kormašov (28 August 1929 – 22 August 2012) was a Russian-Estonian painter and art restorer. He became one of the best-known figures of Estonia’s post-Stalin “Sixties Generation” and is commonly associated with the Soviet-era Severe style. He was also noted for collecting and restoring Old Russian icons. A museum exhibition of icons from his private collection in 1971 has been described as the first museum presentation of icons from a private collection in the Soviet Union.

Life and education Kormašov was born in Turgenevo in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast and trained at the Ivanovo Art School. He later moved to Tallinn to study at the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR, now the Estonian Academy of Arts. After graduating, he remained in Tallinn as a freelance artist and was described in Estonian cultural coverage as bridging Russian realist traditions with more experimental form-searching in Estonian painting.

Exhibitions In 2013–2014, Kumu Art Museum presented The Sacred Modernity. Nikolai Kormashov’s Paintings from the 1960s, framing his early decade as a key explorative period and publishing an accompanying trilingual book. The exhibition and book were reported in Estonian national culture coverage.

The Estonian art-biographical lexicon EKABL lists extensive participation in exhibitions, including personal exhibitions in Estonia and abroad, including venues in Russia, Lithuania and Germany.

According to national reporting, Kormašov’s final lifetime solo exhibitions included an 80th-birthday retrospective at the Tallinn Art Hall Gallery and the exhibition Alguses oli etüüd (In the beginning was a sketch) at Haus Gallery, both in 2009. ERR also reports that he received the Kristjan Raud art annual prize in 1974 for paintings including Minu Eestimaa and Pojad I–II.