Borodin, Aleksei

 1915 - 2004

Alexei Borodin was born in 1915 to a family of peasants. During the Russian Civil War, he was orphaned as a child and was placed in the care of the military regiment on education, an orphanage for boys that trained them to become soldiers. After leaving the orphanage, Borodin attended Saratov Art and Industry High School from which he graduated in 1936 with a diploma in teaching painting and drawing. Also, for a short time, he was a student of Igor Grabar, one of the most celebrated Russian impressionists in history.

Borodin was wounded while serving in an armored division of the Red Army during World War II. After the war, he taught art at his alma mater until the 1960’s when he moved to present day Volgograd (Stalingrad) to do the same.

Borodin was a member of the Russian Union of Artists since 1939 and participated in most all local, regional, Republican and Union-sponsored exhibitions from the 1950’s through the 1980’s. In 1986, Borodin was honored with a one-man exhibit at the Volgograd Art Museum which owns his most famous painting, Volgograd Farmers (1964.) Much of his work is in the Volgograd Art Museum, Saratov Art Museum and the Museum of Defense in Volgograd. His paintings are in numerous private collections throughout the world.

Borodin is listed in Matthew Bown’s A Dictionary of Twentieth Century Russian and Soviet Painters, 1900 - 1980’s.