Rabin, Oscar
Oscar Rabin was born in Moscow in 1928. He showed his talent very early and attended the drawing studio of Evgeny Kropivnitsky (1893-1979) in the 1940s. Oscar started his formal art education at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga learning to paint in the realist manner from 1946 and was invited to enrol at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow by Sergei Gerasimov (1885-1964), a pupil of Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939) and its director, in 1948. His style became more radical and he was expelled from the Institute the following year retiring to the art studio of Kropivnitsky, his first art teacher.
In the 1950s Rabin lived in the same barrack, a large and low rise building, divided into small one-room compartments with shared, typically outdoor, amenities, as his teacher after he married his daughter, Valentina. He worked as a loader and a builder to support himself and his family and painted still-lives, land- and cityscapes in his unique manner depicting barracks, rubbish pits and bottles of vodka in dark colours with heavy impasto to show the absurdity of Soviet life.
Rabin was finally allowed to take part in the 3rd Young Artists Exhibition and the exhibition at the 6th World Festival of Youth in Moscow where he was awarded an honorary diploma in 1957. By that time he became one of the founding members of Lianozovo group of unofficial artists together with Kropivnitsky, Vladimir Nemukhin (1925-2016) and other artists and poets. He was recognised as one of the leaders of the non-conformist art movement and his fame grew in Russia and abroad.
Rabin had his first personal show in London in 1965. He was allowed to join the Moscow Committee of Graphic Artists in 1967 but did not have many commissions and continued to participate in shows of unrecognised artists selling to foreign collectors. Rabin was one of the organisers of the First Autumn Open Air Exhibition, or the Bulldozer Exhibition, in Moscow in 1974 which was put down by the authorities and his participation was not forgotten. He was expelled from the Committee of Graphic Artists in 1975, accused of parasitism, unwillingness to work for the State, a criminal offence in the USSR, in 1977 and forced to emigrate with his family to France in 1978.
Oscar settled in Paris where he worked and lived for the last 40 years of his life. His paintings and drawings were exhibited in many European and North American galleries. Rabin had major retrospectives at the Museum of Russian Art in Jersey City, New Jersey, the USA in 1984, the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg in 1993, the Pushkin Fine Art Museum in 2007, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 2008 and Grand Palais in Paris in 2018. His works are present at all major Russian museums, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, Kolodzei Art Foundation, New Jersey and other important public and private collections.
