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Kasatkin, Nikolay (Alekseyevich)
(b Moscow, 25 Dec 1859; d Moscow, 17 Dec 1930). Russian painter. He trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1873–83) under Vasily Perov, who exerted a decisive influence on him, and he was a member, from 1891, of the WANDERERS, and, from 1922, of the ASSOCIATION OF ARTISTS OF REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA (AKhRR). The theme of the proletariat and images of an industrial hell, as in Coal Miners: Changing Shift (1895; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.), held centre stage in Kasatkin’s socially critical realism, which has a dramatic severity. His genre portraits (e.g. Woman Miner, 1894; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.) convey the spontaneity of everyday life; after the Revolution of 1917 he tried to capture the characteristics of the people of the new society, as in Country Newspaper Correspondent (1927; Moscow, Cent. Mus. Revolution). Kasatkin’s oeuvre provides a direct link between 19th-century critical realism and the work of AKhRR, of which he was the oldest member; in his work the social commitment of the Wanderers appears as the direct prologue to Socialist Realism, with its mission of embodying life ‘in its revolutionary development’.
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