by Vera UDALTSOVA, Merited Art Worker of the Russian Federation, in charge of the fine arts division at the State Darwinian Museum Vassily Vataghin, a creative artist and sculptor, once complained he found it pretty hard to produce science-linked pictorial images. "You do all that with one and the same hand, and check with the same eyes of your own. Perforce one style affects the other." He pictured fleeting moments in the life of beasts and fowls with astounding accuracy. This "animalistic" facet of Vataghin's work is spotlighted in the Moscow-based State Darwinian Museum he had been working for as long as forty years. V. Vataghin. Portrait. 1960. Darwinian Museum photoarchives. стр. 107 Vassily Vataghin (1883/1884-1969) was in for a great many honors and cudos. A Merited Art Worker of the Russian Federation... People's Artist of the Russian Federation (1964)... elected to the Arts Academy of the Soviet Union (1957)... And he collected top prizes like a Stalin Prize for animal sculptures in wood, metal and terra cotta (1952)... a Repin State Prize of the Russian Federation... He taught at the Moscow Senior College of Art and Industry between 1963 and 1968. In 1922 to 1940 and then again, in 1959 to 1961, he was on the staff of the Darwinian Museum, but in fact had been working for it right from its foundation date, that is beginning in 1907. So he is considered by right to be a co-founder of the Darwinian Museum jointly with Nadezhda Ladyghina-Kots, a zoopsychologist, and Philip Fedulov, a taxidermist. Five years ago, in 2008, our museum featured Vataghin works in an exhibition timed for the 125th birth anniversary of this standout artist. The Tretyakov Art Gallery, too, held an exhibition of his sculptures, drawings and paintings. Guests could feast their eyes on a wonderful collection of wood sculptures, for one, sculptural images of native ethnic groups of the Russian Far East rendered from his drawings and sketches of 1928-192 ... Читать далее