Ilya Repin.

Ivan Shishkin.

Ivan Kramskoy.
“As a school, Soviet Socialist Realism surpassed the best naturalist and realist genre painting in the West during the third quarter of the twentieth century! It was a 'renaissance of realism' behind the Iron Curtain.” - Vern Grosvenor Swanson

After the advancement of 20th century modernism, traditional art was rejected by European and American art schools, but, while art education in the West has been practically destroyed, it was preserved and nourished in Russian/Soviet Academies. The Russian Academies have built their program on the best features of classical European academies, adding a tremendous body of theoretical work, uniquely developed by Russian artists-teachers of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continued and expanded into the twentieth century. The best years of the Russian/Soviet academy were between 1930s to the end of the Soviet Era.

While proclaiming modernism as “decadent bourgeois” art, and using art as propaganda of socialist/communist ideology, the Russian government ironically created an unparalleled educational system of representational art, of the highest possible level.

“The Soviet art educational regime, comparable in its thoroughness and emphasis on traditional technique to the training given to dancers of the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet schools, was the outstanding training of its kind available any where in the world at this time” - Matthew Bown

During those years, academies were free (financed by the government), but incredibly competitive. Many students would continuously apply for six, seven years in a row to be accepted to the Academy, without success. With twenty available spots and two-tree thousand applicants, the competition was brutal.

Examination was administered in drawing, painting and composition. Previous training was received by attending children’s and youth’s art schools for many years, followed by private tutoring. There were similar situations in other fields of art, including music, ballet and drama.

Preserving this unique and enormously valuable academic system, Semyon Bilmes, founder of Ashland Academy of Art, brought this knowledge directly to his students.