Arseny Nikiforovich Semionov was born January 23, 1911, in the village of Maksimkovo, Polotsk Uyezd, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire in the family of the master-builder of railway bridges.

Arseny Semionov years of study coincided with a radically reformed of institute and the whole system of art education.

October 11, 1932, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars accept the decree "On creation of the Academy of Arts."

A new director of the Academy of Fine Arts sculptor T. A. Matveev and his Deputy for Academic Affairs professor of painting Alexander Savinov his started this process.

They invited for the teaching job at the institute professors Dmitry Kardovsky, Alexander Osmerkin, Semion Abugov, Eugene Lanceray, Nikolai Radlov, Pavel Shillingovsky, Isaak Brodsky and others, many have made subsequently to the formation of the Leningrad school of painting.

[3] In 1934 the director of the All-Russian Academy of Arts and the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture was appointed Isaak Brodsky, a student of Ilya Repin.

According to Veronika Bogdan, it was just with the arrival of Brodsky to the leadership of the Academy that the active formation of the Leningrad school of painting began.

[4] To work at the Institute Brodsky attracts major artists and educators Konstantin Yuon, Pavel Naumov, Boris Ioganson, Alexander Lubimov, Rudolf Frentz, Nikolai Petrov, Vasily Shuhaev, Dmitry Kiplik, Nikolai Punin, Vasily Meshkov, Mikhail Bernshtein, Yefim Cheptsov, Ivan Bilibin, Matvey Manizer, Piotr Buchkin, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Alexei Karev, Leonid Ovsyannikov, Sergei Priselkov, Ivan Stepashkin, Konstantin Rudakov, and others.

Classes at the studio of Kardovsky, itself an outstanding personality of the teacher had a great influence on the fate of the young artist.

In 1937, shortly before graduation Institute in studio of Dmitry Kardovsky, Arseny Semenov became ill and was forced to stop training.

Simultaneously he was working under graduate painting "Motherhood", and in 1951 after fifteen years of forced interruption ends Repin Institute of Arts.

He eagerly seeks to convey on canvas his immediate impressions of the southern nature and life of the street, filled with the sun, contrasts of light and shadows and sporadic movement.

Much of what was acquired in this early «Crimean» period of his work will be preserved in the individual manner of Semionov as its characteristic and recognizable features.

Some of them, such as «Spring Day» (1959), which depicts the perspective of one of the most beautiful streets of Leningrad, belongs to the best cityscapes created by Arseny Semionov in this genre at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s.

As an artist, he was attracted by living history, ancient architecture and a special way of life, organically combined with the surrounding nature.

According to his works of this cycle, one can trace how his individual style has changed in 1960s in the direction of enhancing the decorativeness of painting and the sophistication of color.

In the 1970s Arseny Semionov successfully appealed to a relatively rare for him genre of still life, creating a variety of decorative and fine works of art.

In a small laconic work Semionov used amazingly accurate means of expression, which allow him with the utmost frankness and depth to say about himself, about his generation and epoch.

In 1977, in the halls of the Leningrad Union of Artists has been shown a joint exhibition of paintings by Arseny Semionov, Sergei Osipov, and Cyril Gushchin.

His paintings reside in Art museums and private collections in Russia, Japan, France, in the U.S., England, and throughout the world.

[39][40] In 2006 in Saint Petersburg in the Anna Akhmatova Museum hosted an exhibition of works by Arseny Semionov, timed to the publication of the monograph devoted to the life and art of artist.