Vlady Rusakov
Attracted to painting from his exposure in Europe, Vlady quickly became part of Mexico's artistic and intellectual scene, with his first individual exhibition in 1945, two years after his arrival to the country.
In the 1970s, he was invited to paint murals at the Miguel Lerdo de Tejada Library, a 17th-century building in the historic center of Mexico City.
Vlady received a number of awards for his life's work including honorary membership with the Russian Academy of Arts.
[2] In 1933, his mother succumbed to mental illness due to the stress of their situation and was committed to the psychiatric clinic of the Red Army.
[2] In Paris, Vlady began to study in the workshops of various painters there such as Victor Brauner, Wifredo Lam, Joseph Lacasse, André Masson and Aristide Maillol.
His father began to write again but was concerned about Vlady's lack of Spanish and proclivity to hang around with other refugees in bars.
[4] Their visa to live in Mexico was approved with help from then ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas, and they left for the Yucatan Peninsula after a short stay in Cuba .
[2] Although Vlady and his father quickly integrated into the artistic and intellectual circles of the country, their economic situation was precarious.
His first visit back to the continent was in 1950, as it was recovering from World War II, traveling to the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Spain, Italy, England and France, where he made a series of lithographs.
[5] Vlady lived and worked in Mexico City until 1990, when he moved to Cuernavaca, to a country house with a large studio.
[3] In 2000, the Museo de Arte Moderno presented a retrospective of Vlady's work with 173 watercolors, sketches, engravings and lithographs.
His most important mural project began in 1973 for the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, a library located in a 17th-century church in the historic center of Mexico City.
[1][8] Vlady first completed the section in the chapel, considered to be the most important panel and causing the area's renaming to the Sala Freudiana.
[2] The library murals attracted visits from a number of notable people including Edgar Morin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Michel Lequenne, Allen Ginsberg and Andrei Voznesensky .
[3] The murals remain in good condition with the library undergoing a number of restoration work in the 2000s to keep moisture and other damaging elements out of the interior.
[2][3] In Culiacan, he painted fifty square meters of ceiling with a work called El ocaso y la alborada using a Venetian technique he admired for it use of pigments.
In 1994, he completed a series of four pieces for the Secretaría de Gobernación called Luces y obscuridad, Violencias fraternas, Descendimiento y ascension and Huella del pasado.
However, these works were disappeared shortly after their official presentation to the former Lecumberri prison when Vlady came out in support of the ongoing Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas .
Despite being of the Muralists’ age, he identified with younger Mexican artists looking to break away, called the Generación de la Ruptura.
This insistence on classical technique induced Vlady to reject most contemporary art that he believed had forgotten the principles of good painting.
The center's mission is to safeguard, do research and promote Vlady's life's work as well as that of his father Victor Serge.
