Michel Moskovtchenko

Of Russian descent through his father, a doctor who emigrated in 1920, and French through his mother, a pianist and painter who graduated from Springfield College (Massachusetts), Michel Moskovtchenko was born in Tarare, but until 1947 he spent "a happy childhood in Violay (Loire), surrounded by art books and music", in an already mountainous countryside. As early as elementary school, the Freinet method enabled him to engrave his first linocuts illustrating the school newspaper. 

After studying at the Collège moderne et technique de Tarare (from 1947 to November 1953), where he preferred the evening drawing classes given by Eugène Riboulet, he began his first job as a draftsman in the silk drawing workshop of the Établissements G. Corsin, small street of Feuillants in Lyon, following simultaneously the courses of apprenticeship and the evening courses of Louis Charrat and Pierre Pelloux at the National School of Fine Arts of Lyon, then the courses of live model that Antoine Chartres gives at the Petit Collège (municipal school of art of Lyon), having then for friends the painters Jacques Lescoulié and Robert Massina, the actor Armand Meffre, Alain Crombecque, future director of the festival of Avignon, or the photographer Rajak Ohanian.