Nikolai Dronnikov

"Since the age of 13 I have been a French painter", this is how Nikolai Egorovich Dronnikov defines himself - Russian painter, born in 1930 in the lost village of Boudki, (Tula region). This statement seems contradictory at first glance only. A more detailed approach to the life and work of the painter, sculptor, publisher, Nikolai Dronnikov, allows us to understand why he is called the most Russian of French painters and the most French of Russian painters. His artistic career, which began before the war in the visual arts studio of the Maison des Pioneers in Moscow, continued at the 1905 painting school and then at the Surikov Institute in Taganka. In 1972, he did not return to the USSR from a private trip to France and at the age of 42, he could realize his lifelong dream: to be free to create and move, to combine cultures and to witness the evolution of Russian culture in emigration. Without joining any dissent movement, Dronnikov has carved out his niche as a chronicler of Russian emigration. His numerous drawings, his portraits in pencil or in oil of contemporaries, have become in the eyes of cultural historians brilliant testimonies of the time, of great documentary value. [...] "Russian Observer"