Skulyari Mikhail Nikolaevich

Mikhail Nikolaevich Skulyari (1905-1985) was born on June 26, 1905 in Simferopol in the family of a mining engineer, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. On the maternal side, the grandson of the general, Baron von Ek, the boy thanks to aristocratic roots received an excellent traditional home education, including basic knowledge of European culture and languages, which aroused his interest in Western European art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Irkutsk, where the family found itself in the difficult years after the revolution, the desire to engage in creativity led a 14-year-old teenager, first to an art studio, and then to the State Art Studio, where he studied (1920-1924) with the famous Siberian artist and teacher I. .L. Kopylova.
The traditions and culture of the family, its moral principles, undoubtedly influenced the creative personality of the future artist. And also the introduction to the innovative search of the Russian avant-garde upon returning to Leningrad affected. In 1926, Skulyari entered the faculty of monumental painting at the Leningrad Higher State Artistic and Technical Institute, where he studied under K.S. Petrova-Vodkina, A.I. Savinova, A.E. Kareva, P.A. Shillingovsky, A.A. Rylov, and also in the years 1925-1926 he studied with P.N. Filonova.
After graduating from the Academy in 1930, he entered the Bolshevik Design Bureau as a design engineer for the creation of diesel engines, where he worked formally until 1934, but would continue to take one-time orders in subsequent years. This fact of the artist’s personal biography is not only related to the search for livelihoods, but also is evidence of the depth and versatility of his talent.
An attempt to establish his status as an artist leads Skulyari in 1934 to the City Committee of Graphic Artists of the Union of Art Workers, through which he receives orders to illustrate scientific publications, for example, for the Institute of Plant Production. During the execution of this order, Skulari ended up in Dushanbe, where he found war. Mikhail Nikolaevich sought to the front as a volunteer, but was sent as a designer to the mine of the Kuzbass Combine in the city of Anzhero-Sudzhensk. Then - summoned to the Research Institute of Diesel Engines near Moscow, and in July 1942, together with his wife M.N. Sculari moves to Kolomna. Here he works on the design of equipment for the needs of the front until the end of the war. Upon returning to Leningrad in December 1945, Skulari worked for some time as head of the Art Workshop of the Military Medical Museum of the Red Army.
Since March 1946, M.N. Skulari becomes a candidate member of the Leningrad organization of the Union of Artists of the RSFSR as a graphic artist. And in October 1948, the artist was transferred to full members of the Union of Artists, which formally allowed him to combine creative activity with the work of a designer at a research institute, where he would work for about 20 years, continuing to create complex diesel engine control systems.
Returning to professional creativity, M.N.Skulyari finds himself in an experimental lithographic workshop, where, since 1946, he has been working side by side with artists whose names are the glory of Leningrad graphics: A.S. Vedernikov, G.S. Vereisky, V. .A. Vlasov, Yu.A. Vasnetsov, B.N. Ermolaev, V.F. Matyukh, V.I. Kurdov, A.L. Kaplan, M.I. Kuks and A.N. Yakobson (with the latter two he studied together in Irkutsk). A lithography workshop was opened in 1933, and many of the leading Leningrad artists tried their hand at graphic technology, solving specific problems, experimenting with form and color. But most of all it was a spiritual and creative community of bright individuals, professional masters, not only and not so much graphics, possessing a culture of form and boldness of color solutions, without any declarative ideological creative unions. In the atmosphere of co-creation, the “quiet” intonation inherent in the artist acquired a more distinct sound.
The work of color lithography does not exhaust the artist’s creative heritage; he tries himself in etching, tempera and watercolor, and is engaged in ceramics. Having received the diploma of a monumental artist, having joined the charts, he never gave up painting.