Background
Antokolski was born in Vilna in 1839. During his childhood in the ghetto, he showed signs of talent in sculpture.
1876
Antokolski was born in Vilna in 1839. During his childhood in the ghetto, he showed signs of talent in sculpture.
After a short time in hedar (elementary Hebrew school), he concentrated on wood carving. Against the wishes of his parents, he went at age twenty-one to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, where he won many prizes and established a reputation. The academy would not elect him a member, but offered him the title of honorary citizen, which he turned down.
Furthermore, he studied in Berlin on a scholarship.
Upon his return to Russia, he won immediate fame with his statue of Ivan the Terrible, which, with precise attention to detail, reveals the remorse of the tsar as he contemplates his awesome past.
He was appointed to the Saint Petersburg Academy at the express order of Tsar Alexander II, who bought the statue and placed it in the Hermitage.
He then received a fellowship to work in Italy, where he continued to develop a technique that was more European than Russian; although the realistic, humanist quality of his work was consistent with the Russian tradition of portrait sculpture.
In Italy, he belonged to a group of young Russian artists who called themselves the Wanderers, because it was their purpose to travel through Russia, bringing art to the people.
In 1875 he returned to Saint Petersburg. In 1878 his preeminence in European sculpture was acknowledged when an international jury awarded him at the Paris Exposition.
Antokolski worked in marble, bronze, and ivory.
During the surge of pogroms in the early 1880s, Antokolski was attacked as a Jew who had no right to portray Russian heroes. He moved to Paris, where he exhibited his marble statue of Spinoza (1882), which of all his many full-length portraits was his favorite.
