1. Sergey Merkurov was a People's Artist of the USSR in visual arts, an academic at the Soviet Academy of Arts, and director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts from 1944 to 1949.
12 Facts About Sergey Merkurov
1. 2.
Sergey Merkurov was the sculptor of the three biggest monuments of Joseph Stalin in the USSR.
3.
Sergey Merkurov was the cousin of George Gurdjieff, a mystic and spiritual teacher.
4.
Sergey Merkurov left the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute after a political scandal and moved to Switzerland, where he became a student of the Swiss sculptor Adolf Meyer.
5.
Sergey Merkurov had met Vladimir Lenin when the revolutionary leader was living abroad, and listened to his speeches.
6.
Sergey Merkurov returned to the Russian Empire in 1907 as he was called by the Armenian Apostolic Church authorities to execute a post-mortem mask of Catholicos Mkrtich Khrimian.
7.
Sergey Merkurov was an outstanding representative of academic modern style, employing the themes of death and stone blocks.
8.
Sergey Merkurov was known as a free-thinker and an extraordinary person.
9.
Sergey Merkurov was a member of the "United Workers' Brotherhood", the Association of Painters of Revolutionary Russia and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
10.
For Joseph Stalin's 70th birthday, Sergey Merkurov made a special gift, a costly granite monument called "Death of the Leader".
11.
Sergey Merkurov was honored with burial at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
12.
In 1984 the Sergey Merkurov Museum was opened in his family house in Gyumri.