School of sculptor Alexander Terentyevich Matveev and his students
Authors: Dobrolyubov Petr V. 
Published: October 2022

This article is dedicated to the “School of sculptor Alexander Terentyevich Matveev and his students.” A.T. Matveev had a profound influence on the development of Russian and Soviet sculpture both through his creativity and his purposeful teaching activities. The beginning was laid by the sculptor while studying at the Bogolyubov School (modeling classes with blind children). The pedagogical experience of A.T.Matveev is measured by half a century, and the official one is only thirty years, due to the fact that this practice was interrupted. But the connection of generations of masters of sculptural craft has not completely frozen. The students who studied with the artist-teacher A.T.Matveev developed them in turn with their followers and students and in their own creative search, turning to the teacher for advice in moments of artistic searches, searches and doubts. Russian Russian sculpture. The author of the article points out that Alexander Terentyevich Matveev is the founder of the Russian school of sculpture, a master and teacher of a whole galaxy of remarkable Russian, Soviet sculptors, who exerted a huge influence on the development of modern Russian plastic art by his example, his method and creativity. He was one of the organizers, ideological inspirers and active participants of many creative associations of the first third of the XX century. The author notes that some researchers of the creative path of the sculptor-innovator A.T.Matveev in their scientific works on the work of the sculptor, pointed out that A. T. Matveev did not leave any theoretical works that could be the key to his work. His works themselves are all that remains of the author. But even these works of the sculptor-teacher give us the opportunity to get an idea of his views, worldview, his attitude to the creative process and, in general, to the profession of an artist-sculptor-teacher and about his personal considerations on this topic. This article presents conversations with him preserved in the notes and memoirs of students, his statements, as it seems to the author, have an exceptional relation not only to the tasks of teaching in the field of sculptural craft, but also to the worldview of the master sculptor as a teacher at the head of his school. The author analyzes and convincingly proves by concrete examples that the school of Alexander Terentyevich Matveev is an understandable, logically competently built pedagogical system based on the experience and skill of previous generations of artists coming from antiquity and Byzantium and related to heuristics and maieutics, from Western European aesthetics and traditions and foundations of the Russian plastic school, its basic foundations and principles dating back to N. F. Gillet and to P. P. Chistyakov. In the early forties, A. T. Matveev compiled a "Sculpture Program" that complemented the established method of teaching sculpture, which earlier and now, of course, is rightfully called as the School of Sculptor Matveev. The author analyzes the process of learning from the teacher and sculptor A.T.Matveev, names the main dates of his work, reveals the details of sculptural craft, talks about the variety of moves in the plastic of the master, analyzes the methods and principles of work in sculpture, shows the attitude of students to their teacher, and highlights the whole course of historical milestones in the creative biography of the sculptor.