Nikolai Andronov

Nikolai Ivanovich Andronov (Russian: Николай Иванович Андронов; 30 April 1929 – 10 November 1998) was a Soviet and Russian painter, muralist, graphic artist and teacher. He was one of the founders of the severe style (Russian: суровый стиль), the reformist movement in Soviet painting of the late 1950s and 1960s. His Rafters (1960–1961) is usually described as a manifesto of that movement.

Rafters was among the paintings attacked by Nikita Khrushchev at the Moscow Manege exhibition of December 1962. Andronov was expelled from the Moscow branch of the artists' union and spent several years outside the official exhibition system. From the mid-1960s he worked mainly in and around the village of Ferapontovo in Vologda Oblast. The village provided the subjects for a cycle of paintings that he continued for more than thirty years, and the mineral-bearing stones and clays that he ground into pigments. He also completed more than twenty works of monumental art, among them the mosaic on the facade of the Oktyabr cinema in Moscow (1967) and Man and the Press in the Izvestia building (1978), for which he shared the USSR State Prize in 1979. Andronov was made an Honored Artist of the RSFSR in 1978 and a People's Artist of the Russian Federation in 1996, and was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Arts in 1997.