Vera Mukhina

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Vera Ignatyevna Mukhina (Russian: Вера Игнатьевна Мухина; July 1, 1889 [O.S. June 19] in Riga — 6 October 1953 in Moscow) was a prominent Soviet sculptor.

She was born in Riga into a wealthy merchant family, and later moved to Moscow, where she studied at different private art schools, including that of Konstantin Yuon and Ilya Mashkov. In 1912 she travelled to Paris, where she attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, taking lessons from Emile-Antoine Bourdelle. She later went to Italy to explore the art and sculptures of the Renaissance period. In 1918 she married Alexei Zamkov, a military surgeon.

Her most celebrated work is is the giant monument "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" which was the centrepiece of the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. The 24-meter-tall, 75-ton sculpture was made of sheets of stainless steel connected together with an innovative method of spot welding. One hand of each figure holds respectively a hammer and a sickle, the two implements joining to form the hammer and sickle symbol of the Soviet Union. In 1947 the sculpture, now installed at the All-Russia Exhibition Centre (then "All Soviet..."), became the symbol of the Russian Mosfilm studio.

In the 1940s Mukhina's artistic style no longer seemed to fit into the aesthetic standards of Stalin's era. Her projects were never erected or seriously distorted, as was the case with the monuments to Soviet leaders Yakov Sverdlov and Vladimir Lenin, composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky in Moscow and writer Maxim Gorky: the latter was designed for the capital but transferred to Nizhny Novgorod.