Taken by Hitler. Hunted by Stalin. His paintings nearly didn't survive.
A life's work, nearly lost for ever
Ivan Garikow was born in Belaya Glina, southern Russia, in 1918, and formally trained at the Academy of Arts in Leningrad: among the last generation of painters schooled in the old Russian academic tradition before the Second World War swept that world away. Probably a Red Army soldier, then a forced labourer in Nazi Austria, a refugee painter in Salzburg and for thirty years a painter in Philadelphia, he never stopped painting. He died in 1982. In 2004 his life's work, nearly 200 paintings, turned up in a storage unit on Orlando's Orange Blossom Trail. Now, through this website, his paintings and his story are seeing the light of day. They are proof that the human spirit survives.
