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, for the first time, through this website, his paintings and his story are seeing the light of day. They are proof that the human spirit survives.
