INTRODUCTION
Ivan Garikow, 1918–1982
The village of white clay
Painting: Belaya Glina, painted from memory, 1974.
Ivan Ivanovich Garikow was born on 12 June 1918 in Belaya Glina, "white clay", a big market village on the steppe of southern Russia. In Russian his name was probably Zharikov; "Garikow" is the spelling the Austrian authorities gave him, and the one he kept.
He was fourteen when famine swept the North Caucasus. And still he drew. The village council chose him, a peasant boy, and sent him to art school in Rostov-on-Don.
Half a world away, in 1974, he painted the village from memory, and wrote on the back: "In this village I was born."
The road north
Painting: The Master's Studio, 1956. The young painter at the easel, a student rather than the master, is thought to be Ivan himself.
In 1937 he went north to the Academy of Arts in Leningrad, the school where Repin had taught. His son said he walked much of the way, nearly two thousand kilometres.
Students slept on floors and lived on soup and bread, and learned from masters the craft of centuries: drawing from life, anatomy, light. Within a few years the war would scatter that world. Ivan carried what it taught him for the rest of his life.
By spring 1941 he was painting scenery at the State Theatre in Petrozavodsk. He was twenty-two. In June the Germans invaded.
War
Painting: Final Departure, 1972.
That autumn a Red Army private, Ivan Ivanovich Zharikov of Belaya Glina, was listed missing. It is probably him, though not proven.
In 1942 the Germans took him, first to dig defences, then on a workers' transport west through Poland to Krems, on the Danube in Austria.
By his own story, told to his son, he was held in a cell with nothing but a piece of charcoal. On the wall he drew the face of Christ. A German officer saw it, and sent him to labour instead of to a concentration camp. It was the first time his art saved his life. It would not be the last.
At Krems he painted scenery for the camp theatre of the Eastern workers until the spring of 1945, so that other prisoners could, for an evening, forget where they were.
"At least I had a meal every day." Ivan, as his family remembered
Salzburg
Painting: Self-Portrait in Salzburg, 1947.
After the war Ivan would not go back. Stalin treated returning prisoners as traitors, and Ivan feared he would "certainly be deported to Siberia". He came to Salzburg in September 1945.
The city was struggling back to its feet. Bombs had broken its old streets, food was rationed, and thousands of refugees crowded into barracks and old army camps on its edge. The Allies worked to house them, feed them and, one day, find them a country that would take them in. It must have been overwhelming: turmoil and suspicion, neglect, and, side by side with them, acts of utter kindness from strangers.
Ivan was worn out and owned almost nothing. On 2 August 1949 the refugee camp at Hellbrunn asked, "on welfare grounds", for him to be given underwear, a shirt, socks and a towel. A proud man, he took them, and he kept the slip.
And he painted: the city, the river, its people. He gave a portrait to a fellow refugee, the cellist Edward Sienkiewicz: "art for art's sake". By 1949 he was listed among the members of Salzburg's professional painters. He married Lilli in 1949; their son Arnold was born in February 1950.
"A young, highly talented painter ... who has already won high recognition." Głos Polski, Salzburg, 1948
The crossing
Painting: Salzburg Lady, 1949.
America had opened its doors to the refugees of Europe, and for Ivan the road to America shone like a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
In August 1951 he sailed from Bremerhaven on the troopship USNS General Harry Taylor, luggage tag number 126, and on 10 September he was admitted at New York. A week later a church committee put him on a train to Philadelphia, with a note in his own hand of where he would be met: the news kiosk at 30th Street Station.
He had no papers from the country of his birth, but he had paintings. The family tells how he carried a few canvases rolled up inside his trousers. Ivan never liked to be parted from his work, and Salzburg Lady, painted in the street in 1949, almost certainly crossed with him. It is in the collection today.
Philadelphia
Painting: Philadelphia Fountain.
He settled in Philadelphia, a city of immigrants, and found work at Newman Galleries on Walnut Street. In every spare moment he painted.
On 7 July 1952 the Evening Bulletin photographed him at his easel on a traffic island in the middle of Broad Street, painting the view towards City Hall. In 1954 he showed in New York with more than twenty fellow émigré artists at the Barbizon-Plaza Art Gallery. In 1955 he opened his own gallery on Girard Avenue, and the local paper wrote that he "is certainly a man of talent".
The house of paintings
Painting: Late Night Scholar.
In 1962 he bought his own house on North 5th Street, twelve rooms, and filled it. When the Philadelphia Inquirer visited in 1968 there were 227 paintings "on walls, behind doors and in every conceivable nook and cranny". He researched every subject in the library: the dress, the furniture, the decoration.
"They come from my imagination." Ivan Garikow, Philadelphia Inquirer, 1968
The neighbourhood around him grew rough. Thieves broke in and took some of his best work. Ivan wrote down what was taken, and kept painting.
Hitler had taken him, Stalin had hunted him, and in the end even the street came for him. Nothing stopped him painting. He died in Philadelphia in 1982, among the pictures he had refused to give up.
His paintings waited in the dark for twenty-two years.