SHAPOSHNIKOV BORIS VALENTINOVICH (1890-1956)
Russian and Soviet graphic artist, painter, art theorist.
Renowned art and museum expert.
He studied at the Moscow Institute of Archaeology. Museum workers among others graduated from this school. Later he studied at the Moscow University Faculty of History and Philology for a few years.
He studied painting at the art studio of K. F. Yuon, and took private lessons from Sapunov and Feofilaktov. From 1910 Boris Valentinovich was a member of an avant-garde group called Jack of Diamonds and he took part in their exhibitions.
In 1912 he visited Italy and met Vyacheslav Ivanov. At the time he translated treatises of the Italian poet, the founder of Futurism, Tommaso Marinetti, and in 1912 he published them in the magazine Masks.
From 1919 to 1921 he worked as a professor of History of art at the Moscow Proletcult (Proletarian culture). In 1920 he was a research assistant and a member of the presidium of State Academy of Arts. In 1928 he published the book Aesthetics of number and compass.
From 1921 until it’s liquidation in 1929 he headed the Museum of Everyday Life of the Nobility during the 40s founded at the beginning of the 20th century, more precisely in 1919, by the initiative of the Department of Museums and Monument Protection of the People’s Commissariat for Education of RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) headed by N. I. Tortskaya. Boris Valentinovich wrote a guide to the Museum of Everyday Life of the Nobility during the 40s, which had four editions from 1924 to 1928.
In the 1940s he was the head of the Leo Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, Literary Museums in Yasnaya Polyana and the Room in which L. N. Tolstoy died at the Leo Tolstoy railway station.
In the late 1930s Shaposhnikov took an active part in establishing the A. S. Pushkin Museum and Memorial Apartment at the Moika, and in 1940 he wrote a guide to this museum. After the war in the forties, in addition to the museums at the Moika and Mikhailovsko, he took part in organising the museum in Carskoe Selo (Detskoe at the time). In addition to that, from 1936 to 1939, and then from 1948 to 1956, he headed the the Pushkin House (IRLI – Institute of Russian Literature).
In 1950 he wrote a doctoral dissertation Literary museums; he is the author of a number of articles on history and museology.
