Igor Golomstock

Igor Golomstock was born on 11 January 1929 in Kalinin, Soviet Union (now Tver, Russia).[1][2] After his Karaite Jew father, Naum Kojak, was sent to a gulag, his parents divorced and Igor took his mother's name.[1][2] From 1939 to 1943, as he was a teenager, Golomstock and his mother lived in Kolyma, a labour camp in the Russian Far East.[1][2]

Golomstock graduated from Moscow University, where he studied art history.[1][2]

Golomstock began his career by working for the Soviet Ministry of Culture.[1] He was also a resident scholar at the Pushkin Museum, and he taught art history at his alma mater, Moscow University.[3] After emigrating to the United Kingdom in 1972, he taught art history at University of Essex, the University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford.[1][2] In 1977, he "co-curated the exhibition Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union at the Institute of Contemporary Arts" in London.[1] He subsequently worked as a radio presenter on the BBC Russian Service.[1]

Golomstock was the author of several books. His first book, co-written with Andrei Sinyavsky, was about Pablo Picasso.[1][2] His other books were about Hieronymus Bosch, Paul Cézanne, Hans Holbein and Damien Hirst.[1] He was best-known for Totalitarian Art, first published in 1990 and republished in 2011, in which he contended that totalitarian art looked the same regardless of the regime.[1] In particular he showed that both Nazism and Stalinism depicted "industrious families, idealistic soldiers and compassionate leaders."[2] Golomstock found similar features in Fascist and Maoist art.[2]

Golomstock authored his memoir in 2011.[1]

Golomstock married Nina Kazarovets in 1960; they had a son, Benjamin.[1][2] They resided in London, U.K.[1] After they separated in the 1990s, he had a relationship with Flora Goldstein, an archeologist.[1][2]

Golomstock died on 12 July 2017, aged 88.[1][2]

• Totalitarian Art (1990; 2011)
• Memoirs of an Old Pessimist (2011)