Controversial Georgian-Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli dies at 91

Zurab Tsereteli, the Russian-Georgian sculptor and painter known for his colossal and frequently controversial artworks, has died at the age of 91, state-affiliated news agency Interfax said on Tuesday, citing his assistant.

“It happened at 1.30 this morning,” Sergey Shagulashvili said, adding that Tsereteli had died after going into cardiac arrest. He said that no funeral plans had yet been made.

Tsereteli was born in the Georgian capital Tbilisi in 1934 to Georgian-Russian parents where his talent was quickly noticed, rising to become the favourite artist of the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the 1970s. In 1980, he was appointed the art director of the Moscow Olympics and charged with overseeing the most elaborate display of propaganda ever produced by the Soviet Union.

In 1995, he was appointed artistic director for Victory Park on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow. He was also the chief architect of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the vast golden-domed church overlooking the Moskva River demolished on Stalin’s orders that was rebuilt in 1994–1997. In 1997, he was appointed the head of the Russian Academy of Arts.

Of the more than 5,000 artworks he created in his lifetime, the most famous include his controversial 1997 monument to Peter the Great in Moscow, which was seen as ugly by many and Muscovites who were also sceptical about paying tribute to a ruler who had much closer associations with St. Petersburg than Moscow, and his sculpture Good Defeats Evil, which depicts St. George on horseback slaying a dragon, which was unveiled at the United Nations in New York in 1990 to commemorate the signing of the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Short-Range Nuclear Missiles.

Though Tsereteli was widely recognised for his technical mastery, especially in bronze and other durable materials, and for his ambitious and monumental projects, his work is considered kitschy and didactic by many critics, and his closeness to the Kremlin, particularly to Vladimir Putin and former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, is often cited as the main reason for his remarkable success in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.