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Aleksandr Mikhailovich Gerasimov (August 12, 1881
- July 23, 1963) was a leading proponent of
Socialist Realism in the visual arts, and was
Stalin's court painter.

Gerasimov was born on August 12, 1881 in Kozlov,
now Michurinsk, in Tambov region. He studied at
the School of Painting, Sculpture and architecture
in Moscow from 1903 to 1915. There he championed
traditional realistic representational art against
the avant-garde.

During World War I and the Russian Civil War he
served in the army. Subsequently he returned to
his hometown to become a stage designer, helping
to present plays glorifying the Revolution and the
Soviet government.

In 1925 Gerasimov returned to Moscow and set up a
studio, combining techniques of academic realism
with an Impressionistic light touch. He favored a
style known as heroic realism, which featured
images of Revolutionary leaders such as Lenin as
larger-than-life heroes. However, as Stalin
tightened his grip on the country, Gerasimov's
work descended into pompous official portraits,
such as "Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin
Wall," for which he won a Stalin Prize in 1934. He
produced a large number of heroic portraits of
Kliment Voroshilov, to the point that Nikita
Khrushchev would later accuse Voroshilov of having
spent most of his time in Gerasimov's studio, to
the detriment of his responsibilities as People's
Commissar of Defense.

His heavy-handed leadership of the Union of
Artists of the USSR and the Soviet Academy of Art
were notorious, and he was at the forefront of the
attacks against cosmopolitanism and formalism
during the Zhdanovshchina.

Although his excessively fawning portraits of
Soviet leaders and his political activities
against artists who would not toe his line have
gained him a reputation as a political hack
(uation)|hack, Gerasimov did not entirely lose
touch with his genuine artistic abilities. Even at
the end of his career, he continued to follow a
moody, almost Impressionistic treatment of
landscapes, curiously at odds with the stridency
of his official portraiture.