Konstantin Leonidovich Pankov was an ethnically Nenets

Nenets people

The Nenets are an indigenous people in Russia. According to the latest census in 2002, there are 41,302 Nenets in the Russian Federation, most of them living in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Nenets Autonomous Okrug...

/Mansi Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 painter. Born in the far north in a family of hunters, he became the first Nenets artist. He started to paint his landscapes, although he had never seen any paintings. As Gennady Gor wrote, "Pankov's paintings are meditations on his land in terms of color. In the Far North airplanes and self-propelled sledges

Aerosan

An aerosani is a type of propeller-driven snowmobile, running on skis, used for communications, mail deliveries, medical aid, emergency recovery and border patrolling in northern Russia, as well as for recreation...

 can be seen side by side with sleds pulled by teams of reindeer

Reindeer

The reindeer , also known as the caribou in North America, is a deer from the Arctic and Subarctic, including both resident and migratory populations. While overall widespread and numerous, some of its subspecies are rare and one has already gone extinct.Reindeer vary considerably in color and size...

. Even in our day, books and TV screens co-exist there with the folklore of times past. Pankov's life reads like a fairy-tale. As a youth he used to ski through his native taiga

Taiga

Taiga , also known as the boreal forest, is a biome characterized by coniferous forests.Taiga is the world's largest terrestrial biome. In North America it covers most of inland Canada and Alaska as well as parts of the extreme northern continental United States and is known as the Northwoods...

 with a song on his lips. Then the song assumed the shape of paintings and, thus metamorphosed, reached Leningrad and Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

, and Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

".

Konstantin was born in 1910 in the village Saranpaul which is now in Beryozovsky District, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug

Beryozovsky District, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug

Beryozovsky District is one of nine districts of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug — Yugra, Russia, located in the northwestern part of the autonomous okrug, on the left bank of meridional part of the Ob River within the limits of North Sosva altitudes and the east slope of the North and Pre-Polar Ural...

, in the Northern Urals. His father was a Nenets, his mother a Mansi.

He entered the Institute for Peoples of the North in Leningrad. The art studio of the institute was supervised by A. Uspensky and L. Mess. They fully realized how intricate and unusual had been the road traveled by their talented disciple, a primitive hunter only two years before. Pankov and his studio mates had no idea of the long-standing traditions of Western and Russian art before they came to Leningrad, for they had simply never seen a picture.

Perhaps Pankov ought to have been first taken to the Hermitage

Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums of the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been opened to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display,...

 or the Russian Museum

Russian Museum

The State Russian Museum is the largest depository of Russian fine art in St Petersburg....

 and shown the great masterpieces of Rembrandt and Rubens or Briullov and Alexander Ivanov

Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov

Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov , 1806 – July 15 , 1858) was a Russian painter who adhered to the waning tradition of Neoclassicism but found little sympathy with his contemporaries....

. Uspensky and Mess did not want to rush things, because Pankov had never seen a picture in his life, except the portraits at the Institute, and might have taken the first masterpiece he saw for an inviolable standard to follow and surrendered his will to somebody else's way of vision.

The traditions of "anonymous" art, folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

, so different from those of the present-day visual arts, are obvious in Pankov's works.

Pankov is unique, for he fuses the folkloristic vision of life and ingenuousness of taiga-born hunter with the modern technique of painting and faultless sense of colour and composition. The high aesthetic merit of the young artist's pictures, their singular and novel character, could not, of course, remain unnoticed. Pictures by Pankov and his studio mates were repeatedly reproduced in many magazines in the thirties. They decorated the Pavilion of the Far North at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition and the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1937

Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937)

The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne was held from May 25 to November 25, 1937 in Paris, France...

. Thousands and thousands of Parisians visiting the Soviet Pavilion were deeply impressed by the art of the minor nationalities of the Soviet Far North, to whom the October Revolution

October Revolution

The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

 had given a new lease of life. The Jury of the Exposition rated the works of the painters of the Far North, notably Pankov, who were awarded the Grand Prix and Gold Medals. The Honorary Diploma of the Exposition conferred upon the Institute for Peoples of the North is kept at the Leningrad Museum of the Arctic

Arctic

The Arctic is a region located at the northern-most part of the Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, Russia, Greenland, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean, surrounded by treeless permafrost...

.

As soon as World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 began, Konstantin Pankov joined the Red Army

Red Army

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...

 as a sniper and scout, making good use of his knowledge of the North. He was fighting on the Volkhov Front

Volkhov Front

The Front was reformed on the 9 June 1942 from the Volkhov Operational Group of the Leningrad Front and served until 15 February 1944, participating in the relief of the Siege of Leningrad and taking part in other operations including:-Campaigns:...

in 1942 when he was killed in action.