Brodsky I. I.
Painting “At the coffin of the Leader [at the coffin of Ilyich]”
USSR, Moscow. 1925.
Canvas, oil
124×208 cm.
Admission in 1936 from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute

V. I. Lenin died at the age of 53 on January 21, 1924 at 18: 50 in the Gorky estate of the Podolsk district.
The body of the leader of the world proletariat was delivered to Moscow by a special funeral train (later museumified).
The coffin was placed in the Column Hall of the House of Unions for five days, so that everyone could say goodbye to the first leader of the Soviet state.
The funeral commission paid special attention to the artistic perpetuation of the events of those days. There were many who wanted to sketch everything connected with Lenin’s death. Isaac Brodsky was not accidentally called the painter number 1 for the official authorities. He worked long and hard to create iconography of Soviet leaders, endlessly replicated the main images of the revolution – Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, as well as Anatoly Lunacharsky, Klim Voroshilov, Mikhail Frunze, Mikhail Kalinin and others.
Brodsky made the first version of the painting in 1924. It was not approved by the Commission for perpetuating the memory of V. I. Lenin perhaps because the General Secretary of the party, Joseph Stalin, as the main contender to replace Lenin was not depicted.
In April 1925, the artist prepared another version of the painting. The presence of political figures, later deleted from the history of the party will be the reason for the long exile of the canvas to the Museum storerooms. By a circular dated October 16, 1950, the painting was requested to be transferred to the special storage of the Ministry of State Security with a note: “Brodsky I. “At the coffin of the Leader. Column Hall of the House of Unions”.
There are images of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Enukidze.”