User:BonHommeRichard1080/Draft of Expanded Ernst N. Article

Ernst Neizvestny (b. 9 april 1925) is an expatriate Russian sculptor. He currently lives and works in New York City.

=Life=

He was born to Ossip and Nadezhda Neizvestny in Sverdlovsk. At the time this city had a large population of dissidents who the Soviet authorities neither wished to ship to Siberia nor to permit back into the more respectable parts of Russia. Because of this Ernst grew up in an atmosphere of considerable intellectual diversity. He was interested in art from an early age and he attended an elite school for artists that was originally based in Leningrad, but had been temporarily removed to Samarkand on account of the recent German Invasion.

When a friend was killed in the fighting he lied about his age in order to volunteer for the Red Army. Knowing that he was now untouchable, he beat the school's headmaster for the preferential treatment he had shown to boys from better families, and then left for the front. He was shot in 1945 while leading a charge outside the village of Heisendorf, in Austria. He received some treatment at a hospital, but when he was overcome with paralysis his doctors gave him up for dead. He likely would have died had he not, by an incredible coincidence, been recognized by his family's old nurse. Papers went out, however, confirming that he was dead, and he was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner. He recovered, however. Denied re-admission to the school he had attended before the war, he attended Academy of Arts in Riga.

=Work=

=Quotes by Ernst Neizvestny= "I longed to perform great deeds. To be quite honest, I knew as a child that I would be something big, although I did not know in exactly what way."

"There is only one way for art - the path of absolute truth. Anything that is not true, is not art. There is no excuse for untruth, not even that of being young. Untruth becomes a habit. One must learn to be truthful right from the start."