Eternal Masters

It is a harsh winter of 1942 in besieged Leningrad. The broken windows of the mosaic workshop of the Academy of Arts are boarded up with plywood, it is cold. A master is working in the room – he lays out scenes of peaceful life from pieces of colored smalt. This is a representative of the dynasty of mosaic artists Vladimir Alexandrovich Frolov, he is 68 years old.

Just before the war he received an order: to make mosaic panels for the Moscow subway. He completed the work For the Paveletskaya and Avtozavodskaya stations by the summer of 1941, but the mosaic panel for the Novoslobodskaya station was still in progress. And then June 22 came. Nevertheless, the order wasn’t cancelled. And the master couldn’t leave Leningrad because all the equipment was here.

The master worked by the light of a kerosene lamp, alone, losing his last strength – he had to meet the deadline. He sent the finished work through the Road of Life to Moscow. In the last days of January 1942,  the last panels crossed the Ladoga lake. And on February 3rd the master passed away.

The entire Frolov family are hereditary mosaicists. Vladimir’s father, Alexander, was awarded the title of Academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts and worked on mosaic paintings for St. Isaac’s Cathedral. His children, Alexander and Vladimir, laid out the unique mosaics of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ, known as “The Savior on Spilled Blood”.

The Frolov brothers had to endure a lot in the 20th century. The successor of the dynasty, Vladimir Frolov, tells about the difficult fate of the mosaic artists in the film.