Brief Biography-Aleksandr Drevin of Cēsis, Latvia, was first tutored by Vilhelms Purvītis in Riga. He studied in Moscow in 1914 and was involved in the founding of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. In 1917 he became a professor of painting at the Vkhutemas, the Russian State Art and Technical School set up by Vladimir Lenin. He was dispatched throughout Russia to undertake landscape works, but his paintings were non-political. Fauvism was his primary influence, and later realism and abstract style. His wife, Nadezhda Udaltsova, was a successful Russian artist, and his son Andrey Drevin was a sculptor. Aleksandr was shot at the Butovo training ground outside Moscow by the NKVD, or secret police, during Joseph Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’ in 1938. In 1957 he was posthumously rehabilitated.