Painter, graphic artist, cartoonist

During his childhood he lived in Dvinsk, where his sister Rosa (1902) was born. His father, Grigory Moiseevich Efros (Geshel Moshkovich Efrush), was a merchant, and in the 1920s he served as an agent of Promkredit. From 1908 to the end of the 1930s, the family lived on Mytninskaya Street, house No. 1, sq. 3. Simultaneously with studying at the real school, he attended the private art school of M. D. Bernstein (1915-1916) in Petrograd. Since 1918 he studied at the painting department of the Petrograd State Free Art Workshops (since 1921 VKHUTEIN), the workshop of K. S. Petrov-Vodkin. In 1924, after graduating from the painting department, he continued his studies at the architectural faculty of VKhUTEIN, having defended his thesis in 1929.

From the mid-1920s to the early 1930s he worked in the field of posters and magazine satirical graphics, collaborated with the Moscow and Leningrad magazines “Behemoth”, “Buzoter”, “Smekhach”, “Red Raven”, “Lapot”, “Cannon”, “Inspector”, “Crocodile”, created cycles “NEP Stories”, “Everyday”. Since 1933 — member of the Leningrad Union of Architects. In 1938-1940 he made a sketch of a multi-figure monumental frieze for a competitive project of the Palace of Soviets in Moscow on the themes “Harvest”, “Aircraft Builders” and “Miners”. Since the late 1930s, he taught drawing at the Architectural Faculty of the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineering (LISI).

On March 10, 1942, together with LISI, he was evacuated with his family to Barnaul, after returning from evacuation, he taught at LISI until 1961, and since 1962 at the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute named after A. I. Herzen.

In 1988, a book-album of cartoonists Grigory Rose, Robert Chernyak and Gerasim Efros was released in Moscow in the series “Masters of Soviet Caricature”. In 2004, the Moscow gallery “Art-Divage” hosted a retrospective exhibition of the work of Gerasim Efros. G. G. Efros is one of the most significant masters of Soviet satirical graphics of the 1920s.

He was buried at the Komarovsky cemetery.

Publications:

• Grigory Rose, Robert Chernyak, Gerasim Efros. The series “Masters of Soviet Caricature”. Moscow: Soviet Artist, 1988.
• Efros Gerasim Grigorievich, 1902-1979: exhibition catalog. Moscow: Skorpion, 2004.

Reference: Wikipedia, 2022