Russian/American, 1888 - 1975
Encouraged in the study of art by his father who was a professor at the University of Petrograd (Leningrad) and later at Aberdeen University in Scotland, Derujinsky began his studies in Petrograd at the School for the Encouragement of Art. It soon became clear that his main interest was in the field of sculpture and so, in 1911, he was sent to Paris where he studied at the Acad‚mie Colarossi, and with Charles Verlet, and Jean Antonin Injalbert. Two years later he entered the Imperial Academy of Art in Petrograd where he remained for four years. With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, he fled to the Crimea where he stayed with his boyhood friend, Price Felix Youssoupoff, until in 1919, he managed to leave Russia as a sailor on a ship bound for New York. Derujinsky had not been long in America before his work was being exhibited. He was soon elected to the National Sculpture Society, and, at the invitation of John Gregory, was teaching at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design.
Derujinsky specialized in the carving of allegorical and mythological figures and several examples of these are in the Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina. Among his portrait work are busts of Theodore Roosevelt (Roosevelt Birthplace, New York) and Sir John Lavery (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). One of his most well-known busts is that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt which was unveiled at the president's home in Hyde Park, New York, in 1947. The sculptor also created a number of religious works including a Stations of the Cross series for the private chapel of New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, and statues of saints for the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D. C.. His Europa and the Bull, a fountain group, was a feature of the 1939 New York World's Fair.
Derujinsky was an active exhibiter in the Academy's annuals from 1922 to the year of his death. He won the Academy's Watrous Gold Medal in 1938, and the Anna Hyatt Huntington Prize in 1949.
Derujinsky specialized in the carving of allegorical and mythological figures and several examples of these are in the Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina. Among his portrait work are busts of Theodore Roosevelt (Roosevelt Birthplace, New York) and Sir John Lavery (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). One of his most well-known busts is that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt which was unveiled at the president's home in Hyde Park, New York, in 1947. The sculptor also created a number of religious works including a Stations of the Cross series for the private chapel of New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, and statues of saints for the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D. C.. His Europa and the Bull, a fountain group, was a feature of the 1939 New York World's Fair.
Derujinsky was an active exhibiter in the Academy's annuals from 1922 to the year of his death. He won the Academy's Watrous Gold Medal in 1938, and the Anna Hyatt Huntington Prize in 1949.
