Vasily Ivanovich Vikulov

Vikulov was born on 2 January 1904 in Nerchinsk, in the Russian Empire's Transbaikal region. He completed the Blagoveshchensk Art Technical School in 1924, then studied painting at the Leningrad VKhUTEIN from 1925 to 1930, under Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Vasily Savinsky. He graduated in 1930 with the professional title of artist-painter; his diploma painting, Foundry Shop of the Red Putilovets Plant, is held today by the Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.

In the late 1920s he took part in the Leningrad branch of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, and in 1929 joined the Society of Painters. He became a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists in 1935 and exhibited regularly in Leningrad group and citywide shows from 1930 onward, working in cityscapes, industrial subjects, genre and historical painting, and portraiture.

He died on 23 January 1971, per Arthive, and the year 1971 is independently corroborated by MutualArt, Sotheby's catalogue records, and Russian Wikipedia. Two dealer-reference sites, Shishkin Gallery and Tramvai Iskusstv, list 1973 instead; on the weight of the available sourcing this appears to be a minor misreport rather than an equally supported alternative, though no primary obituary or archival death record has been located to fully close the question. His place of death is given as Leningrad by Russian Wikipedia alone and is not independently corroborated.

Available reference sources describe Vikulov within the realist idiom of the Leningrad school: cityscapes, industrial and factory scenes, genre and historical subjects, and portraits. The State Russian Museum's own bibliography for the artist cites the art historian A. Dmitrenko, but the available material does not preserve a quotable passage from that writing, and no other exact, attributable critical quotation could be located. His profile rests on institutional and biographical documentation rather than a developed body of published criticism.

Vikulov's highest documented auction price is USD 109,345, for New Year's Celebrations on Palace Square, sold at Sotheby's London in 2016, according to MutualArt's market database; the exact sale date is not specified by that source, and no second, independent database was found to cross-verify the figure. A separate secondary aggregator, Art.Salon, lists two further Sotheby's London lots, Palace Square and At the Corner of Bolshaya Morskaya Street and Nevsky Prospect, each at GBP 40,000 in November 2017, though these could not be cross-checked against another source and their exact dates and relationship to the MutualArt-recorded record are unclear. His work also circulates through at least one secondary-market dealer, Sovart Gallery in Moscow, which lists pieces attributed to him and solicits further consignments. Collectors should treat this as a thin, largely single-sourced price history rather than an established market trend.

There is no catalogue raisonne and no certificate-of-authenticity program for Vikulov; verification of any specific work would depend on provenance tracing through Soviet-era museum and union records. His death year is well corroborated as 1971 across four independent sources, though two dealer references give 1973, a reminder that even basic biographical facts for lesser-documented Soviet-era artists can carry real uncertainty. His known auction record, USD 109,345 for New Year's Celebrations on Palace Square at Sotheby's London in 2016, rests on a single market-database source without a confirmed exact date, so it should be treated as directional rather than definitive; anyone considering a work attributed to him should weigh museum and archival corroboration alongside this thin price history, not price history alone.