Chose C'ezanne - chose your destiny, artist and teacher I. I. Loshakov: unknown pages of Chelyabinsk art culture

It is the first time when the historiography of South Ural art depicts the atmosphere of the artistic medium of 1940's Chelyabinsk, which, as all the Soviet art of that time, specified the drastic incongruity of art as a creation and art as a means of expressing the government's ideological programme, realized through the ideology and the "method" of socialistic realism. The conflict between the system and an individual constructive method of artist M.M. Loshakov, who lived in Paris in 1920-1930 and returned to his homeland on the verge of the Great Patriotic War, was aggravated by the notorious decrees of 1946 and 1948 followed by the waves of Stalin's repressions. On the basis of specific material the author throws light on the qualitative condition of the region's artistic process in 1940s.