Ivan Ivanov was born on , in ,
Chelyabinsky Uyezd,
Orenburg Governorate,
Russian Empire (now ,
Mishkinsky District,
Kurgan Oblast,
Russian Federation). His father, Dmitry Yevgrafovich Ivanov (1862-1926), was a carpenter. He worked temporarily in Taktashi. Shadr studied at the Artistic Industrial School in
Yekaterinburg from 1903 to 1907, and from 1907 to 1908 at the Drawing School of the
Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in
St Petersburg where the famous
Nicholas Roerich was his teacher. He furthered his education under
Auguste Rodin and
Emile-Antoine Bourdelle in
Paris (1910–1911), and in
Rome (1911–1912). From 1914 to 1917, he worked for the film industrialist
Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. In 1918, he went to
Omsk to take his family to Moscow, but remained in this city until 1921. He gave lectures on art there. Shadr's early works, such as the project for the
Monument to the World's Suffering (1916), were designed according to the principles of
Art Nouveau. After the
1917 Revolution he was an active participant in the execution of the
Monumental Propaganda Plan, in particular, he sculptured reliefs depicting the Socialist ideological leaders
Karl Marx,
Karl Liebknecht, and
Rosa Luxemburg, as well as some sixteen separate monuments to
Vladimir Lenin. In these years the characteristics of Shadr’s style were consolidated: an elevated,
romantic organization of the figures and an emotional, dynamic composition. Among his most famous and characteristic works are sculptures
The Cobblestone Is the Weapon of the Proletariat (1927) and
Girl with an Oar (1936). In the 1920s, Shadr together with sculptor
Piotr Tayozhny came up with one of the first
designs of the
Order of Lenin, the highest
Soviet award. Shadr also worked for
Goznak, including on designing new Soviet
money that included the symbols of that time: a worker, a peasant and a
Red Army soldier. Those sculptures remarkable for their vigorous and dynamic typical characters can be seen nowadays in the
Russian Museum (plaster casts) and in the
Tretyakov Gallery (bronze sculptures). Shadr died in Moscow and in 1952 was awarded the
Stalin Prize posthumously. He is buried in
Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where his sculptural work can also been seen at the grave of
Nadezhda Alliluyeva, the second wife of Stalin, and the grave of theater director
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. '', 1927,
bronze,
Moscow,
State Tretyakov Gallery ==Selected work==