Alexander Baturin (1914 – 2003) was a painter and graphic artist, and one of the most important figures in the history of the art of Leningrad during the second half of the XX century. The pupil of Vladimir Sterligov – himself a student of Kazimir Malevich – he was the definitive authority for several generations of Leningrad artists, personifying a living connection with the traditions of the Russian avant-garde. His parents, who were aristocrats, were exiled to the small town of Shadrinsk following the revolution. Baturin himself was exiled from the Academy of Arts because of his background and spent 22 years in prison camps and various places of exile and was allowed to return to Leningrad only in 1956 after ‘rehabilitation’. Developing Sterligov’s plastic system, Baturin combined mathematical logic and a poetic belief in the primal rationality and order of the world in his works. He was engaged in a search for a definitive coloristic and plastic combination of color planes, which turned his landscapes into a painted formula of the universe.