Although Alexander Isaakovich Rusakov (1898-1952) is closely identified with "Circle of Artists" and the Leningrad Landscape School his painting aspirations expanded much further beyond these orbits. The development of the Leningrad artists in the 1930s-1950s is usually described in terms of their evolution from grand narrative painting on socially significant themes to a more intimate genre of landscape. Rusakov progressed in the opposite direction. Although in "Circle of Artists" he pioneered a novel strand of narrative painting, these works had little in common with the genre of "Soviet fresco" – Rusakov deliberately rendered them in a sketchy manner. At the same time, he handled the intimate genres of still life and landscape in the spirit of the Grand Style or panel painting. He achieved lightness and expressiveness while keeping technical devices to a minimum. In a similar vein to the Symbolists of the 1900s he would articulate form by combining the line with shaded expanses of color. In these works a sea of paint of complex, intense colors infuses the painting's simplified perspective and the straightened lines that form the outline of the subject's geometric frame.
Following his studies at E.N. Zvantseva's school as a teenager, Rusakov enrolled in VKhUTEIN where his teachers were masters of the late 19th century – Osip Braz and Dmitry Kardovsky. Subjected to these influences Rusakov's first efforts in art involved comprehending Academism, Art Nouveau, and Neo-Classicism and adapting them to his own ends, which distinguished him from the majority of the "Circle of Artists" members who adopted an accomplished approach learned from Petrov-Vodkin's workshop. Preserving independence from the government, Rusakov almost never exhibited his painting and, engrossed in work, led the life of a recluse. Rusakov's studio, which also served as a source of inspiration for the artist, was set up in an apartment on Bolshoy Prospect of Petrograd Side. In these spacious rooms of the Art Nouveau epoch, which had belonged to his family since before the revolution, Rusakov lived together with his wife, the artist Tatiana Kupervasser, through the reallocation of living space and the Siege of Leningrad. In the 1920s, meetings of "Circle of Artists" were held there and in the following years it served as a gathering place for the members of the Leningrad Landscape School. Parts of his home's interior and the view from the window, which remain almost unchanged to this day, are featured in many of his paintings that were created in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s and have since become part of modernist myth, much in the same way as settings that recur in Matisse's and Duncan Grant's interior paintings have done.
Unlike other members of "Circle of Artists" Rusakov didn't leave any memoires or theoretical texts. Drawn to technical aspects of painting, he developed his own compositions of primer which prevented colors from growing faint over time. His work process can be reconstructed through sketches of landscapes in notebooks and photo-sketches. Although most of Rusakov's works were painted on the spot there were some he would paint from memory rendering impressions from what he saw in the past. Rusakov preferred to work in series and frequently painted views of the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure, Sestroretsk and Petrograd Side en plein air or from memory, showing almost no interest in classic Petersburg views. In the 1930s – 1940s he created a series of portraits of his close friends, Leningrad artists, which preserved for history the faces of unofficial art. These included Boris Ermolaev, Alexander Vedernikov, and Nikolay Emelyanov – a "marquist" (as Albert Marque's followers were jokingly called as opposed to the similar-sounding "Marxist") who was executed by firing squad, portrayed in glasses wearing a second-hand half-length fur coat.
In the mid-1920s within the orbit of "Circle of Artists" there were many artistic couples – Victor Proshkin and Victoria Belakovskaya, Valentin Kurdov and Gerta Nemenova, Alexander Matveev and Zoya Matveeva-Mostova, Vladimir and Sarra Lebedev. The couple of Alexander Rusakov and Tatiana Kupervasser was also that of creative equals. Sharing with Rusakov's output an embeddedness in Symbolism, Kupervasser's work features much less of the geometric, showing a more overt affinity to Art Deco. Her large-format works, for example the "Religion – Opium for the Masses" series (1920s), reveal an interest in archaic aesthetics – dynamic figures appear as compact solid volumes. Nadia Plungian