For example, on Cosmonauts Square, near the ‘October’ house of culture, there are portraits of space explorers: Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Komarov, Georgy Dobrovolsky and Vladislav Volkov.
And, near the ‘Mir’ house of culture, there is a whole alley of portraits in the same style: Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Shostakovich and Maya Plisetskaya, Leo Tolstoy and Rodion Shchedrin, Peter Tchaikovsky and Fernand Leger, Leonid Kogan and even Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.
All these works were created by one author - artist Nadezhda Léger. The sister of poet Vladislav Khodasevich, a student of the UNOVIS created by Kazimir Malevich, she went to Paris in 1924. There, she studied with artist Fernand Léger and, later, became his wife. She began to work in mosaics only in the 1960s, having become acquainted with the work of Italian mosaic master Melano, who did the facade of the Léger Museum.
Then she also conceived a series of 65 portraits of prominent people. In 1972, Nadezhda Léger presented her project in the suburbs of Paris and then donated them to the USSR.
Having received several cars with mosaic portraits, Soviet authorities were a little confused and left them standing on the spare tracks for some time. And, in 1974, they found a use for them - several dozen were installed in Dubna. Since then, they have been decorating the streets of the science city.
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