Lyudmila Marts

Lyudmila Viktorovna Marts was born on 9 November 1935 in Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East.

She first studied engineering, graduating from the construction faculty of the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers in 1959. After several years working in architecture she turned to art history and in 1967 graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in art history.

From 1960 to 1965 Marts worked in the architectural studio of Mosgiprotrans, the Moscow transport design institute. From 1965 to 1976 she worked in the theory and history department of the All-Union Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE), where between 1968 and 1972 she compiled and edited collections on the history of industrial design and design education. She also wrote a series of articles on the propaedeutic course of the Vkhutemas and Vkhutein art schools.

She became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1973. In the 1970s she was deputy chair of the Moscow Union of Artists' commission for work with young artists and art historians, and for six years led its Club of Young Artists and Art Historians, a discussion forum. In the 1980s she sat on the bureau of the union's criticism and art history section, and in the 1990s and 2000s on the board of the Association of Moscow Sculptors. She was also a member of the creative commissions for sculpture and for monumental art of the Union of Artists of Russia.

In 1980 she joined the State Tretyakov Gallery, where she became head of the department of twentieth and twenty-first century sculpture. There she built up a significant collection of work by contemporary sculptors and helped with the gallery's international projects. She compiled, edited and introduced volume three of the gallery's catalogue of sculpture, covering the second half of the twentieth century (1998), and contributed the section on sculpture to the gallery's history of its collections (1987).

Her books and catalogues include Moscow Sculptors (1987), Pyotr Dik (1994), Russian Sculpture of the 20th Century (Paris, 1996), Dmitry Shakhovskoy (2003), Viktor Korneev (2003 and 2011), Dashi's Bronze Asia (2005) and later volumes on the Buryat sculptor Dashi Namdakov, Inhabited Islands (2006), a centenary volume on the animal artist Vasily Vatagin (2008), and a section on sculpture of the 1950s to 1970s in Masterpieces of Soviet Art (London, 2015). She curated solo exhibitions of many contemporary sculptors. In 2007 she was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts in its department of art history and criticism.

Marts was married to the sculptor Andrei Valerianovich Marts (1924 to 2002), an animal sculptor, Honoured Artist of the RSFSR and corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts. Their daughter, Irina Andreyevna Marts, born in 1959, is an artist who was elected a corresponding member of the Academy in 2012. She lived and worked in Moscow. The sculptor Dmitry Tugarinov made a portrait sculpture of her, Milochka Marts, in 2005.

Lyudmila Marts died on 20 October 2026, at the age of 90. Her death was announced by the Russian Academy of Arts, which said the Academy had suffered a heavy loss. The cause of death was not made public. Some Russian outlets gave her age as 91, but her date of birth, 9 November 1935, means she was 90.

Georgy Smirnov, chair of the Association of Moscow Sculptors, wrote that it was impossible to imagine she was no longer there, and that even in recent years, when it had become hard for her to attend public events, sculptors could still call her and hear her voice. The association said details of the farewell would be announced later.

Marts was one of the leading specialists on Russian sculpture of the second half of the twentieth century. The Tretyakov Gallery catalogue she edited became a standard reference on the period, and the contemporary sculpture collection she assembled at the gallery remains part of the national collection.

Colleagues remembered her as an art historian who worked in the studios rather than the study, following works from their first stages and supporting many sculptors at the beginning of their careers. Her honours included the title Honoured Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation (2001), the medals Veteran of Labour (1987) and In Memory of the 850th Anniversary of Moscow (1997), the Surikov gold medal of the Union of Artists of Russia for an outstanding contribution to Russian fine art (2015), and the Russian Academy of Arts silver medal Worthy (2018).