Alexey Smirnov von Rauch was a Soviet and Russian painter, icon painter, poet, writer and theorist of art associated with the nonconformist generation of the 1960s and the Second Russian Avant-Garde. He developed a distinctive form of magical symbolism, combining expressionist and surrealist imagery with Russian Orthodox iconography, Byzantine and Scythian traditions, and mystical symbolism. His early paintings often depicted apocalyptic and visionary scenes, while his later work increasingly centred on religious imagery and the symbolic language of the icon.

Born in Moscow in 1937, Smirnov came from a family of artists and hereditary nobility. His father, Gleb Smirnov, was a painter, graphic artist and professor, while his grandfather, Boris Smirnov, was a painter associated with the Peredvizhniki. From 1950 to 1956, Smirnov studied at the Moscow Central Art School and from 1957 to 1962 studied graphic art at the Moscow Art Institute named after Vasily Surikov under Yevgeny Kibrik. He considered Russian icon painting his true artistic school.

In the early 1960s, Smirnov joined the Yuzhinsky Circle after being introduced to the writer Yury Mamleyev by Vladimir Kovenatsky. He became closely associated with figures of Moscow's underground culture, including Yevgeny Golovin, Yury Stefanov, Genrikh Khudyakov and Mikhail Grobman. His work developed through successive phases of Neo-Impressionism, Cézannism, Expressionism and abstraction before moving towards mystical symbolism and, from the late 1960s, his theory of magical symbolism. His work was exhibited internationally, including in Florence, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Zurich and Turin, and he received the Joan Miró Dibuix Prize in Barcelona in 1969 and was again recognised in 1971.

From the late 1960s, Smirnov increasingly turned away from the Moscow underground and devoted himself to the restoration and painting of Orthodox churches and icons, a practice that occupied much of the following three decades. A fire in his studio in 1975 destroyed a significant portion of his earlier work. By the mid-1970s he had largely abandoned visual art for literature, producing poetry, plays, essays and the novel The Dionysius Board. His literary work was largely unpublished in the Soviet Union but began appearing in Russia, France and Israel from the 1990s.

Smirnov's work was included in major surveys of Soviet nonconformist art, including Progressive Strömungen in Moskau 1957–1970 at the Museum Bochum in 1974, Free Art from the Soviet Union: From the Collection of Michael Grobman at the Herzliya Museum of Art in 1980, and The Second Russian Avant-Garde: The Nonconformists 1953–1983 in Hamburg in 1993. In 1996, his work was shown in Nonkonformisten: The Second Russian Avant-Garde 1955–1988 at both the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Later exhibitions included the Museum of Modern Art in Olomouc in 2016 and Dark Thaw at the Voznesensky Centre in Moscow in 2025.

Smirnov died in Moscow in 2009, aged 72. His work remains associated with the history of Moscow's unofficial art and the Second Russian Avant-Garde, particularly through his development of magical symbolism and his synthesis of modernist experimentation with Russian religious and historical traditions.

Alexey Glebovich Smirnov (von Raukh)