In the above works of Osmerkin, one can clearly see the great talent of the artist and an excellent understanding of color. He was the youngest artist of the Jack of Diamonds and one of the most talented. The works of Goncharova and Larionov are now worth millions and this is only because the artists came to Paris and their works had access to the painting market. Of course, the same would have happened with the works of Osmerkin, but by the will of fate he remained to live in the USSR. Having experienced all the hardships of the revolutionary and war years, the artist remains devoted to art until the end of his days. Deineka wrote about him;
He passed among us Don Quixote in art, many things seemed to him better than they actually were, he looked at many things with sublime delight. "But not only painting conquered his heart then. The feeling of art, as he later called himself, the ability to penetrate into the world of the sublime, the beautiful, was brought up in him and literature.He knew Russian poetry perfectly - the works of Baratynsky, Tyutchev, Fet, but nevertheless A.S. Pushkin remained an idol and god for him.Everyone who knew Osmerkin was surprised his brilliant knowledge, feeling and reading of the poet's immortal creations,to which he dedicated a series of paintings painted in 1928 in the Mikhailovsky, Trigorsky, Pushkin mountains. The best achievements of French painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries undoubtedly influenced Russian artists. Osmerkin said: "The Shchukin and Morozov galleries are my academy. I have done all the way of analytical research in painting. There were both impressionism and cubism …"
The talent for teaching woke up in the artist quite early. Since 1918 he taught at 1 and 2 Free State Workshops, then at Vkhutemas - Vhutein. In 1932. at the invitation of AT Matveev, who headed the All-Russian Academy of Arts, Osmerkin moved to Leningrad .. At that time, Osmerkin was in charge of the painting department, which, according to his students, was the most interesting in the Academy. In his article "On the Education of Artists" Osmerkin wrote: "The upbringing of a young artist is, first of all, the upbringing of artistic culture in him, and one must begin with this upbringing. Mind and feeling must guide by the hand of the artist, only in this way does the craft necessary for the master not turn into needlework. One craft taken without visual imagination leads to the passivity of artistic thinking. Without visual imagination, it is impossible to organize a picture as a whole, to achieve in it the correct subordination of details. In teaching, I strive to develop students' sense of color as the fundamental principle of painting. At first I instill in them a love of material, a love of paints: ultramarine, emerald, ocher, cadmium, ivory, etc. " Being a deeply educated person and considering his main the vital task of the development of art, until the end of his life, he remained faithful to his ideals and managed to pass on to his students his knowledge and faith in fine art, which he considered impressionism.
Osmerkin has always been reprimanded for his worship of Western painting. Both externally and internally, he was a man of the old world, a man of imperial Russia. He came to his lectures at the Academy in a fox fur coat, in an impeccable suit and always talked about art from the point of view of beauty, but in no case from the side of the establishment of Soviet power and the approval of socialist realism. A it wasn't easy at the time. In 1947. At a party meeting, Alexander Alexandrovich Osmerkin was asked to renounce the French impressionists and no longer recognize their painting, to which the professor replied that those who do not recognize Cezanne's painting are complete fools and left the meeting, slamming the door. After that, he was released from teaching at the Repin Academy in Leningrad and at the Surikov Institute in Moscow. He had to live on a small pension. In 1953. The master is gone.