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In 1912, Ivan Lazarov graduated in Sculpture from the State Industrial School of Arts in Sofia, under Prof. Zheko Spiridonov. During the two Balkan Wars and the WWI, he created his first significant works, in which he revealed the tragic dimensions of war to the ordinary man. In 1918 and 1919, as a scholarship student of the Ministry of National Enlightenment, he specialised in sculpture at the Munich and Dresden Art Academies. By the time of his return to Bulgaria, Lazarov had already become a mature artist with clear views on the role of art, who had developed his own plastic language. He was a master of multi-figure sculptural compositions, combining the unity of volumes with the complex rhythm and movement of stylised forms. His favoured material was stone, by means of which he created the feeling of monolithism and eternity. Emphasising the typical features of the images he revealed the specificity of our national character and psychology. Lazarov was involved both in easel and monumental forms of sculpture. His major works—the figures for the monuments to the great Bulgarian poets Dimcho Debelyanov and Peyo Yavorov—represent a standard for memorial sculpture in Bulgaria. In 1928, he received the art prize awarded by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS).