1970s UNOFFICIAL ART

SHULZHENKO Vasily Vladimirovich (1949) Road. 1997. Oil on canvas. 200 × 120

And again the uncompromising Shulzhenko. Comparable to his scandalously famous “Outhouse” or “Rural dump”. There seemed to be a real existential horror in the current state of the Russian countryside. If it weren't for the sneering faces and muzzles of his characters.

Nevertheless. Hard Russian absurdism is a theme for which he is respected. And a theme for which he is hated. Hated by whom? Those who blame artists for all problems. Defilers! Daubers! Russophobes! Slander on Russia. Enemies are everywhere. The spiritless Czech Republic joined the spiritless America. Foreign agents, traitors — horror. Without people like Shulzhenko, the village would probably have lived, as in the film “Kuban Cossacks”. There were millionaire collective farms, village fairs, and brave front-rank workers.

The artist has chosen a difficult time to act straightforwardly. And he is not even one of the nonconformists. He is a member of the Union of Artists with 40 years of experience. Where does a well-to-do city dweller Shulzhenko get such a complicated gallery of country fears and terrors? It turns out, from his childhood, when he lived in a country house near Kasimov. These old women, these shepherds, these village drunks, he did not invent them. He remembered them. But it wasn't until 60 years later that they began to return to his canvases.

And one more thing. Not the main one, but an important one. Pay attention to the highest quality of technical execution. Shulzhenko does not allow himself to cut corners in the literal sense. If there is a little tree or a little landscape in the background, it will be painted at the level of a Shishkin sketch. And if there is a cigarette in the teeth, then the light will glow as if it were alive. This is amazing. And all this is here.

Uncompromising Shulzhenko. Russian theme. Museum level. For brave collectors.

PROVOTOROV Vladislav Alekseevich (1947) Head — III. 1980. Oil on canvas. 92 × 74

Vladislav Alekseevich Provotorov is the rector of the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the village of Pavlovskaya Sloboda. And in the 1970s and 1980s he was an avant-garde artist.

Today his name is associated with the Gorkom (City Committee) “twenty” — a group of “XX Moscow artists” in the painting section of the Moscow United Committee of the Union of Graphic Artists, which was located at 28, Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. In the basement of the cooperative house where Vladimir Vysotsky lived.

Gorkom appeared in 1976. Perhaps it was conceived by the authorities as a way to blow off steam after the disgrace of the Bulldozer exhibition. And a form of controlling dissent. But in fact, it became an island of independence reclaimed by artists.

There were many groups in the City Committee — “Seven” with Vladimir Nemukhin. “Group 21” with Zverev and Kazarin. And then there was the “twenty”. There were Petr Belenok, Evgeny Izmailov, Vyacheslav Kalinin, Igor Snegur, Alexander Kharitonov, Semen Faibisovich, Konstantin Khudyakov, and others. Why “twenty”? What did they have in common? Well, there were about 30 artists exhibited in the twenty during the 10 years of its existence, and the line-up varied. But the format was exactly 20 people — it was the idea of Koryun Nagapetyan. The idea was ecclesiastical and religious — 20 people form a parish. The format turned out to be prophetic. Years later, three artists of the group — Vitaly Linitsky, Sergey Simakov and Vladislav Provotorov — became priests and headed the parishes. But that was later. And in 1976, many of the members of the group were young people, already of the post-war generation. Many of them were well educated, many of them were graduates of the Surikov Institute or the Stroganov Art School, independent thinkers with a sharp outlook and critical thinking. And at the same time, this was already a disillusioned generation which saw the hypocrisy, opportunism and cowardice in the socialism of the stagnation era.

Vladislav Provotorov, the son of a front-line officer, was like that. One can imagine what was going on in his soul. In September 1975, he was 28 years old. He participates in one of the first authorized exhibitions of independent artists in the pavilion of the House of Culture at the VDNKh. And what does he see? The night before an important holiday for any artist, “art critics in plainclothes” remove 50 paintings to combat dissent. In protest, the rest of the participants turn their canvases to face the wall. Somehow the scandal is settled. The holiday is ruined, but the paintings are returned. And then the authorities decided to mock the audience. The media didn't report the exhibition, but people heard about it by the “voices” and thousands gathered. What did they come up with then? They turned on the heating and closed the windows inside the pavilion on a hot September day. They closed the public toilets in the building and everywhere else around, to make people suffer. So what should a young artist think of this world after such an exhibition? What should a person looking for his own way and not agreeing to the feeding trough of socialist realism believe in?

Many chose the path of “inner emigration”. And one of its forms was a spiritual quest. And in Vladislav Provotorov the idea of spiritual search pervades all his work. He was captured by the imagery of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment. He increasingly depicts abstract characters and historical figures in which moral destruction turns into physical destruction. The criminal Salome turns into a vile monster before his eyes. Sinners smolder on the move. And in the “Heads” series we present today, the sinner, stripped of her soul, is disfigured and acquires a visible inner emptiness. Here is a woman's head. And the male heads under the numbers were jokingly called “the head of the first”, “the head of the second” — like the members of the Central Committee on the Mausoleum rostrum.

But even modest exhibition opportunities kept the authorities in suspense. The artists were harassed by insulting reviews. The newspaper “Soviet Culture” responded to one of the first exhibitions of the “twenty” with a pejorative article, “Counting on aesthetic ignorance”. They wrote: “At the exhibition, there is an artist who has the ability to convey the visible with scrupulous precision, claiming to be a truthful representation of nature. But where did he go in search of nature? Alas, not in the street, where life is boiling, not where children play, laugh, argue, think and work adults. No, he went to... the morgue, the anatomical theater. Immersing everything he saw there in a brown and green palette, depicting corpses, and even more in sexual poses, the author of these nightmarish scenes, V. Provotorov, is following in the footsteps of the trend common in the West, which asserts the aesthetic of the ugly”.

At the end of the 1980s, his creative spiritual search and religious quest brought the artist to a new point of decision-making. He became a priest and received a parish. The former artists who took the ministry went by the dictates of the soul, without education, learning on the go. And they coped. Today, Archpriest Vladislav Provotorov leads the church in the village of Pavlovskaya Sloboda in Istra district.

CONTEMPORARY ART

BATYNKOV Konstantin Alexandrovich (1959) Anatomical theater. 2019. Acrylic on canvas. 50 × 80

Konstantin Batynkov is a rider of the “merry apocalypse”, a Moscow member of the “Mitki” art group, a five-time USSR junior basketball champion, self-taught and one of the most popular artists of the 2000s. His works decorate the most famous collections of contemporary art and at the same time remain accessible to a wide range of collectors.

He still works very hard. Painting for him is a stimulant, a source of seratonin and endorphin. They say that the artist always returns from his studio in a good mood. Even when he is sick, Batynkov always has a notebook and a pencil in his hands — he cannot live without art.

Absurdist plots, impetuous graphic style — Batynkov is memorable at first sight. Helicopters, like bees, swoop down on cities. Submarines in the steppes engage in unequal air battle. Airships take the dream away with them. This would be the typical, recognizable Batynkov.

But today we have a special case — an exclusive, a rare plot. Batynkov's fantasy on a medical theme. “Anatomical Theater”. This, who does not know, was once more a form of public entertainment. The autopsies were performed by doctors in ceremonial suits. And in the forefront were representatives of the nobility. Later, anatomical theaters were used to train medical students. In Russia anatomic theaters were introduced by Peter the Great. But today we have no professors or students in the Anatomical Theater. Only disembodied spirits and ghosts are present in the room.

1960s UNOFFICIAL ART

NEMUKHIN Vladimir Nikolaevich (1925–2016) Constructive vision. 2007. Acrylic on canvas. 60.5 × 60

Nemukhin again. Geometric, constructivist abstraction of one of the leaders of the Lianozovo group. We have already noticed that in the opinion of many Nemukhin — a convinced formalist, denying the realistic figurative art. In fact, he loved the Russian classics, loved impressionism, and was himself a “man of impressions”. Many of his primary symbols are the sublimation of vivid images from museum painting and everyday life. For example, the red circle in the super-elephants is the setting sun from Clover's landscape. And the same cards are the consequences of someone else's nightly party on the banks of the river (Nemukhin saw the cards submerged in the water, and transferred a beautiful picture to his painting). So who knows. What if the geometry from «Constructive Vision» is also some kind of fence or parquet in its originality? The painting is signed, and a photograph signed by Nemukhin is attached to it. This is what he did for his friends.

BELENOK Petr Ivanovich (1938–1991) Something warning us. 1991. Hardboard, collage, oil, mixed media. 85.5 × 114

Huge, more than a meter-height Belenok. Pasty, textured, juicy — very good. The paste-like substance in two places gave a crumbling, but this is solved by an inexpensive restoration. And the piece is powerful. A worthy exhibit in a museum collection. We often tell about Belenk, but it's not a sin to repeat it.

Petr Belenok is the developer of the concept of panic realism. The conflict of an aggressive environment with a helpless person. Usually his plot is a character's escape from an anomaly. He rarely drew people by hand. He usually cut them out of magazines and finished painting. Belenok was loved by Costakis, who took out many of his works. It is known that Belenok was a favorite artist of Eduard Limonov. The artist wrote many of his subjects as if from himself. He had a difficult fate. He did not live ten years before the time when his paintings were worth money and sold at Sotheby's and Christie’s. He lived his last years in poverty. He did not want to remain a nomenklatura sculptor who sculpted eternal busts of Lenin for the district committees in Ukraine. He left for Moscow, became an underground artist, and now it is clear that he became one of the main figures of nonconformism.

BUKH Aron Froimovich (1923–2006) Flowers. Blue vase. 2001. Oil on canvas. 80 × 60

Now it is hard to believe that for most of his life the artist Aron Bukh was a joyless, gloomy socialist realist.

Until 1984, until his 60s, he painted unmemorable landscapes. If you see them, you won't recognize the author. Although it is unlikely you will see — Bukh burned them after another art council and disappointment. And now at the age of 61, he is reborn as a painter. Next — twenty years of life and crazy energy. Bright expressionism at the junction of performance art. Everyone likes to remember how Bukh grabbed paint with his fingers, and at the end threw a rag into the canvas — take it. But it wasn't always like that. Not for the public, Bukh worked more calmly, thoroughly and with classical tools. And in front of us is just one of the works where he took his time and showed his highest level.

RUSSIAN CLASSICS

KRASOVSKY Alexey Andreevich (1884 — after 1920) A courtyard in summer. 1900–1910s. Oil on canvas. 42 × 55.8

An impressionistic landscape by Alexey Krasovsky. His estate Kulichka in Kharkov province was sometimes visited by his friend Robert Falk. The view of the estate is believed to be depicted in the picture. Alexey Krasovsky studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Serov and Korovin. He exhibited at city exhibitions of contemporary art. After the revolution, he emigrated to Hungary, where he died quite soon. The authenticity of the work is confirmed by the expertise of the Repin Center.

STEPANOV Alexander Nikolaevich (1861–1911) Herd of cows in the forest. 1900–1910s. Oil on canvas. 62.7 × 80.3

A deaf-mute Russian animalist, painter, and portraitist. He graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts. Reproductions of his paintings were published in the magazine “Niva”, on postcards. And exactly subjects with cows at the pasture. The artist was a member of the Kuindzhi society. Stepanov's works are presented in the Russian Museum and other museums of the country. An eye-pleasing work that will adorn the collection of Russian classics.