“I don’t want to scold — I’m just sorry for this person. He is just pathetic, unhappy pathetic. He got into a very unattractive story, and only because he turned out to be too grateful material for speculators visiting from abroad on the part of human souls... A vague, frightened, neurasthenic world appears in the artist's canvases. Sloping houses, crooked windows, herring heads, scrubbed walls of barracks — all this would look like an ordinary bias of the layman, if it were not mixed with pseudo-significant symbolism of nonsense”... And further in the same spirit. So the newspaper “Soviet Culture” wrote. Article “Expensive price of lentil soup”. June 14, 1966.

Among the dozens of artists of the Vladimir school of painting there are three pillars: Kim Britov, Valery Kokurin and Vladimir Yukin. The most expensive, the most famous. Pioneers and discoverers. Russian landscapes, painted in incredibly vivid colors, emitting light themselves, created a sensation in 1960 at the republican exhibition in Moscow. And, like the “Impressionists” after the “Salon of the Outcasts”, the term “Vladimirites” was fixed in our language after the exhibition “Soviet Russia”.

NEMUKHIN Vladimir Nikolaevich (1925–2016) Dedication to Bulat Okudzhava. 1997. Wood tinted, metal. Underneath the pedestal are the author's signature, name and date: НВ Dedicated to B. Okudzhava. Vl. Nemukhin. 1997. A version of the sculpture from this series is reproduced on page 313 of the monograph “Vladimir NEMUKHIN. Painting. Graphic arts. Sculpture. Porcelain” (Moscow, 2012. BONFI). About Okudzhava. The father, the party organizer of Uralvagonzavod, was shot in 1937 on charges of attempting to assassinate his friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Mother was sent to camps in 1938. In 1942, as he turned 18, he volunteered for the front. They did not take him for a long time, and he begged the military commissar to send him. Mortar. He was wounded near Mozdok. Commissioned. After the war, he studied at the faculty of philology, worked as a teacher. In the 1960s, he began performing in the bard song genre.

Before us is the sculpture “Dedication to Paul Cézanne”, created by the nonconformist artist Vladimir Nemukhin. Why Cézanne? This is a beautiful story. Cézanne is one of the main innovators of the 20th century, the main figure of post-impressionism. And so distinctive that there is even the term “Cezannism”. In particular, our famous “Jack of Diamonds” (part of the Russian avant-garde) — Konchalovsky, Mashkov, Falk — all of them were at a certain stage Cezannists.

Weisberg is an artist who needs to be able to watch correctly. He created his works in a special, very painstaking way. “White on white” is not just white paint on a white background. His paintings use a very complicated technology, based on a complex philosophy of metaphysical-color cognition of the world and a special system of color perception. On some viewers, Weisberg's paintings even have a psychic effect. The solution to the white had mystical significance for Weisberg — it was a symbol of the main secret, a great infinity and great silence.

The sculpture “Don Quixote” is a programmatic work in the works of Nikolai Silis — the artist of the innovative group of sculptors of the sixties “LeSS” (Lemport-Silis-Sidur). Usually Don Quixote is portrayed as a grotesque character — ridiculous, with a weirdo lost in time. And here is a completely different Don Quixote. Don Quixote is happy. Peaceful, sitting in lotus position and admiring a wildflower. A sort of Zen Quixote. Comprehending the meanings. And the mills? What are mills? Perhaps only part of the game, the role and social camouflage.

Sergei Ivanovich Vasilkovsky in a new manner is called a Russian-Ukrainian artist. He was born in the Kharkov province, but studied in St. Petersburg, at the Imperial Academy of Arts with Klodt and Orlovsky. Then he trained for several years in France, even participated in the Paris Salon. But, of course, the most fruitful and inspired his creative years are connected with Ukraine, with Kharkov. The artist became famous thanks to the soulful landscapes of southern nature and his favorite Cossack theme.

“Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov” — exactly so, with full patronymic — this is not just a name, but the name of a long-term art project, in the center of which stood this man-orchestra. Prigov is an avant-garde artist, a key figure in Moscow conceptualism, a poet, artist, sculptor and performance artist. In the summer of 2007, on the day when he had a heart attack, he was supposed to participate in the next performance. His followers from the group “War” were planning to put Prigov in a Soviet closet and take him up the stairs to the 22nd floor of the Moscow State University dormitory during the day to read his poems.