Translated from the Russian by Brian Bean
Designed by A.~Serebryakov
Vladislav Zimenko (born 1919) is an eminent Soviet art critic, author of numerous books and articles on aesthetics and history of art, Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Iskusstvo (Art).
In this new work he deals with the humanistic essence of art---undoubtedly one of the most vital questions in world art today. It is examined with special reference to the works of Deyneka, Plastov, Saryan, Korzhev, and other Soviet artists. The author shows the humanistic content of socialist realism, and the unlimited scope it provides for employing a tremendous variety of styles, devices and manners.
The book also contains a critical analysis of anti-humanistic modern art trends such as Abstract Art, Surrealism and the ``accessible'' art forms of recent years---pop art, op art, kinetic art, and so on.
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© Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1976
First printing 1976
Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
[4] Contents Introduction 7 The Microcosm of Art 13 The Humanist Tradition in Art 39 The New Hero 107 The Work and Days of the People 137 The Beauty of the World 159 The Truth, Nothing but the Truth 185 The Diamond Facets of Realism Reflections on Easel Painting 201 List of Illustrations 239 [5] ~ [6] __ALPHA_LVL1__ IntroductionIs = there really any need to discuss the humanism of art, let alone establish the relationship between the two? After all, art is a human creation, and artistic images reflect and embody the finest human thoughts and feelings, dreams and ideals. Everything would appear to be perfectly simple and straightforward. And yet there is surely no other aesthetic question more complex and urgent than the question of the humanism of art.
The point is that in the world today two diametrically opposed approaches to the question of the humanism of art meet in irreconcilable conflict: the assertion of humanism in art and its rejection. Or if not an outright rejection of humanism, at least such an interpretation of it that terribly impoverishes, eviscerates and mutilates this great, important and highly complex concept. The problem of humanism in art actually derives from numerous other problems that reflect the sharp antagonism between two ideologies, the communist and the bourgeois, which leaves a characteristic, indelible mark on contemporary cultural life.
What is Man? Is it biological characteristics or social structure that determines the basic features of human life? What is man's place in the world and what is his role in relation to nature and society? What does the individual owe the group, society, and vice versa? In what ways and forms will the human personality develop now and in the future?
These and many other sociological and psychological aspects of the problem of Man are treated, examined and evaluated very differently in Marxist-Leninist sociology, ethics and aesthetics and various currents of bourgeois science today.
The practical results of theories thus elaborated and generally accepted by people are also quite different and often in direct contradiction. Socialist realist art, on the one hand, and the numerous currents in bourgeois contemporary art, both of a formalistic, modernistic character and of a naturalist salon kind, on the other, embody fundamentally different answers to the question of what Man is and the meaning of his life, and what the prospects and development of mankind are.
Humanism is not an abstract category where class differences and political tasks and goals somehow do not apply, as some bourgeois ideologists are wont to contend. The predication of abstract humanism, reducing humanism to anthropology, is one of the means used in the attempt to split the ranks of the opponents of capitalism and sow the seeds of conciliation. Man is not a purely biological or racial structure: the most important thing about him derives from 7 __RUNNING_HEADER_LEFT__ Introduction society, is produced by social relations. Only on the path of struggle for social progress and for revolutionary transformation of society in the spirit of the ideals of scientific communism do humanist ideas acquire a real meaning, particularly ideas concerning the free development of the human personality and aesthetic expression of its many requirements, liberated from the shackles of former ``mythological'' concepts, class, caste and other conventions.
One ``moral formula'' widely propagated by bourgeois ideologists today is ``freedom of the individual''. Taken in its aesthetic aspect it is presented as ``creative freedom'', ``artistic freedom'', the independence of the artist from the dictates of society, etc. All these concepts are often strangely identified by the preachers of the ``Western world'' with the supreme expression and flowering of human creative powers and with realisation of the ideals of humanism.
In actual fact, however, this is simply a cover for the directly opposite tendencies towards dehumanisation of life and all personal expression in bourgeois society, tendencies that are coming to have an ever more powerful and destructive impact in bourgeois culture.
Today, individualism and subjectivism are the inevitable companions of dehumanised sentiments and theoretical conclusions, in whatever form they might appear.
It is common knowledge that existentialism, which started by propagating the ``liberation of the individual'', ultimately arrived at the pessimistic formula of ``the alienated individual'', alone and misunderstood, which represented, in effect, a profound crisis in humanism. Yet the critics of existentialism came to the same conclusion, like Michel Foucault who regards the concept of ``man'' (and also ``humanity'' and ``humanism'') as a relic that does not correspond to present or future requirements'' (emphasis added---V.Z.).
Many other spiritual leaders of the bourgeois world today are inclined to draw frankly unhumanistic conclusions, while trying, however, to ascribe this consequence of their narrow class sympathies to the objective conditions of society. Representatives of the so-called ``real aesthetics'', the most influential of whom currently is Etienne Souriau, regard the formalisation of art as an aesthetic expression of man's present industrial power. Kindred views are held by Herbert Read, and even people who once called themselves Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse and Ivan Svitak. (The latter left socialist Czechoslovakia and found a nook among the active anti-communists of the Russian Institute at Columbia University.)
8 __RUNNING_HEADER_RIGHT__ IntroductionIn their opinion (which they constantly try to present as the ``objective truth'' arrived at through ``scientific analysis of social changes''), modern society, in undergoing a number of successive scientific and technological changes, has debased man and brought individuality and personality to naught. Alienation has assumed hyperbolic proportions: completely alone in the ``desert of the city'', man is a pawn in the hands of monstrously powerful forces of scientific and technological progress, living under the Sword of Damocles of the H-bomb, under the threat of ... why, even invasion from other worlds! . . .
Art, according to these aestheticians, must return to man his lost ``sense of security'' and ``self-assurance''. The way to do this is by ``self-assertion'' of a purely formal kind. Art becomes the ``sphere of free play of human powers'', in the process of which some ``poetic derealisation of the world'' supposedly occurs. A statement by the philosopher Charles Lalo to the effect that art makes it possible to play freely with serious life and enjoy this freedom is highly typical in this respect. But how can we speak of ``freedom'' when, according to bourgeois ideologists, man, the artist included, is anyway but a puppet in the hands of the superhuman forces of scientific and technological progress, for ``technology is the fate of our age''? All that is left is an illusion of freedom, which, like all illusions, is sooner or later going to come into cruel conflict with reality and the task of reflecting and apprehending it truthfully. It is surely no accident that all the latest varieties of bourgeois modernistic art---abstractionism, surrealism, tachism, pop art and op art, kinetic art, etc.---are militantly opposed to authenticity and scornfully reject the very idea of accurate depiction of reality. Instead they try to construct a ``new reality'', to materialise some mirage or dream, which, whether violent and repulsive or calm and soothing, is supposedly capable of taking one away from the even more unpleasant real-life world.
Such an approach cannot be regarded as affirming humanism, as its supporters are wont to insist. The best arguments against views of this kind are to be found in historical experience which teaches us to treasure the priceless core of the creative act---the artist's subjective transforming will inscribing itself naturally and organically in the objective system of nature's laws. That is why although the present book is in the form of essays on different subjects, an overall historical view of the problem of humanism is adopted throughout.
The question of the humanism of art must not, and indeed cannot, be treated in disjunction from politics, philosophy, sociology and ethics. But it would seem to be necessary to try 9 and illuminate this vital question more fully than is usually the case, without losing sight of the concrete image fabric of art and without worrying about the incompleteness or even contradictory nature of the answers frequently to be found in the history of artistic creation.
Marxist-Leninist science teaches that the truth is concrete. The humanism of art, like any other basic creative problem, is an historical category. The humanistic content of images in the art of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, medieval Russia, or Middle East or Gothic art, is in each case quite different. The great masters of the Renaissance, the geniuses of the seventeenth century and the outstanding artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, all had a different approach to man, and asserted and celebrated as positive values different aspects of him. But no objectively thinking person, whether an expert or simply an art lover who knows a few elementary facts about the history of art, can fail to note the preoccupation with man to be found in art throughout the ages.
Whether showing the perfectly developed human physique, plumbing the depths of man's psychological world, presenting a broad picture of the complex processes of social life, pinpointing its contradictions, celebrating labour and the natural environment, or, last but not least, glorifying man's creative power, the bold flight of his poetic dreams, the skill of his hands, obedient to his heart and mind, art spoke of man, expressing affection and respect for him. This has been the pivotal course of the entire history of mankind's aesthetic development.
The art of various epochs examined different aspects of man but always, provided it was genuine art, had as its object not an isolated, self-engrossed individual but man a social being, although possibly one-sidedly, partially or obliquely expressed.
A long line of bequests of the legacy of active social humanism links all the great ages in mankind's artistic development, uniting all that is genuinely talented in art. The Russian 19th century critic Belinsky was right when he said that ``man has always been and will remain the most fascinating phenomenon for man''.
The art of socialist realism, a vigorous live phenomenon in the history of world art, has introduced to it much that is new and fresh. It has enriched it with a hero of a new type, entirely unknown to the old society of coercion and exploitation, the combatant for the happiness of mankind, the collectivist man of labour and the internationalist. This art has created new means and forms for his artistic representation, reflection and affirmation, and is constantly searching for ever new ones, 10 perfecting the existing ones, for life flows on and new problems arise that require answers and solutions.
The image of man celebrated by Soviet art--- revolutionaryworker, hero of the days of the October Revolution, participant in the battles of the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War, active builder of socialist society, the creator of the new lifehas tremendous range and provides vast scope for subtle emotional gradations and stylistic variations. Realism in general, and socialist realism in particular, has never stood for the levelling of artistic talent, or uniformity of manner, idiom and forms. Monumental sculpture, the poster, large-scale murals, the easel-painting, whether portraits or subject pictures, graphic art---in all these art forms and styles the image of the new man has come to occupy a leading position, and although essentially kindred, has found highly distinctive individual embodiment.
But the problem of humanism in art is not exhausted by actually depicting man and aesthetically exploring his external appearance and inner world, by asserting his place in life. It also involves the questions of the freedom and high level of artistic technique and aesthetic education, artistic transformation of the social and natural environment, and much else besides. Not all these diverse aspects can be examined or even mentioned in this book. But the author nevertheless hopes to bring the following main points to the attention of the reader: that the historical novelty of Soviet art consists in the fact that it continues and carries forward, on a fundamentally new social and methodological basis, the great tradition of humanism inherited from the finest representatives of mankind's artistic culture, that it thereby opens up a broad road ahead for artistic talent and the public it is intended for, a far wider public, moreover, than ever before. Also that here for the first time beauty is interwoven with the mighty historical creative upsurge of the popular masses, which awakens and stimulates a mass growth of talent.
Communism and talent are kindred concepts, for the society which creates the conditions for the blossoming of all personal gifts needs talented people and cannot fail to attract their hearts. It provides men of talent with a supreme ideal and an inspiring background in which the seeds of beauty grow with a power and in a profusion unknown to any previous social system.
Soviet artists and writers strive to reflect the processes of our time and sing its heroism and unparalleled beauty. They discuss passionately ways to increase their own contribution to the blossoming of society. A vivid example of this was an 11 open letter by a group of eminent artists published on the eve of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, entitled ``Communism Is the Era of Beauty''. An important debate is in progress on beauty as an inalienable quality of our activities, of all our labour. ``In the approaching era of communism,'' the letter said, ``the horizons for creative artistic labour will be boundless. In things great and small an artist must be able to see how beauty will become the everyday possession of the people and by its clear visibility and universal accessibility educate their minds and hearts. Not only must the artist's work in the generally accepted forms of painting, sculpture, graphic art, monumental and decorative-applied art, rise to new heights. Beauty must be placed constantly beside man, wherever he is and whatever he is doing.'' And at their Third AllUnion Congress, Soviet artists said that their art belongs wholly to the people.
Cold pedestrian technique, and empty, artless formalistic devices and counterfeits which exert a stultifying influence on the hearts and minds of artist and public alike, squandering talent, materials, time and life itself, are quite incompatible with bold inspired creativity by the actor, writer or artist producing real values eagrely received and cherished by the people. Society has every right to strongly object to such pseudoart and take steps to protect itself from the growth of tendencies of this kind.
"Soviet society today,'' said Comrade Brezhnev in his speech ``Lenin's Cause Lives on and Triumphs'', ``is the real embodiment of the ideas of proletarian, socialist humanism. It has placed the production of material values and the achievements of spiritual culture, the whole system of social relations, at the service of the man of = labour.''^^1^^
The life of the Soviet people building communism, which provides the main subject of Soviet art, is exceptionally diverse, and provides an extensive field for any creative inclinations, tastes and special talents the artist may have and care to express. Socialist realism does not involve any forced levelling or regulation of art. The whole history of our revolutionary art is evidence of this, and also of the fact that when an artist is bidden by his convictions and a passionate impulse of the heart to undertake a sincere and profound investigation of questions that are important in the life of the people, and carries = it out with a personal interest and involvement, in a spirit of inquiry and with inspiration, according to high standards of technique, his effort is rewarded with a satisfying development of his talent.
_-_-_~^^1^^ L. I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course, Moscow, 1972, p. 270.
[12] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Microcosm of Art [13] ~ [14]The = path into the unknown is tempting and inviting. But very often it makes you stop and puzzle over its difficulties and the poor visibility ahead. Only very rarely do we try to dismiss the difficulties of science and suggest that the gaps in our knowledge are unfortunate pitfalls on its uneven paths. But in art the opposite tends to be the case. People are wont to make far too facile judgements, for both the achievements and the failures seem patently evident and clearly perceptible. This is understandable, for art by its nature is wide open to man, holds out its arms to us to take us in its fond embrace, attracts us and casts its spell on us with its bright colours, rhythms, and the vivid picture of life concentrated in its images.
In actual fact, however, the sphere of art is by no means as simple as it might seem: it only gives a lot to the person who is able to demand and take a lot. Although it ennobles man and lends him wings, instructs him and uplifts him, it does not do so automatically, as a matter of course: it requires an effort on his part. But the fact that such efforts are masked, concealed, often not objectively perceived as an effort, being inseparably merged as they are with the joy of aesthetic perception and delight in beauty, is one of the most attractive ``mysteries'' of art, which are a constant source of fascination to art critics and public alike.
When I say ``mystery'' I do not mean to imply that there is anything mystical, unfathomable or illogical about it. I simply feel that this word conveys the sense of surprise one usually is overcome with when apprehending the hidden wisdom, the unnoticeable but nevertheless vast organising and educative power of the poetic image. It is also appropriate because it holds the key to the ``epistemological springs'' of the aesthetic problem of the humanism of art, to which this book is devoted.
Art is one of the most distinctive forms of social activity, which, of course, has played the decisive role in shaping man and making him what he is today---in the emergence and the subsequent development of the human personality, the improvement and polishing of his physical and psychological structure.
Art is sheer hard work, exhausting and painful, demanding the exertion of all man's powers. Yet it is also---and this is extremely important and noteworthy too---joyous, inspiring and satisfying, and informed with beauty.
The very substance of human labour contains a powerful creative and transforming principle. Work is never an empty pastime, the free play of the generously developed vigour of the healthy organism. It is always purposeful action, assessable above all by its results. The social product of work 15 is the measure of its significance. But even the simplest work action is only really productive, and its result only acquires irreplaceable aesthetic elements when it is performed skilfully and produces satisfaction, giving pleasure to the performer of the action. Forced labour, mechanical, monotonous, stultifying work, or work performed unexpertly or without enthusiasm, are quite the opposite of creativity, and hence of beauty. ``The unskilful person never produces what he wants to produce because he is not master of his own action,'' Hegel shrewdly observed. ``Whereas that worker may be called skilful who produces an object just as it is meant to be and who in his subjective action finds no opposition to the aim.''
Total submission of the material to the working effort, and precise, sure and economical advancement towards a clearly perceived goal produces in work a joyous sense of freedom, perfection and artistry.
Man creates according to the laws of beauty, Marx said. Every expert work action has the beauty of a humanly considered purpose and its skilful implementation. But art began to be perceived from the very earliest days of its history as something that can serve as a standard in evaluating truly creative work. The artist creates freely. He comes to his workshop or studio by vocation. He is impelled to undertake the most complicated tasks by his talent, and does not rest until he has found a solution that at least for the time being satisfies him personally. The true artist feels compelled to create. Tolstoi, speaking of the writer, expressed the irresistible urge that every artist feels as follows: ``One should only write when one feels within one a completely new, important content, clear to oneself, but incomprehensible to other people and the need to express this content gives one no rest.'' And whatever difficulties might arise for the artist on the path between the birth of the idea and its realisation, he will spare neither time nor effort to bring the work to a high standard of skill. Such is the nature of artistic talent, the talent of a hard-working creative person.
Works of art represent the idea of the poetic essence of human labour, thereby exerting a tremendously powerful ennobling influence on man and society. It has often been noted that the most boisterous people tend to restrain themselves and behave very quietly in a museum, automatically suppressing negative emotions in themselves in the presence of works of art bearing the stamp of inspired, self-abnegating work.
In absolutely any sphere of transformative activity a person has a real chance to be creative, since they all provide an opportunity for improving the efficiency and quality of work, 16 __RUNNING_HEADER_RIGHT__ The Microcosm of Art
and finding more economic methods producing better results. Aesthetic elements are present in all this. It is important to note that the perfection of a product even of a purely technical nature often reflects in a way that is hard to describe but is clearly visible nonetheless its creator's unique personality. It is no accident that we are wont to speak of the ``touch'' of a particular turner, when referring to his qualifications.Art requires great efforts, but these efforts must not leave a stamp on the finished product. Pavel Korin says of the painter: ``The artist at work may have sweat on his brow but not on his canvas.'' The artist expends a great deal of physical and spiritual effort during the creative process, but being deeply engrossed in the creative act he does not notice fatigue and feels joyous excitement and exhilaration. As Gogol wrote: ``There is surely no pleasure more supreme than the pleasure of creating . . . .'' Much later, another humanist writer, Romain Holland, described artistic creation as one of the supreme expressions of human nature. ``Joy, joy in all its violence, sun illuminating everything that is and will be, the divine joy of creation! . . . All the joys of life are creative joys: love, genius, action, they are categories of power born in the flame of a single fire .... To create means to destroy death.''
The aesthetic element underlying human labour in general is most fully expressed in art, primarily because it is here that skill and perfection are most highly prized, since the product of work is removed from a direct utilitarian function. An ugly hammer is still useful for hammering in a nail, whereas an ugly sculpture is of no earthly use at all. Another important point is that the object of work here is far more malleable, flexible and changeable than real life, the field of application of utilitarian production.
Clearly, it is far easier to remake nature in a picture than in life, and relatively simpler to bring out the best in man by creating an artistic image than it is to reform a living person, and so on. This is not to say that artistic creation is easy and simple. We are here referring only to the degree of transformative efforts of the individual. Art has provided man with a special field or testing ground, free from unnecessary obstructions and impediments. That is why man has found in art satisfaction for his need to create on the scale of his human nature, to create a world transformed according to his own concepts, ideals and tastes. This is where he feels most sharply the exquisite delight of skilful transformative work, deriving profound satisfaction from the free play of his essential human powers, which easily overcome all the difficulties arising in the course of the work. This artistry, which is a very valuable part 17 of art, along with painstaking, meticulous execution, has always had a tremendous educative importance for mankind, and has exerted an ennobling influence on all other spheres of constructive activity.
__b_b_b__We frequently use the term creative artist, and quite rightly so. But to be truly aware of art as one of the finest and most beautiful of human activities is not so simple as it sometimes seems. There would appear to be no grounds for doubting that when you look at a painting, statue or drawing, read a poem or listen to a violin sonata you are dealing not with natural phenomena but with the creations of the human mind, heart and hands. But a work of art is objectivised, removed from its creator and appears to us, the public, in its own independent characteristic form, which is revealed especially patently, fully and completely, in the fine arts. This form is based on objects and phenomena in life, although there can be no question of identity.
Nevertheless, when we perceive a painting, sculpture or engraving we automatically and quite reasonably relate the forms we see to the forms of real-life objects, often even to the extent of forgetting that they are not identical. The joy of recognition of familiar objects tends to take precedence over the joy derived from their aesthetic reproduction and representation. This objective circumstance was described by Goethe in his well-known definition of the substance of artistic creation. ``The supreme and only desire of the greatest masters was to truthfully express the internal through the external. Not only did they strive to present the content of an object with all fidelity to reality: they wanted this representation to replace nature itself and even, in the case of the external phenomenon, surpass it.'' Of course, it would be wrong to take the great realist writer too literally here in a statement which generalises the experience of the great masters of the past, and conclude that Goethe was in fact advocating a dry, mechanical likeness in depicting reality. Least of all should we take him for a champion of naturalism, often aimlessly rivalling nature in order to achieve, as Goethe himself noted with irony, simple ``doubling of the object''. But the poet has shrewdly raised an important problem here.
A prerequisite for the development of the fine arts, the
figurative arts, was the need of social man to capture reality
in artistic images possessing the quality of closest proximity
to a plastic, visible and palpable picture of life. Neither music
nor poetry, nor any other art could represent the objects
of reality so accurately or saliently, thereby making it easier to
Nike of Samothrace
18 study and memorise them, and subsequently make use of them in social practice. True, the fine arts could not directly convey such an important aspect of reality as movement, could not show an object in its vital dynamics, flux and in development. Portrayal of a single moment in the existence of an object remained the natural and essential characteristic feature of the fine arts, despite all the original methods devised by artists in an attempt to overcome it. Is this a limitation? Well, yes, to a certain extent, of course, it is. But then in the same way we can speak of music and dancing being limited in that their images only live during the actual performance, or of poetry being limited in that it is unable to actually recreate the plastic form of a subject. But this limitation, or rather specific feature, of the fine arts was the basis of the clarity and definiteness of its images, that have a direct visual = quality.^^1^^But even in the simplest, most elementary exercise in the fine arts that goes beyond pure documentary presentation, there is a certain tendency to express something more than the actual image, to say something important to the viewer, and this is all the more true of a significant work of art. Suppose the artist is depicting a modest still-life composed of household objects: a clay jug, a plate with pieces of herring on it, a glass of wine and a loaf of bread (the 17th century Dutch artist Beyeren). The depiction is strictly true to life, simple and unadorned, and all the objects are presented very tangibly as regards form, texture and colour. We derive enjoyment and aesthetic pleasure from the purely pictorial accuracy and beauty of the picture. Moreover, we perceive in addition the tenderness with which the artist gazes on a close, lived-in world of things, his calm affirmation of simple, unpretentious domestic life, his clear, sober, optimistic view of the world. And we can sense in this picture echoes of the great progressive ideas of his age, freshened by the wind of the Dutch revolution of the 17th century. When the artist sets out to portray man or scenes of human and public life (the main task of art), he is even less able to confine himself to the documentary, descriptive aspect without trying to reveal at the same time vital internal elements and express his attitude to them. If he is creating a real work of art he inevitably illuminates the phenomena and events he is depicting from the inside, trying through suitably organised concrete forms to convey thoughts, feelings, aspiration and ideals, in other words, everything that constitutes the complex psychological and ideological content of the work.
The Swiss painter Liotard, who was prominent among the brilliant pleiadc of followers of Watteau and whose subtle, refined art represents an important facet of 18th century _-_-_
~^^1^^ Gothold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
19 painting, produced what is undoubtedly one of the most popular masterpieces of world art, La Chocolatiere. The graceful figure of the young woman, her fresh pink cheeks and fine hands gently carrying the tray are painted with extraordinary delicacy and lightness. The technique is so perfect that it creates the impression of a live, mirror-like reflection. But that is only the initial, superficial impression. In fact everything in the painting---the composition, the colour, even the tiniest detail--- betrays the hand of a consummate artist, his fine taste, his sense of harmony and perfection. There is absolutely nothing superfluous or fortuitous (there is method in the figure of the woman being placed against smooth background of a bright wall, its outline clear, extremely elegant and gracefully provocative).Representation always involves active interpretation of the subject. It is not to be confused with passive copying which expresses nothing, adds nothing at all to what we already know and does not serve to strengthen man's inner powers.
To assert, as Roman Ingarden does, that ``the representational layer of a picture is devoid of aesthetic values'' is incorrect. Representation in an artistic image cannot be separated from the ``subjective complex'', cannot be reduced to a literal copy, a protocol, to a mechanical reproduction.
Empty speculation in art does not convey any important conceptual and emotional information,- and nor does the flat statement of a purely concrete image-fact. The realist image proper, on the other hand, is remarkably attractive by virtue of its almost inexhaustible information-content, its active property of enriching and ennobling man.
In this connection, I should like to make it clear that in my opinion it is a great mistake to understand the extremely broad concept of information, which brings the most diverse natural and social phenomena together, in purely literal, factual terms, as an unbiased, objective transmission of a fact. Such a narrow view of information is the premise from which many aestheticians go on to try and minimise the cognitive value of art, on the grounds that the information conveyed does not exhaust the content of the artistic image, while others try to remove art from the sphere of the important affairs of contemporary man, engaged in the accumulation and exchange of information and data, and, at the very least, banish from art as `` oldfashioned'', ``out-of-date'' concepts all emotional, lyrical, psychological and other elements.
However, the distinctiveness and value of the aesthetic channel of information happens to lie in the fact that it is there and there alone that elements of emotional, ethical and aesthetic judgement of great human value and importance are 20 organically and fully comprised in the sphere of information and the concrete fact is regarded as typical, universally recognised and an instructive example right from the start.
We have grown accustomed to the idea of art using concrete material forms. This is so familiar to us as to have become a commonplace. But we tend to forget that the concrete in art and the concrete in real life are two very different things. The concrete artistic image is already generalised, so that perception of the concrete in art is both more equivocal and more precise than direct perception of the concrete in life. The concrete in art is ``clad'' in feelings, thoughts, and associations. Hence the complexity of the information content of the artistic image, sought by every genuine artist.
Art creates a special world organised by the will and wisdom of the artist, in which we are all the time aware of reflections of his artistic nature even where he has been at great pains to hide them. Let us recall, for example, what the outstanding Russian artist and brilliant art critic Kramskoi had to say about the paintings of the talented Russian landscape artist Vassilyev, in a letter to him about his Road in the Crimea.
``Have you noticed that I haven't said a word about your colours? That's because there aren't any, you see, none at all. Before me is a magnificent view of nature, I see woods, trees, I see clouds, I see rocks, and not only that, but a poetry of light moving over them, a kind of solemn silence, something profoundly thoughtful and mysterious: well, what a mere mortal can see any colours, any tone, in these conditions?''
One might suppose that Kramskoi is enthusing about how ``natural'' Vassilyev's landscape is. But the idea must not be taken out of context. The rest of the sentence clearly modifies this first idea, and indeed it could not be otherwise for Kramskoi confirmed on several occasions that he was perfectly capable of appreciating the most important thing in art--- profound human thought, the live feeling of the artist---and was not inclined to fetishise representational authenticity for its own sake. The latter after all can immediately destroy the aesthetic charm of a work of art, and lead to the acceptance of a mirror-like reflection as a brilliant creation of the highest order.
Realism does not consist in ``copying'' as accurately as possible what the artist's eye sees. Realism presupposes aesthetic expression, through external forms, of the inner essence of object, phenomenon or event, and its evaluation. In this connection it must be said that it is a grave mistake to suppose that the realist artist only deals with the objective material world as such. It is far more complicated than that. 21 In the creative process the artist operates with a set of psychological processes---perception, apprehension, imagination---in which reality already appears remade and transformed to some extent. Aesthetic, as indeed scientific, cognisance of reality starts with specially preparing reality for such study and cognisance. The mathematician, for example, before beginning to study three-dimensional space first organises it by introducing a system of coordinates. The artist organises his material primarily through rhythm. The space represented by the artist is always ``rhythmised''. A series of planes in it, or special zones, may be distinguished, or its structure may be captured through the sequence in which the dimensions are arranged, or again one may feel in it the presence of certain ``lines of force'' which either draw us in or repels us, to some extent altering the actual forms of the material objects. The extent to which this is done depends on the nature of the artistic tasks combined with the objectively existing structural features of real space. And in their perception the laws of perspective, applied freely and creatively, are very important.
Not that rhythmisation is limited to space. Every artist has his own rhythm of aesthetic perception of reality. The real rhythm of a motif is combined with the emotional rhythm of the artist's creative impulse, to produce the inimitable rhythm of the emergent work, which may excite and move, or soothe the spectator, as the case may be.
Scholars examining the work of the great French artist Daumier have frequently referred to two compositions of his. Both of them convey crowds of people on the move and are similar in size and certain features of their image structure, expressing the artist's own inimitable style. Yet even a cursory glance suffices to reveal the profound difference between the two, which lies primarily in the rhythm of the works. In one case the rhythm is energetic, vigorous and animated (the revolutionary army on the march). In the other it is slow and sluggish, and elegiac (the procession of emigres).
Van Gogh's canvasses often display a feverish ``syncopated'' rhythm, space itself being distorted by the passionate creative energy of the artist. The ground is hunched up, trees strain out towards the sky, their roots churning up the soil, and scorching sun blisters the earth, the starry sky above the sleeping town is like an eruption into the ``workshop'' of the universe, where fiery nebulae whirl and seethe and primeval giant stars roam .... This approach is not entirely justified from the point of view of realist art: the subjective element sometimes acquires an unwarrantedly large part in the creative act. But there is no denying that the artist thereby frequently achieves 22 remarkable expressive power. Moreover, as a rule his images are free of what can be the greatest danger of all in art--- indifference.
In art each element of the artistically treated form of the subject is extremely eloquent. There is no form without content and no element of form that is not related in some way to the spiritual and emotional content of the work. The composition, its architectonics, its rhythm, its colour, with the distribution of tones and areas of colour; the nature of the drawing and light and shade arrangement; the texture due to the use of this or that technique and the artist's ``touch'' reflecting his temperament and his direct creative impulse---all is literally imbued with thought and feeling, all inspired by content and inseparably fused with it, forming its own material facets without which it does not exist.
Any genuine realist coloristic solution is based on the natural colour key of the motif depicted, and the artist rarely departs from it. However, within the given range of colours and shades, and in each individual tone, the artist has extensive opportunities for a creative approach to colour, which again means that he is not creating a literal copy but a subjective image of the object. This is why we can commonly observe a particular favourite colour device in works by the same artist that are otherwise very different in their subject and mood: it is like a ``transposition'' of the music of his soul.
A sensitive artist always conforms the concrete colour solution to the internal character of the subject he is depicting. Thus, Renoir made a superb use of a ``pearl-like'' tone for his Nude, its irridescence, warmth and delicacy being in perfect harmony with the poetic image of the woman. In both Yermak's Conquest of Siberia (1895) and Suvorov Crossing the Alps (1889) the brilliant hand of Surikov is immediately recognisable, although on the whole the colour scheme in these two pictures---red-brown and grey-blue respectively---is very different. Although in these paintings the colour appears to be entirely dictated by the subject, it is nevertheless not difficult to note and feel a rather important evocative use of colour in Suvorov Crossing the Alps, for example, where the bluish tones and bright (though subdued) rose-red accents create a general mood of exhilaration and purity with a touch of severity. Sometimes the evocative ``charge'', so to speak, of colour is stronger and more pronounced, so that, for example, a black and white reproduction of it is so deprived of an essential meaningful element as to be practically unrecognisable. This can easily be tested by taking, for instance, Perov's Last Tavern at the Turnpike (1868), one of the most coloristically interesting
23 works in the whole of Russian 19th century painting. The unusual, sharp, indescribably cold and mournful yellow tone of the sunset in this picture (dominating the entire colour structure) has such an emotional and meaningful impact that without it the picture is inconceivable.Often colour expresses a sensual joy. Colours carry healthy decorative beauty so necessary and natural for a work of art. And Delacroix was doubtlessly right when he said that a picture should be ``a feast for the eyes''.
A real colourist will always strive deliberately or instinctively to fulfil this requirement, taking considerable trouble to ensure that his colours are harmonious and striking, that their combination not only helps to produce a fuller, more vivid expression of the ideas the work contains, but gives the viewer emotional pleasure.
__b_b_b__In analysing the movement of realist artistic forms reflecting the life of society at this or that period, its partialities and dreams, we frequently underestimate the ``subjective element'' in artistic creation and fail to give due attention to how hard and complex, and often contradictory, is its path of formation, the gradual emancipation of art from everyday trivia. Reality, the soil and basis of art, hypnotised the artist, as it were, with its profusion of detail, its infinite variety and changeability. The point is that creative activity could only be fruitful when the artist had mastered forms, lines, volumes, surfaces, and colours, and could reproduce a natural phenomenon accurately, powerfully and vividly, bringing to the fore its main, essential features. Such accuracy of a literal depiction was achieved, it must be said, only with great difficulty, and at one historical period represented a colossal aesthetic achievement. But it did not, and could not, become the purpose of art.
Modern times have produced many fascinating ideas as to how to overcome the limitations of purely ``natural representation'', which was often greatly admired as late as the 18th and 19th centuries, although earlier periods had developed a set of devices of artistic expressiveness that increased the emotional and idea content of a work, or as we would now say `` information content''. The 19th century realists extended these devices, paying special attention to those which permitted the fullest, clearest and most powerful expression of the social aspect and provided special opportunities for showing the object world in movement.
Two currents merge in the artistic image, each revealing man's creative power in its own way: one is cognisance of reality, of 24 its motives, objects, laws and the dialectic of its development, and the other is an expression of the inner world of the artist himself, perceived as a momentous aspect of the creative act. (We omit for the time being the question of the ``social component'' of this subjective world, and confine our attention to a few epistemological questions of artistic creation.)
Art historians usually note that starting roughly with the Impressionists the relative balance between these two currents was upset. While Impressionism is characterised by an excessive interest in objective reflection of an instant, a moment captured by the ``child-like'', naive gaze of a highly sensitive artist, void of philosophical views or ideas, the Post-Impressionists, on the contrary, attached an exaggerated importance to the problem of ``self-expression'', ``self-assertion'' of the artisf s personality, dominating an object, enveloping it in a thick web of his own fanciful and often illusory views, and bringing it into conflict and often tragic collisions with other objects.
It was at precisely this period that there arose a widespread interest in creative devices that made an emphasis on ``re-- creation'' of reality in the artistic image, ostentatiously revealed its internal structure, laid bare a characteristically individual manner of organising it, etc.
The taste for symbolic images, metaphorical images, the use of grotesque devices, exaggeration, simplification and schematisation in the construction of space and forms, heightened expression of line and splashes of colour was not such an absolute novelty. Many of these had been known to earliest artists.
The traditional flattening of space and ``lack of body'' found in medieval frescoes or icons cannot be ascribed solely to ignorance of scientific facts or a failure to observe nature. The real, basic reason lay in aesthetic affirmation of certain concepts of the world, in the artistic task of separating and contrasting the sinful earthly world and the ideal heavenly world. Naturally, in conveying the latter, which was regarded as the supreme artistic task, conventional devices were employed which placed a certain distance between it and what man observed around him in everyday life.
The icon of Boris and Gleb produced in Central Russia in the 14th century, which upon study of the evolution of Russian icon painting over several centuries shows ``how far Russian painting had come in approaching the earthly interests of people'' (Alpatov), nevertheless contains all the conventional features characteristic of medieval Russian icon painting, which confine the artistic image firmly within a special circle of ideas. The slender, somewhat elongated figures of the martyr princes, 25 full of noble dignity and serenity, are placed in smooth, almost bodiless silhouette against the conventional flat gold background. Their colourful attire, at once elegant and festive, the clearly visible rhythmisation of the colour patches and lines--- everything is intended to produce the effect of an image with a clear ``distance'' separating it from the world about us. This removal of art from reality had an historical basis, and was thus justified. The conventionality actually helps to convey the grandeur of the subjects' ordeal, creating an aura of glory around them. Another important point is that many of these conventional devices contain a great deal derived from the national aesthetic experience, such as the age-old Russian devotion to smooth, rhythmic, repetition, and bright festive colour combinations. But none of the above alters the fact that, as in many other features of icon painting of this type, we are dealing with a limited, and artificially restricted complex of real concepts and knowledge of reality. The ``stream of reality'' penetrated the sphere of art through a small crack, often having to overcome all kinds of barriers erected by the ``guardian of thoughts and feelings'' of people in those times, the Church. While delighting in the artistic beauty of the remarkable works of the Middle Ages, one cannot but regret that so many live sources of beauty remained outside the scope of art and that artistic creation was held firmly in the vice of strict canons and rules. But even in these conditions a powerful and convincing artistic solution was only achieved when the fertilising current of life invaded the artistic image. Alongside hundreds of superb examples of icon painting, we find thousands of skilful, but empty, cold, pedestrian works, constrained by the shackles of tradition. Indeed, even among these hundreds, masterpieces like Rublyov's Trinity were pretty rare, for geniuses are not born every day. However, the question arises whether we are really justified in judging the quality of works that basically renounce the material world by the degree to which they reflect this world. Are we not perhaps trying to forcibly ``update'' the creative situation and thereby sinning against historical truth?
No, not really, for it is immaterial from our point of view
that Andrei Rublyov, as a child of his age, undertook his Trinity
not with the aim of reproducing real personages in authentic
circumstances but as a moral and religious task of embodying
the Holy Trinity. Indeed, the loftiness of the task and the
artist's dedication to it ensured that all available expressive
means were brought into play in a supremely concentrated
form. The icon only made very limited use of cipher-symbols
devoid of emotional content but tended rather to employ
26
Icon of Boris and Gleb
[27] representative material symbols that had a stronger impact on believers. The artist, assuming a task of profound emotional importance, was guided towards reality by the logic of creative development of the forms of the icon painting. It was noted long ago that the poses of the three angels in Rublyov's work are highly distinctive not in their formal harmony, their ``musicality'', but also in their remarkable natural grace so out of line with the prescribed stiffness of pose. The noble calm in their faces is also very different from the prescribed cold detachment or intellectual and spiritual aloofness. This is the calm that emanates from a rich human nature that is the complete master of all its faculties. Note, too, the subtle differentiation in the emotional types of the angels, who nevertheless form a natural organic unity not only by being formally placed in a semicircle but because of certain shared psychological characteristics. All these subtle features of the structure and content of the work were the result not of a sudden flash of inspiration or ``revelation'' visiting the painter but of his sensitive interest in and contact with the world of men.Nevertheless, an icon painter, even the most gifted, did not and could not break away from the system of canonical conventions intended to ``subdue'' ``excessive vitality'', which fashioned a special ``icon space'' that lacked real depth and introduced its own time rhythm where hours were equivalent to centuries.
The difficulty of achieving a direct reflection of reality obliged the artist to search, find, develop and perfect channels, forms and means of reflecting life obliquely. We have spoken of conventional devices for organising space, working plastic form, introducing rhythmic lines and use of colour, and the solemnly static composition. All this reflects the dominant tendency of the time. But the artistic image is by its very nature not a copy of something in life, but a generalisation and concentration of a number of facts, and involves thoughts and aspirations merged with feelings. Thus, medieval artists were improving artistic means in devising and developing methods of indirect reflection of life, accomplished not in abstract but in relatively concrete forms. (The portrayal of saints was always anthropomorphic, and symbolism, if resorted to at all, was also based on material images that could be easily comprehended by ordinary people---suffice it to recall, for example, the symbols for the Four Evangelists, or the dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost).
While giving the best works of the Impressionists and PostImpressionists their due for enriching the aesthetic devices that make it possible to show the dialectical changeability of objective reality and expressing an active, creative approach of 28
Andrei Rublyov. Trinity. Icon
man to the world, one important point must nevertheless be
borne in mind. Their search involved a sharp growth in the
individualist pretensions of the artist and hence a frequent
weakening of control over real substance contained in the
artistic image. Nothing can compensate for such
impoverishment of the image, no amount of external expressive devices,
such as compositional colour-shifts, sharp rhythmisation of
29
lines, colour splashes, volumes and surfaces, textural
discoveries, etc. In the typical works of the Expressionists, Cubists,
and Fauvists, let alone the Abstractionists, the channel of
communication between artist and public is greatly narrowed.
Matisse expressed in a nutshell one of the basic commandments of his comrades in art: ``The plastic should convey as directly as possible and by the simplest means that which is perceptible to the feelings''. It is well known that Matisse was very fond of Russian icons and at one period (around 1905) even borrowed their festive colour to enrich the decorative quality of his own canvases. But the complex formal structure of the icon image, determined by a special and by no means primitive content, escaped his attention.
Quite different is the case of Petrov-Vodkin, an outstanding Soviet artist, whose talent was shaped at the same time and who also evinced a profound interest in Russian icons. He was not only interested in their decorative aspect, however. His painting Mother (1915) delights us with its remarkably bright and pure atmosphere, in which we can detect reflections of the old Russian icons. The calm sonorousness of the red of the Mother's skirt and the subtle rhythm of the folds of her open blouse are also partly derived from icon painting. But all this is creatively welded together with deep artistic perception of the world, displayed before us in a vivid scene that is true to life, although free from petty naturalistic detail. Everything is ordered, enlarged and weighted by the loving, assessing gaze of the artist, all details are organised in a system. The happy young peasant mother, seated on a bench in the corner of a lowly wooden cottage, is ennobled and poeticised by the artist's brush. While losing none of its plastic concreteness, her image is enlarged to become a symbol of motherhood. This is also achieved by so-called ``spherical perspective'' characteristic of Petrov-Vodkin, which seems to wrench the picture out of visually authentic space and places it in another wider, almost cosmic space. Yet all these active creative ``devices'' to `` recreate'' the motif depicted are firmly based on a strictly realistic plastic structure.
Speaking of the creative character of depiction and its idea charge, the importance of operational ``threshold'' of this specific information system should be stressed in particular. There is indeed a certain margin or narrow zone prior to which we are incapable of even recognising what is depicted. Only when certain characteristic structural elements are added are we able to grasp it. But what is even more important is that up to a point the form remains fundamentally meaningless or insignificant since it is incapable of conveying any extensive 30 spiritual and emotional information. If we lose sight of this circumstance, we may well find ourselves deprived of an essential criterion in assessing the tremendous diversity and multiplicity of so-called ``figurative'', but often in no way realistic, forms of depiction abounding in 20th~ century art.
If, for example, art sets out to create a human image but simply presents a schematic outline of the shape, it is thereby preventing itself from solving any psychological and social problems. This is obviously a departure from the general direction in which art has developed, from what artistic creation is all about.
This, indeed, is one of the grave defects of Cubism, as was noted bitterly by Fernand Leger, himself at one time an active supporter of the movement, but whose art does not fit into the narrow framework of its doctrines. He wrote that the Cubists broke, destroyed, and pulverised the subject, going on until they had reached the ``abstract'' picture. But once they had achieved this extreme position, total confusion ensued. A state of sheer anarchy reigned.
One of the most curious examples of this kind of aesthetic confusion and intellectual disarray is to be found in the reflections of the Russian ``Cubo-futurist'' Kamensky on the new system of painting. As he saw it, the artist's thoughts should be reflected through symbolic ``conventional signs'' quite unrelated to material forms, and art is ``the direct projection of conventional signs from the artist's brain into the painting''.
An artistic image is a synthesis of the objective and the subjective. But in this dialectical unity of object and subject, as in any other result of purposeful cognitive-transformative activity in which man engages, we can trace a main line, a super-objective, which is the mastering of reality, investigation of it and discovery of its objective laws and patterns.
No genuine artist can, or has the right to, ignore the long and arduous path of assimilating and comprehending the actual forms of reality, since he clearly realises that this is his ``language''. Outside concrete material forms even the most brilliant artist cannot say anything articulate, let alone powerful, vivid and expressive, that can be readily understood by a wide public.
Individuality in perception of a work of art is a very important quality. But it only involves a marginal sphere of its aesthetic and idea content. The essential thing in it cannot be placed on an unstable subjective base, for art is one of Man's means of eliciting the truth, developing knowledge of life and bringing it to the broad mass of people.
31This is why even the most sophisticated attempts by abstract artists to employ a language using abstract elements of real forms---lines, colour, volumes, unorganised by an objective structure---are doomed to failure. In these elements the logic of objective reality is contained in tiny, negligible quantities: they are detached, isolated from the wealth of dialectical links of real objects and phenomena, from the flux of life. That is why this language represents an extremely impoverished aesthetic system, which has some validity for decorative purposes but in easel painting can only be used to express the most elementary emotions and moods. And this after the works of Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Surikov, and Serov, which delight us with their depth and their inexhaustible wealth of thoughts and feelings!
Among the early landscape works of the Russian artist Sergei Gerassimov is a small one entitled Flowers of the Field (1910). This is a modest, unpretentious work, but extremely interesting nonetheless. Especially since it provides a remarkably good opportunity to appreciate the distance that separates any abstract picture from a realist work, although the latter may be both internally and externally far removed from a naturalistic likeness. The writer Ivan Goncharov showed very well the vanity of the attempts of naturalists to compete with nature, ignoring the genuinely human, poetic means of art. ``Nature is too strong and original to take her, so to speak, wholly, match oneself against her with her own powers and stand right beside her: she simply does not submit. She has all too powerful means of her own. By taking directly from her all we get is a pitiful, powerless copy. She only allows us to approach her through creative fancy.
``Otherwise it would be too easy to be an artist. All one would need to do would be, as a character in Gogol's Departure advised, to sit by the window and write down what was going on outside, and one would have a play or a story."
There is absolutely nothing of this kind of direct copying from nature in Gerassimov's picture. The picture represents a carpet of bold, sweeping splashes of colour---blue, lilac, yellow and green. It is as though absolutely no attention has been paid to form, and we have just patches of colour conveyed with tremendous subjective freedom. Surely this is abstract art!
But on closer inspection we find that everything here speaks of nature, which emanates from everything and pervades everything: the patches of colour suggest ``growth'', there is perspective, a foreground and a background, a centre where the eye sees more clearly and vividly and marginal areas with rather more dimly discernible patches, while the succession of 32 colours is not arbitrary but follows a strict natural order of growth of flowers in proximity to one another. One looks in vain for all this in the pictures of abstract artists, who oppose the image to reality as a matter of principle and separate the world of art from the real world thereby impoverishing it beyond measure.
That is why even the most honestly inspired and sincere quests of the Abstractionists (especially in the early days of abstract art) have proved such a mistake and so disastrous for the development of art. One of the prominent protagonists of the early Abstractionists, Guillaume Apollinaire, wrote, describing the movement's credo, that they ``create new combinations out of elements borrowed not from visible reality, but created entirely by the artist''. But the subjective in the figurative image cannot be clearly, fully and powerfully expressed when it is separated from the objective. A line, or a surface, or a patch of colour in themselves cannot provide a sufficiently developed language for expressing the plentitude of the inner world of the subject, the artist, if he wishes to remain sufficiently complex and diverse and not descend to the lowest, most primitive level, confining himself to a few vague emotions and basic sensations. Only a concrete language, the depiction of objects and real things and the re-creation of their objective links permits the artist to express his subjective wealth, and meaningful perceptions, thoughts, feelings and associations.
``Compression'' of aesthetic information, packing rich content into the images, highly implicative poetic language, various undercurrents, the use of allegory, metaphor and so on and so forth, are all facets of one and the same tendency which is extremely widespread at the present time. It is only fruitful, however, provided the artist does not lose sight of an objective criterion in his work, and the spectator likewise in assessing its results.
Take, for instance, associative extension of the image. This is a real factor which is very valuable and greatly enriches our perception of art. But one has only to plant it in unfirm subjective soil and irreparable damage is done to the informative value of the work, since this multi-channel line of communication between artist and public will be clogged by interference. This brings to mind The Amber Seekers by the outstanding Latvian painter Iltner. In my opinion this picture is affected and pretentious, and I regard it as a failure. Yet it earned high praise from many critics because they read into it a beautiful and poetic hidden meaning, ascribing to it a nonexistent halo of associations.
33Yablonskaya's Spring, on the contrary, is externally very simple and strikingly unpretentious. What could be simpler, one might say, than this modest subject of a young mother with her child, and an old man, who have come out to enjoy the sunshine in front of their house on a warm spring day? But the attentive person who takes the trouble to look closer will at once feel warm waves of poetic associations, enveloping and expanding the image of this delightful picture, awakening serious reflections about human life, speaking of the relentless advance of time and simultaneously affirming the joy of being alive, the indestructibility and miraculous rebirth of beauty and happiness in every new successive generation. There is nothing arbitrary about this associative sphere, it is objectively present in the image and unfolds in our minds as naturally and easily as Ariadne's thread in the hands of Theseus.
The associative wealth of the realist image is based on the most important objective law of the cause and effect relationship. If, when regarding Konchalovsky's Strawberries we seem to be able to actually smell the fragrant aroma of fresh ripe strawberries, it is because a whole chain of links, established by experience between our visual perception of certain forms and our senses of taste and smell has come into operation. If the subtle gradation of cream-yellow tones and blue-violet ones in Yablonskaya's Spring re-creates superbly the warm atmosphere of a spring day, it is because they serve to activise our memorative associations. Then the gay blue of the window platbands and shutters and the green of the plant on the window-sill offsetting the slim, but strong figure of the young woman, forms a perfectly natural associative ensemble in a major key in contrast to the eligiac linear rhythm and dull red-brown hues of the figure of the old man.
The relationship of cause and effect between the image and the reality it expresses is also found in other important qualities such as volume, dimension, space, and time, although here, as a rule, it is also intimately associated with the specific form, genre and style of art. The rhythm of lines and colour patches is not the only way of indicating time. Stanislavsky is well known to have devoted great attention to making an actor aware of the rhythm of his role. It is possible not only to move, but to stand or sit in a particular rhythm. The use of a similar principle of time organisation provides the talented painter with an extremely flexible expressive means. A much-cited example is Repin's They Did Not Expect Him, where for each character time changes its pace, and the sharply compressed intensity of a moment crowded with thoughts and feelings is captured and fixed. Another example is Zhilinsky's Gymnasts 34 of the USSR. Here, too, we have a momentary situation, which easily unfolds in our perception as a keenly felt slice of time, for the unity and cohesion of the group is not achieved at the expense of crushing the individual rhythm of each of the characters, and we perceive the diversity of the rhythmic organisation as a live time process.
__b_b_b__The works of true artists embody a clear and simple aesthetic idea: art does not copy but re-embodies reality. The artistic image is a cleverly constructed, wisely organised world, related to the real one not by simple ties of similarity, but by the dialectic of correspondence and non-correspondence, analysis and synthesis, acceptance and rejection. This is a complex compound, containing the result of cognisance and the call to go on further, that which exists and that which is longed for or anticipated, reality and dream. And to all this is added the quivering, responsive heart of a poet, the whole having passed through the crucible of his passionate feelings.
With the geniuses of Antiquity and the Renaissance, and the titans of the 17th century---Rembrandt, Rubens and Velazquez--- with them the aura of history or the convention of legendary subjects automatically translates the image world of their works for us into a special elevated artistic sphere. And this often masks its original aesthetic meaning as the world of reality subjectively interpreted, apprehended and assessed. But one has only to compare for a moment such a genius with an ordinary run-of-the-mill artist, the poet and the skilful but pedestrian craftsman, and the priceless substance of art immediately showers us with diamond sparks ....
Probably tens of thousands of times artists in different countries have taken the madonna as their subject or painted pictures on biblical themes.
But Raphael's Sistine Madonna and Rembrandt's The Return ol the Prodigal Son are unique. In these paintings reality reveals its inner logic. The artist's thought leads us to the heart of things, making us see more clearly, feel more keenly, and think more wisely.
In Raphael's painting, the Madonna is advancing to meet the future, bearing her child in her arms, her most precious possession, dedicating him to life, creativity and struggle. The artist has not embellished her, but has painted her in a simple, straightforward, unadorned manner, severe but lofty. She ;s beautiful but perhaps thousand of other mothers, who, without suspecting it, inspired the artist's heart, were lovelier than she. For her loveliness is the noble beauty of art, in which poetry and the truth of life are crystallised.
35The prodigal son, returning home to his father's house after having had his fill of sufferings in his wanderings, has been portrayed by artists in very many ways. Rembrandt leads us into a complex, dramatic cross-fire of profound human feelings. This for him is the main thing. The trembling hands of the blind old man, the father, gripping the back of his kneeling son, are placed in expressive contrast to the latter's rough feet peeping out of his worn boots. How much the calloused bare sole tells us! What a brilliant touch! Everything is taken from real life here, yet how far are the composition, the characters and the colour of the scene from what might have been their real life prototypes!
Great artists authoritatively introduce into mankind's spiritual currency their own special perception of the world, their own values and criteria of life. This is not to say, of course, that art is a purely subjective sphere. The artist accumulates what is experienced by many many people and expresses it in a concentrated form, in vivid images. Class, society, time and history speak through the artistic genius. But he must speak eloquently, and his heart and mind must be sensitive to the ``currents'' of the time which determine society's way forward.
The reflection of life in art is a very active process. Art shapes the spectator, and the artist too. Art teaches a person to be creative, bold, daring, active in struggle and the work of transformation. Maxim Gorky put it magnificently: ``Basically art is struggle for or against, there is no indifferent art and cannot be, for man is not a camera, he does not `note down' reality, but either affirms it, or changes it, destroys it.'' The history of art is the history of development of man's active, transformative potentialities.
The affirming and destructive power of art, which is closely related to the artist's social views, his class loyalties and antipathies, his concept of the norm, the ideal, and finally his personal taste, derives from life and has life as its sphere of application. The art of socialist realism is unthinkable out of contact with life.
The ``malady'' of aestheticism, creating as it does favourable circumstances for ``art for art's sake'', art devoid of ideas, formalism and naturalism, is a departure from life and indeed from its fundamental problems. The artist who docs not conceive of himself apart from the mainstream of the life of his people, who finds it only natural to be in the forefront of the struggle for communism, never suffers from this ``malady''.
For such an artist there is not, and cannot be, any contradiction between the ideological and aesthetic tasks of art, for he 36
Raphael. The Sistine Madonna
solves them as one, as an inseparable whole. And he naturally
acquires that real creative freedom over which such
exaggerated concern is shown, particularly by those who have no
thought for their civic duty and stand aloof from important
social issues.
37
This is naturally not to say that there is an automatic dependence between ideological and artistic problems. Finding the most appropriate expressive solution for each organically chosen ideological task is a long and tortuous process involving tireless search and experimentation and often attended by partial failures. One of the dogmatic aesthetic ideas of the recent past that was fraught with dangerous consequences was the contention that a correct general idea is in itself sufficient to bring the artist to its satisfactory artistic realisation, its expression in images. In practice this led to a sterile illustrative style, cliche-ridden and stereotype. By no means all ideas can be expressed in artistic terms, and by no means every potentially artistic idea can immediately acquire satisfactory aesthetic embodiment.
Artistic creation, it must be stressed, is no bed of roses, it is not a walk along a well-worn path but an adventure into undiscovered country, however simple the task set by the artist in each case might appear at first sight. Only where inimitable ideological and aesthetic novelty has been achieved can we really speak of a work of art or an artist without depreciating the value of these fine words, which designate selfless, inspired effort and a person devoted to such work.
The artist is not a copyist of life, but its interpreter and transformer. But his transformative activity does not involve using his creative fancy to fly far away from the real world into an imaginary world of subjective illusions or to distort the material world until it is unrecognisable, ignoring its objective laws. The history of art is full of such Utopian attempts that ended in ideological and aesthetic bankruptcy. Only the realist artist is a real transformer of life. He is at once solicitous and yet merciless towards reality, his gaze penetrating into the depths of the essence of things, revealing all, stripping away all masks from its ungainly aspects, and joyfully celebrating its beauty. Only thus does he create a suitable aesthetic environment, educate people and produce impulses of aesthetic pleasure in their souls. Yes indeed, the artist ``makes the tree of reality sprout new branches'', but not by creating ``his own reality'', owing nothing to the former and quite dissimilar from it, but by making the buds of life burst forth as magnificent roses, so that it appears brighter, more complete, its facts concentrated by the magnifying glass of the human artistic talent, and its cold beauty imbued with warmth and passion, by being correlated with human life.
[38] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Humanist Tradition in Art [39] ~ [40]The = world of great ideas, important to society, was highly valued in art in all periods, in all countries and among all peoples. The Old Stone Age hunter who decorated his caves with pictures of bison and deer which still impress us today with their realism and artistic power, did so not simply in order to develop his artistic abilities and produce a pleasant decorative effect. He was moved to it by the idea of subduing the forces of nature, an idea that was vital for him and for society, although it took the mistaken form of magic. It was not simply to embellish a locality that the Egyptians built their splendid temples, the tombs of the pharaohs and sphynxes: they were primarily guided by the ideas of strong state power and glorification of their country which withstood numerous invaders, ideas that were essential to their way of life.
Idle experiments with form were not the purpose of Phidias and Aeschylus, Polygnotus and Lysippus, Rublyov and Masaccio, Michelangelo and Shakespeare, or any other great artists who created outstanding works of art. They brought their contemporaries and the successive generations progressive ideas that could teach, develop and uplift people and inspire them to strive for a better future.
It is noteworthy that art at its best has always glorified Man, poeticised his wisdom, strength and beauty and has always been an active means of affirming humanistic ideas which appeared along with man and gradually became organised into a system.
In the exquisite portrait bust of Nefertiti, carved in pale gold crystalline sandstone that conveys superbly the swarthy complexion of an inhabitant of a southern land, a brilliant ancient Egyptian artist who lived over three thousand years ago produced a veritable hymn to Man. The sculptor wielded his chisel with great precision truthfully conveying much that is individually characteristic in the appearance of the consort of the reformer pharaoh Amenhotep IV. This is in itself remarkable, but even more striking is the way all the features are Drought into an exceptionally harmonious balance, the image poeticised and inspirited. There can be no doubt at all that the sculptor, a child of his age, shared its view of the godlike nature of the pharaoh and his wife: the expression is serene and the eyes seem to be gazing into infinity, and there are certainly hieratic elements present. But the important thing is that the artist has managed to convey his own devotion to the earthly and real in this concrete historical image, and express his delight in human beauty.
The reliefs of the frieze of the altar of Zeus at Pergamum
(2nd c. B.C.) were executed at a time when the magnificent
Thutmosis. Sculptured portrait of Nefertiti
41 __RUNNING_HEADER_LEFT__ The Humanist Tradition in ArtAthena and Alcyoneus. A detail of a frieze of the altar of Zeus at Pergamum
aesthetic ideal of Hellenic art had already begun to decline.
The ideal hero had become aristocratised, had lost his popular
roots, and begun to shed his concrete earthly features. The
important thing for contemporaries was that the images of
gigantomachia which formed the subject of the reliefs on the
altar were clearly understood by them as an allegorical,
symbolic account of the victories of Pergamum over the Gauls.
The aristocratic hierarchy of the slave-holding monarchy
undoubtedly interpreted them in its own way, as affirming the
rule of the chosen, and as a warning to rebellious slaves. These
overtones certainly complicated, but did not completely shackle
the live humanistic idea which alone could inspire a remarkable
work: the images on the famous frieze glorify the triumph of
the noble, beautiful human being over fierce, blind forces of
evil. Typically enough, this idea is expressed not only in the
subject matter, in the way the giants are portrayed as mostly
already defeated with the Olympians clearly triumphant, but
plastically too. The very treatment of the figures shows the
disproportion between the two camps.
The giant Alcyoneus, struggling with Athena, has seized the
delicate hand of the goddess in his own rough hand, and is
pulling it downwards, but the smooth womanly hand shows
no trace of a crease even from the titan's strong grip, his
42
Raphael. School oi Athens. Fresco. A detail
strength is so paltry compared to the boundless power of the truly beautiful, divinified human being.With Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican Stanze we are in another age, a world of different images, another system of artistic thought, based on precise scientific laws and principles and reflecting far more complex social relations, and richer concepts of the world. Yet once again we are immediately struck by the indisputable humanistic nature of these masterpieces of High Renaissance art. It is interesting to note, however, that this is felt in a very special way in the actual presence of the frescoes, due to a very significant circumstance. The artist hit on a perfect disposition of the main compositions and the size of the figures, slightly larger than life-size. Combined with the clear plastic poses and expressive faces, this serves to strengthen the impression of monumentality, power and grandeur of the figures. At the same time they are not so much larger than life-size as to seem superhuman. Moreover, the compositions are placed in such a way as to appear to be a continuation of the actual room space, although at the same time separated by a small painted socle. As a result, when you observe Raphael's figures of ideal people, slightly
Raphael. School ol Athens. Fresco. A detail
[43]
raised above the real crowd of visitors in the small and rather
dim rooms, but not opposed to them, better, brighter and more
noble than the ordinary person but not so much so that the
latter despairs of ever rising to their level and joining them,
then you really feel the greatness of the humanistic idea of the
great artist and the perfection of its artistic execution.
Every society has its heroes and its own ideal of man, and affirms it aesthetically in its own particular way, using an historically determined artistic image system and its own devices and forms.
Medieval art was far from being a vale of darkness between the two bright ``summits'' of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. True, human thought was held in the straight jacket of religious dogma, and art was oriented away from the real, earthly world, and was regarded as a means of mystical uplifting of the spirit and communion with the ``Heavenly Kingdom''. But the stream of artistic creativity continued to flow through this narrow defile. A passionate dream of happiness, joyous wonder at the wealth and strength of the human spirit of deified man, albeit alienated from reality, and love for the illicit secrets of this world are all revealed in the Gothic cathedrals of France and Germany and the Orthodox churches of Kiev and Vladimir-Suzdal Rus, Novgorod and Pskov, in the icons and frescoes of Theophanes the Greek, Rublyov and Dionisius.
Nevertheless, humanistic sentiments were only expressed obliquely in the images of medieval art, generally immersed in mystical visions, although, perhaps in some ways art has never since been so imbued with the folklore element or drawn so extensively on the treasury of the poetic phantasy of the common people. Such were the real cruel contradictions in the aesthetic sphere, a reflection of the contradictions of the life of the age, which was cruel and bloody and characterised by ignorance and superstition, wars, and epidemics of plague and cholera ....
The works of the great Asian, African and American cultures of the Middle Ages form a special aesthetic world apart. They contain a great deal that is strange and unfamiliar to the eye of the European who, directly or indirectly, had absorbed the Greco-Roman tradition. One is frequently struck by their expressive power and complex symbolism, clearly marked by the influence of primitive magic with its ``cryptography'', a system of taboos, concrete personification and deification of the powers of nature, and cult of guardian spirits, along with the specific socio-historical forms and features of life of the various peoples. Natural environment also played a role. Thus, 44 the melody structure of eastern music, based on capricious stringing together of short interval sounds (parts of the European tone or even semitone) seems to embody the constant dream of a freely flowing stream of water, the source of life. Similarly, equally vital ideas and feelings that accompany man throughout his life like the air he breathes are embodied in the complex system of eastern ornamentation. Perhaps only in Buddhist art do we encounter a more direct and at the same time intellectually enlightened world of real observations. But here, too, the depiction of man was never completely free from restricting mystical and symbolic constructions (viz. The Birth of Buddha, one of the Ajanta Cave Frescoes, 5th--6th century).
Often even the discerning eye of the modern viewer is astonished by the consummate skill and freedom of the plastic solution and the refined composition testifying to highly developed poetic imagination taking its inspiration from the material world and man's natural environment. Whenever Buddhism was practised in less rigid conditions in different countries of the Far East, the poetry of this world acquired remarkable freshness and vividness in cult images, even a ``classical'' completeness and power. Such, for example, was the art of the Mongolian 17th century master Dzanabazar, whose versatile talent produced works, in particular sculptures, which are like an inspired song glorifying the harmony of two principles in man---the body and the spirit.
But even in countries where religious taboos greatly reduced the scope for artistic creation, limiting its subject matter (for instance, in the Islamic countries), aesthetic interest in man and human life was not so hopelessly stifled as is often erroneously supposed. Some of the most recent discoveries of medieval Azerbaijanian tombstones, for example, reveal a constant interest in everyday life themes and a well-developed system of plastic = representations.~^^1^^
Nevertheless, the whole system of rigid regulations characteristic of feudal society---in spiritual and moral relationships as well as in the sphere of property and political relations, and the predominance of religious dogmas in people's world outlook---were bound to hamper not only social but also artistic progress.
The affirmation of the objectively positive set of human individual and social qualities distinguished the historically progressive periods in art and was active in forming the humanist tradition, a fundamental one in world realist art. No wonder the age of Classical Antiquity, and the Renaissance present such a rich, inexhaustibly diverse source of bright aesthetic concepts that still inspire us today. For in both those _-_-_
~^^1^^ R. Effendi, ``Unknown Examples of Medieval Azerbaijanian Sculpture'', Iskusstvo No.~5, 1973 (in Russian).
45Tombstone from Agdam District of Azerbaijan
periods the artist's attention was focussed on the hero, the
strong, fully developed individual, and art composed superb
hymns to man tasting sweet victory over his weaknesses and
imperfections, over social evils and the blind forces of nature.
Perhaps these victories were still illusory (man's faith in them
breathes the naive unawareness of the complex dialectic of life,
and he has yet to comprehend the hidden ``mainsprings'' of
real-life phenomena and processes) and perhaps they remain
largely confined to aesthetic values, be that, as it may, we
treasure them not only as an example of ``good intentions'' but
because they are the real result of the actively humanistic
position of the artist who turns his gaze to man with loving
attention.
In speaking of the art of Antiquity and the Renaissance, one ought not to overlook an extremely important aspect of the art of these two great periods. Artistic creation was clearly orientated towards asserting certain social values, and was inseparable from a poetically integrated perception of reality. Was this an historical limitation? To some extent, of course, it was, because this integrity and poetic quality contained certain features of superficial contemplation and patriarchal 46 naivety. But in this also lies the great power and tremendous historical promise of the art of these periods, a fact noted by Marx and Engels on several occasions. They were attracted by the natural and organic character of this art, reflecting as it did an historical stage in the development of a class society when class conflicts had not yet permeated all cells of the social organism and led to a confrontation between two opposed class cultures, as was to happen in developed bourgeois society.
Was the predominantly affirmative element a temporary, fortuitous feature of the art of those far-off ages? Clearly it was not. Here were revealed essential qualities objectively inherent in art as a social phenomenon, qualities that are by no means transient, although undergoing a complex process of development, enrichment and modification.
Among the various functions of art is that of exploring and discovering the beauty of life, which, strengthened, is capable of activising the development of mankind. Only art is capable of concentrating ideal concepts of mankind in each concrete historical time into an integrated aesthetic ideal, and embodying it in appropriate plastic form.
All great ages in art, it can safely be asserted, were great because they proceeded from the natural view of art as a force affirming beauty, and saw the artistic image primarily as a means of showing and asserting the positive and the genuinely human.
In different ways, depending upon the concrete class character of a particular phenomenon in art, a selection of positive values took place. Phidias and Michelangelo, the masters of the Fayum Portraits, and Titian, Rembrandt and David did not affirm the same things or did so in the same way. Yet the central idea and the general direction of the affirmative element in art was invariably the same---Man. Art approached man in different ways and presented him in different aspects, but always, wherever we are dealing with true art, the figure of man is the object of aesthetic affirmation.
Let us take a look at a few examples of the forms the affirmation of the image of man has taken in modern times.
La Bella is hardly one of Titian's greatest portraits. Yet it is perhaps precisely for this reason, because it is not one of the great master's most significant and innovational works, that we can perceive so clearly the principles of portraying man that had established themselves in the art of the Renaissance. Calm dignity combined with inner vitality are the essence of the work. Hence, the clarity of the pose, the imperturbable expression, the outward simplicity despite the splendour and magnificence of the dress and jewelry. There is a certain degree 47 of individualisation but this is not stressed, so that the artist is mainly concerned with capturing the general traits and features of a particular type, character and social standing.
In comparison, the Flemish soldier in Velazquez's historical portrait The Surrender of Breda (1634--1635) is far more of a true portrait, richer in individual traits and details, although conceived as a generalised type, one of many. Here one can clearly see the tremendous change that occurred in the basic approach of the 17th century realist to depicting the individual, with what a sympathetic and penetrating gaze he studied the face of the subject, looking into his eyes, trying to read what is hidden in his soul, not shrinking from the incongruous or avoiding any contradictions of character, views or behaviour.
Let us now turn to the end of the 18th century. In France the monarchy had been overthrown, and thrones all over Europe were extremely shaky. The common people, rejoicing in their victory and having acquired a new awareness of themselves as a powerful historical force, were setting up republican institutions, not suspecting that they would soon be turned against them by those who have gained most from the great revolutionary drama and whom it had actually brought to power.
The revolutionary wave carried high on its crest the talent of the artist David. His sincere revolutionary ardour is demonstrated not only in his works executed before the revolution and at its peak, but also, for example, in his famous La Maraichere painted in 1795, when the revolutionary energy of the masses was declining and the ruling classes were undertaking harsh punitive measures. This portrait of a simple working-class woman shows a person full of strength and hope, prepared for trials and struggle. She is a symbol of the people who have proudly raised themselves up to their full height (it is significant that her dress is in the red-white-and-blue colour scheme of the tricolour, the republican flag). Here humanism has not only been democratised, it has been revolutionised too. The beauty of revolutionary protest and fidelity to the ideals of revolution are here defended aesthetically. Yet the affirmative element does not go as far as idealisation, that is, deliberate embellishment of the image.
Another vivid example of this approach is David's portrait drawing of Danton. David does not depart one iota from the concrete features and traits of this leader of the bourgeois revolution. The low forehead over the small eyes, the misshapen nose, and the thick coarse lips, all the individual characteristics are preserved in this remarkable profile sketch executed in short pencil strokes. Nor are these simply physical 48
L. David. La Maraichere
features: they stand for definite negative features of a despotic,
self-willed, callous character. Yet how complete and powerful
the image is in this laconic drawing. This is a noble and heroic
figure with great civic dignity, portrayed as though on a medal.
Nor is it an accident that the pencil lines are soft and wide,
yet at the same time incisive, as though cut with a chisel.
Not only man himself and his spiritual features, his plastic image, is the object of aesthetic affirmation, but also certain 49
D. Velazquez. The Spinners
human functions capable of improving and ennobling man, as
well as everything that can be regarded as allied forces helping
him in his transformative activity.
Even in the art of Ancient Egypt we find a portrayal of a wide range of productive work, of astonishing wealth and artistic expressiveness (an aspect which has not received due attention). We also encounter fine depictions of animals and plants, in a far closer relationship with man than in Stone Age art. They are naturally incorporated in scenes of working activities, freely grouped, stylised as necessary, yet without being deprived of their characteristic features or verisimilitude.
In later ages, in classical Greek art, for example, with its unprecedented achievement in poetic portrayal of man in a plastically perfect but isolated image, we find nothing of the sort. With the development of class society, productive labour gradually loses its aesthetic elements in the eyes of artists and the limited class views of the idle, leisured ruling classes begin to predominate, with the characteristic disdain for work as an ``inferior'' occupation.
Indeed, it is only since the quattrocento, and more particularly since the 17th century, with the growth of bourgeoisdemocratic elements in culture, that an interest in scenes of 50 work begins to reawaken. Velazquez's Spinners is one of the most poetic examples of the depth and strength of this newfound interest. But again, the ugly forms of social relations in exploiter society place a limit on artistic exploration in this direction: in order to be truthful, the artist is bound to speak of the onerousness of work, of joyless backbreaking toil, which does not uplift a man but crushes him, depersonalises him and deprives him of any individuality in the conditions of the capitalist factory system.
Art, however, irrespective of what is depicted, carries the idea of the essential poetry of human labour, and in this respect, as already noted, its educative role is equally valuable.
The gradual enrichment and growing complexity of man as society develops has been reflected in the aesthetic sphere in many various ways. The gradual polishing of powers of perception, feelings and emotions has been reflected in a sharper response to nature and a need for lyrical outpourings with deeper and more diverse implications. Music, the art form that is most directly linked to individual emotional life, has developed particularly rapidly in modern times and has influenced all spheres of art and culture. Differentiation of intellectual life, an exceptional growth in potential social conflicts and class struggle lead to a flowering of literature. Literature becomes the depository of thoughts actively shaping public opinion. The plastic arts are also affected by its powerful impact.
Entering the capitalist era, man found more and more that the very essence of the new system was profoundly hostile to both art and humanism.
The latter circumstance was clearly felt by the ever perceptive Hegel, and was noted and commented on by many other outstanding minds of the age, among them Alexander Herzen, who wrote the following angry lines: ``Art is uncomfortable in the prim, over-tidy house of the petty bourgeois . . . and feels that in this life it has been relegated to the role of external decoration, wallpaper, furniture~.~.~.~.''
But only Marxism was able to scientifically present the objective causes of the hostility of capitalism to art and explain the mechanism of its inhuman nature. Both are due to the rule of lifeless capital over man, to the way capitalism converts everything in the natural, social and spiritual environment into a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. To affirm in these conditions one had first to reject all that failed to conform to the normal concept of society, man, beauty, truth and duty from the positions of a progressive world outlook. Yet this is not the only merit of the realism of that period.
51Critical realism was a tremendous aesthetic accomplishment for mankind. For the first time detailed and profound social analysis of the individual and his environment came within the scope of art. Character began to be regarded as the product of social relations. Man was found to be involved in the most complex relationships with other people: family, everyday life, social, production, class and national relations.
Ingres was not a consistent realist. He was drawn to the distant past, and it was the great deeds of semi-mythical heroes of antiquity that captured his imagination most. But his Portrait of M. Berlin is evidence that he could see clearly, and indeed extremely clearly, his own age, too. His desire was to affirm, and he surrounded his subject with an aura of grandeur, almost heroism. Yet the veracity of the true artist took the upper hand. The result is a portrait of a strong and cynical predator. Undoubtedly clever, this bourgeois newspaper magnate, perfectly aware of his own and other people's worth, is not depicted as an isolated individual. He is in the thick of the social struggle, on the captain's bridge. In him are focussed numerous reflections of various phenomena which we can only divine. But the important thing is that the heavy-jowled face, the massive figure and grasping hands cannot but make us think about these phenomena.
Delacroix, as a romantic, placed more faith in his creative imagination than in precise, scrupulous attention to factual detail which, in his opinion, could kill poetry. His picturesque La Liberte guidant le peuple, one of the first works of an openly revolutionary, heroic nature, is not without traditional allegorical elements. But it is allegory of an extremely vital variety. The beautiful half-naked woman in the Phrygian cap holding up the flag is no denizen of a distant world but is an extremely down to earth figure, with the simplicity and grandeur of an ordinary working woman. She might well be the daughter of Maraichere. Delacroix was extremely attentive to the features of his age. His boy with the pistols is one of the most vivid examples of a child combatant in the whole of world art. Contemporary history with its burning problems knocked forcefully and insistently at the door of art, which was thrown open to admit it.
The great Russian painter Repin was not sinning against truth when he brought his destitute, ragged boatmen into the avant-scene of great art. His pictures aroused feelings of anger and protest among those who appreciated his democratic realism. In others it produced howls of protest over such an ``unbecoming'', ``scandalous'' subject. The artist keenly felt the pulse of his time and took a definite stand in the social 52
E. Delacroix. La Liberte guidant le peuple. A detail
struggle. It was not only because his picture showed the
unbearable burden of forced labour that stultifies the human heart
and mind that it became such a major artistic and social event:
it was also because it bore the great idea of the beauty,
53
grandeur, spiritual nobility and wisdom of the common man.
The strong social element and the idea that the individual was largely conditioned by society that made such headway in the progressive, democratic art of the 19th century to become one of its distinctive features, is also very much in evidence in the treatment of historical personages, for example, in the head of the redbearded strelets in Surikov's preparatory study for his painting Morning of the Execution of the Streltsi. He is quite inseparable from the concrete socio-historical environment and the given situation. Surikov drew his preparatory studies already knowing the exact position a particular character would occupy in the finished work. The character is only fully revealed and comes to life in the general context, whither we are irresistibly drawn by countless connecting threads, and especially the burning gaze. Who is he staring at so hard, we find ourselves asking.
The relationship between the character and a particular environment is again revealed very powerfully in Surikov's historical epic Boyarina Morozova. A major feature of the 19th century realism was its profound study of the individual representative of the common people.
Look at the vast gallery of ordinary Russian folk that were tangibly and poetically depicted by Surikov, the striking, highly individual figures of the old beggar woman, the Boyar's daughter, the nun, the merchant, and many, many others. Each has his own complex life. But the strength of these figures partly derives from the fact that they also represent concrete historical types of different sections of Russian society in the late 17th century. We find historicism to a greater or lesser extent present in many of the 19th century works with a social orientation. Indeed, this was the century when, in the critic Belinsky's words, ``historical contemplation penetrated forcefully and irresistibly into all spheres of the contemporary consciousness''. Further on, he remarks with great perspicacity: ``... Only historical reality can now provide painting with both live substance and contemporary interest".
By criticising and exposing negative features, the 19th century realist affirmed the positive principles which he was advocating. But art cannot exist without direct affirmation of an aesthetic ideal. This task always faces art in one form or another.
Nor did 19th century art avoid it, though it solved it in its
own rather special concrete historical forms and predominantly
in portraiture. Of course, we are not forgetting that Courbet,
Menzel, Munkacsy, Repin and many other Russian and foreign
artists of the latter half of the 19th century, when critical
54
I. Repin. The Volga Boatmen
realism reached its zenith, created numerous positive figures in historical and genre painting, too. Nevertheless, the centre of gravity in the solution of the aesthetic task in question clearly lay in portraiture.The great innovator and militant artist Gustave Courbet, whose political sympathies prompted him to become a communard, had great reservations about the word ``ideal'', which he regarded <v (Detrimental to ``real truth'', for him the most important thing of all in art. But in his portraits (his portraits proper, not the subject pictures wiii.h contained portraits), mainly of close friends, and revolutionaries, Courbet captured the essence of the sitter's character, and, what is more, presented a kind of ``programme'' personality. There is nothing surprising in the fact that such a convinced realist as he was should have revcaio. himself in works like Charles Baudelaire (1848), Alphnnsc Pr-wallet (1847) and Jules Valles (1866) not only as a [/e.uelrating analyst, but as a winged romantic.
Whistler's best portraits affirm a different concept of human dignity, the nobility of a person free from petty concern for ancumuia'tng material wealth. This American painter who fully shared the Impressionists' admiration for Velazquez's delicate and ``radiant'' pallette, responded perhaps more organically than any of them to the restrained but essentially passionate appeals of the great Spaniard's humanism.
55The Russian realist artists willingly turned to portraiture as a sphere less restricted by official rules and regulations and less subject to attack from the reactionary critics than, for example, genre painting (especially where the purpose was social criticism). They imbued the portrait with great social content, making it an effective vehicle for public discussion of important ideas, questions of politics and ethics and other problems, and a means of affirming a progressive aesthetic ideal.
The very choice of subjects was determined by the aim of immortalising the great sons of the nation, who had been ``of positive use'' (Repin).
The Wandering Exhibition of 1872 included practically all the portrait masterpieces of Vassili Perov, among them his portraits of Turgenev, Maikov, Aksakov and Dostoyevsky, the latter one of the most profound works of 19th century Russian portraiture.
The majority of portraits were commissioned by Tretyakov, who intended to set up a gallery of men of letters and leading representatives of Russian culture. Perov himself realised he had achieved something outstanding in his portrait of Dostoyevsky and in the portrait of Maikov, painted at the same time. In a letter to Tretyakov, he wrote: ``The saying `I can't say whether it'll be to your taste but at least it'll be hot' can be applied to these portraits ... I feel they express even the character of the writer and the poet.''
Dostoyevsky is portrayed seated, his hands clasped round
one knee, deep in thought. On the thin face with high
cheekbones and a sparse ginger beard and moustache marks of deep
affliction are visible. The whole figure conveys at once
wretchedness and inner power: the back is bent, the head is
slightly withdrawn between the shoulders, but the heavy,
powerful hands suggest strength; the inflamed eyelids are
watering but the brown eyes have lost none of their lively
sparkle and penetrating sharpness. And the whole is crowned
by the vast forehead of the thinker, especially noticeable
because the artist has presented it from slightly above. The
colours are simple and subdued, in perfect harmony with the
writer's figure. The tremendous tension one feels in the whole
figure, and the severe simplicity of the image, give us a hint of
the direction of his profound meditation. It is certainly not the
narrow world of egoistic interests, but important social
questions. Perov showed saliently in the Dostoyevsky of that time,
broken by years of penal servitude, already the author of the
morbidly profound Crime and Punishment and The Brothers
Karamazov already conceived, his true greatness as a
56
V. Surikov. Boyarina Morozooa. A detail
democratic writer, a passionate opponent of the humiliation and oppression of man.Valentin Serov revealed remarkable skill as a portraitist in his very first portrait paintings, Girl with Peaches and Sunlit Girl. His Portrait of the Singer Tamagno is one of his mature works. It is painted in an emotional key, in broad, sweeping strokes, and captures perfectly the artistic appearance of the famous dramatic tenor, his characteristic powerful figure. But in the socio-political sense, the painting affirms not only the artistry and refined intellect but the boldness and directness of a generous, honest nature, an active appeal to the world and rejection of closed, isolated life.
Tamagno is not a hero of social struggle, but the artist
illuminates such facets of his image which, without distorting
him, give him an extremely important accent, enabling him to
represent, to a far greater extent than was usual in the
portraiture not only of Manet, but even of Courbet and Ingres, a
positive civic aesthetic ideal. This is a significant and very
precious feature of Russian realist portrait painting of the latter
57
V. Serov. Portrait of M. N. Yermolova
half of the 19th century in general. To some extent it makes it akin to the art of the Renaissance, and even more links it with the art of socialist realism, the rightful heir and continuator of all that was best in world art and culture.We have spoken of a work by Serov in which the subject did not give the artist an opportunity to embody fully a progressive civic ideal. But it is quite a different matter when we come to his portraits of Maxim Gorky and the famous Russian actress Maria Yermolova. Although very different from each other in composition, these two works arc remarkably similar in one respect: both figures are strongly suggestive of personal service to society. Both the great writer and the great tragedienne are portrayed as active opponents of social evil, free of any kind of self-admiration---composed, modest, and tireless in the performance of their civic duty. Serov, who was so fond of using a sharp, expressive silhouette, a resilient line, a bright patch of colour, revealed his skill to the full in these two portraits. But at the same time he is restrained. There is the necessary element of simplicity well suited for people who, although used to being ``in the public eye'', do not ``act a part'' but feel deeply, and are our models in the great profession of being a Man.
The outward expressiveness in these two paintings does not mask the complexity of the person's inner world, which includes his or her positive features in both the personal and the social plane. This, as a rule, is what West European portraits came to lack more and more.
Cezanne's famous Self-Portrait at Twenty-Three is very expressive. It is built up of broad, laconic colour strokes with an abundance of contrasts of light and shade. It conveys the young artist's nature, energetic, stubborn and firm. At the same time, before us is a passionate, almost raving, fanatic. The intense, sullen stare is distraught, almost maniacal.
The man we see in two powerful, brutally frank self-portraits
by Van Gogh of 1889 is clearly pathologically abnormal. He is
in the grip of terrible visions and expects nothing good from
life. The artist's eyes are those of a tracked animal. But he
does not take a morbid pleasure in this ``inferiority complex'',
he wishes to free himself from it through his art, he rises above
his sickness through his creative effort: hence the terrible
feeling of truth that emanates from his canvases. This is the
confession of an artist, whose heart has been crushed by the
ruthless wheel of history. Here the artistic image serves for
self-analysis and self-assertion but does not present a moral, or,
especially, civic example, and does not contain a ``spiritual
charge'' of inspiring ideas and emotions encouraging
58
V. Surikov. Yermafe'.s Conquest of Siberia
self-improvement. Naturally, every honest confession of a great artist, even where it merely cautions against something, spiritually enriches the viewer, reader or listener, as the case may be. But this cannot compare with the image-example, which uplifts people and encourages them to rise to the heights of endeavour, heroism and self-sacrifice like David's Marat, Delacroix's Liberte, Repin's Kanin or the lyrical hero of Beethoven's Third Symphony.The question arose: was not the great principle of artistic creation, its fertilising spiritual power being lost by the wayside, perhaps for ever, in the historical zig-zags of artistic development? Many artists and thinkers at the turn of the century were dismayed at the impact of decadent aestheticism, the cult of form as an end in itself. Especially as the question gave rise to another one: was this principle really great and important and did people need its torch?
In 1849 the French artist Courbet painted his Les Casseurs de pierre. In 1874 the Russian painter Savitsky painted his Railway Repair Works. In 1875 the German artist Menzel completed his Das Eisenmalzrverk. In the early eighties the remarkable works of the Belgian sculptor Meunier began to appear---Ouorier puddleur, Le Marteleur, and others.
In short, a new hero was coming to occupy a place in art, the worker.
59This process had begun even earlier in literature, which presented a vivid picture of the factory system, with its unbearable burden of monotonous backbreaking toil, transforming the workers' blood, sweat and tears into money. Suffice it to recall Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times. This was more than an extension of the factual material providing the subject matter of literature and art. Life was advancing an exceptionally complex social and aesthetic problem, and the existing methods of artistic reflection of life were no longer equal to the new task, not even the method which was the most progressive in the 19th century---critical realism.
In Meunier's Ouvrier puddleur the figure is seated snatching a short rest. The muscles of his torso have relaxed and his chest is sunken. A hand with knotty fingers hangs limply between his parted knees. The head is slightly raised and the face is contorted in a grimace of suffering, with sunken eyes and parted lips, as though in a silent vain prayer. This is a realist figure, and it is undoubtedly warmed by the sympathy of the artist for his hero. But there is nothing new or novel in the artist's conception or his approach to the new subject. Le Debardeur is in much the same vein, although rather more optimistic.
Contradictions characterise not only Meunier's art. They are a feature of critical realism as a whole, straining towards poetry and beauty yet finding in life mainly cruelty, stupidity and abject poverty. This was the truth, but not the whole truth about the bourgeois world. And as time went on, this incomplete truth gradually became historical untruth. The tendencies of life and art were running in different directions. Life brought forth active opponents of social injustice, whereas art, as a rule, ignored them, or continued to see them only as victims.
At the beginning of 1888 Engels read Margaret Harkness's A City Girl. Here was a courageous, honest writer, not afraid to speak out against the injustices of the society she lived in. The banal story of the poor girl seduced by a middle-class man was told in a new, fresh way, with severe simplicity. Not long afterwards, Engels, who admitted to having read the book with great enjoyment, conveyed his impressions of it to the author. His ideas on the subject clearly express the demands the classics of Marxism made on the works of contemporary artists and writers.
Engels spoke of the need to go beyond the historical
limitations of critical realism to achieve a higher level of truthfulness.
``If I have anything to criticise,'' Engels wrote to Margaret
Harkness, ``it would be that perhaps after all the tale is not
C. Meunier. Ouvrier puddleur
60V. Perov. Portrait of F. M. Dostoyevsky
quite realistic enough. Realism, to my mind, implies, besides
truth of detail, the truth in reproduction of typical characters
under typical circumstances. Now your characters are typical
enough, as far as they go; but the circumstances which
surround them and make them act, are not perhaps equally =
so."^^1^^
What exactly does Engels mean when he says that Margaret
Harkness had failed to show typical circumstances? Above all,
he means the active power of social environment in which the
_-_-_
~^^1^^ Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1975, p. 379.
61
P. Cezanne. L'homme a la pipe
heroine of the novel acts, the working class. ``In the City Girl the working class figures as a passive mass, unable to help itself and not even showing any attempt at striving to help itself.''^^1^^ And Engels concludes: ``The rebellious reaction of the working class against the oppressive medium which surrounds them, their attempts---convulsive, half conscious or conscious--- at recovering their status as human beings, belong to history and must therefore lay claim to a place in the domain of realism.''^^2^^This was an imperative of the time. But only artists who had noticed the great historic process of the awakening of selfawareness in the working class had realised it. Elements of a new, revolutionary art are to be seen in certain poems by Heine and Weerth, and they are present in Pettier and Degeyter's immortal work, the Internationale. In Meunier's La mine (1892) and Kasatkin's Coal Cutters. Change of Shift (1895) essentially new features are evident in the depiction of the working man. His dignity, strength and resolution are stressed. Yet these were still only elements, and had yet to be shaped into an organised, integrated aesthetic system.
Maxim Gorky was the founder of the innovatory artistic method that opened up broad prospects for the aesthetic development of mankind. Like no other great artist before him, Gorky subjected the life of the proletariat to close, all-round and profound scrutiny, capturing the fundamental changes in society associated with the struggle of the working class for its rights. He deliberately adopted the philosophical, political and moral principles of the revolutionary proletariat and committed his art to their cause. This deepened his realism, and fecundated his excellent first-hand knowledge of the life and characters of different classes and social strata in Russia, which he had acquired from his wanderings across the length and breadth of the country. The great source of Gorky's strength, according to Lenin, was that he had ``bound himself . . . closely to the workers' movement in Russia and throughout the world~.~.~.".^^3^^
Gorky's innovatory contribution as the founder and first brilliant exponent of socialist realism consists above all in bringing to the fore the new hero of the age. Pavel Vlasov, and Nakhodka and Nilovna in the novel Mother and Grekov in the play Enemies are conscious fighters for the proletarian cause who firmly believe in the ultimate triumph of their great struggle. They stand upright, their souls cleansed of the grime of slavery and the selfish bourgeois ethics.
The contradictions of exploiter society, which became more acute than ever in conditions of imperialism, the highest stage _-_-_
~^^1^^ Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 379.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 380
~^^3^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works. Vol. 16, p. 106.
62
V. Van Gogh. Promenade a Aries
of capitalism, greatly restricted the expression of the humanistic substance of art. The social crisis was reflected in the aesthetic sphere. The presentiment, if not the actual awareness that a great upheaval was in the offing weighed heavily on the artist's heart. Feverish efforts were made to escape from the stifling, circumscribed world of bourgeois ``virtues''. Moods of revolt, refracted through petty-bourgeois anarchy and individualism, which had often been features of the artistic world even earlier, now took the form of aesthetic ``reclusion'' and ``shocking'' public taste, and nihilistic rejection of tradition. Not infrequently they perverted the very substance of art. 63Yet even in these unfavourable social conditions, which did considerable damage to artistic creation, art could not develop at all fruitfully outside the sphere of humanistic concepts, interests and impulses.
This is where we should seek the objective roots of the significant fact that the works of a number of gifted and honest artists who were subjectively indifferent to the democratic social movement and realistic art, and even opposed to them, nevertheless contained certain valuable elements.
The age pregnant with proletarian revolution was bound to produce, in the aesthetic sphere, phenomena which defy simple, straightforward assessment, and must be collated with the tremendously complex and important process of the emergence of the fundamentally new art of socialist realism. Such links may be extremely marginal and oblique, but in so far as they are discernible it would be an historical mistake to reject them and fail to take them into consideration.
Let us recall, for example, the remarkable attention a number of artists of the period devoted to icon painting and folk arts, to the epic and folk tales. Was this purely a romantic evasion of the contradictions of real life? One must also see the other side of it---enrichment of the aesthetic power of art. This was particularly patent in the works of a number of Russian artists of the time like Vasnetsov, Serov, Rerikh, Kuznetsov and Vrubel.
Interest in folk art had arisen periodically prior to this, without, however, leading to any significant practical results. This is a particular manifestation of the complex social contradictions of capitalism. Capitalist production struck the arts and crafts a cruel blow. The aesthetic principle began to depart from everyday life of the masses.
The interest in folk arts and crafts was frequently accompanied by rejection of the bourgeois world. There is no reason to assume that this automatically led to the adoption of a practical revolutionary approach. The life of the artist in the past frequently presents a curious picture of good sense combined with fantastic illusions, decisive, resolute steps and unnecessary retreats. Quite often interest in folk art masked social passivity and was a form of withdrawal from sharp social problems. This was certainly the case with the Jack of Diamonds = group^^1^^ in Russia, who took a fervid interest in ``primitive'' folk art. But when this interest was evinced by a genuinely gifted, discerning artist, it could not fail to produce valuable, albeit limited results. This was part of the wider process of searching for a way to overcome the aestheticising of ignorance and triviality, spiritual flabbiness, and served to protect art against the poison of decaying bourgeois culture.
_-_-_~^^1^^ A group of Moscow artists organised in 1910. Rejecting both academic art and 19th century realism alike, yet equally opposed to the currents of mysticism and symbolism in Russian art during the first decade of the present century, they were inspired by the art of Cezanne, Fauvism and Cubism, and also employed devices from Russian lubok (mass produced lithographs) and folk toys. ---Ed.
64G. Courbet. Les Casseurs de pierre
A merciless critic and fighter, the revolutionary worker was at the same time concerned with preserving and protecting what was of genuine value, with creating. He held in his hands the life-giving fire of the future. And this gradually removed the gloomy, dismal attire from his artistic image and enveloped him in a cheerful, life-asserting emotional atmosphere. He now became a strong, vigorous, passionate and determined hero. He did not turn his back on the joys of life. He was certainly no ascetic. He was not averse to a smile, a racy song, a funny joke or a colourful tale. And folk art contained all these valuable artistic elements in abundance.
A most interesting parallel phenomenon was an unprecedented interest in national artistic forms of other continents. The aesthetic values of a number of Eastern and American cultures only really came to occupy a firm place in artistic currency at the end of the 19th century. The amazing discoveries made in the heart of the African continent produced an especially strong impression. The sculptural figures and masks of the ancient state of Ife and medieval Benin introduce us to a world of highly expressive forms, with a profound emotional content and keen plastic sense that lies outside the familiar academic norms and concepts of European artists. This influx of novel forms had its negative aspects, too, but nevertheless it was part and parcel of the objective spontaneous process towards internationalisation of art and human culture, which were being enriched with the achievements of different 65 countries and peoples (a process that is proceeding particularly vigorously in our own day). It was at that time that primitive art began to be studied systematically. All this provides an external explanation of the extraordinary growth of interest in the primitive, although the real internal motives differed greatly from case to case, and could equally well consist in the artist's desire to evade the contemporary or to serve it more actively by widening his aesthetic horizons.
Imperialism, which, as Lenin frequently noted, is the highest phase of capitalism and at the same time the phase of the withering and decay of exploiter society as a whole, has brought into high relief basic class antagonisms, creating a tangle of social contradictions of extraordinary complexity.
The culture of the ruling class at this period is distinguished by aggressiveness and morbid hysteria. Afraid of reality, it turns away from important problems and complicated ideas, substituting sensuality for feeling, rejecting beauty and mocking harmony. Various styles are employed to this end, from pseudotraditional descending to trite, naturalistic copying, to pseudoinnovatory, circumscribed by the above-mentioned anti-- humanistic spiritual complex or consisting in completely empty, mechanical formal exercises.
Apologists of imperialism not only turn art into a profitable business, flooding the market with cheap products, creating and destroying names and whole movements, corrupting the minds of millions with their poisonous ``spiritual food''. Heroes whose credo is sex and violence are glorified. Philosophers try to define ``new principles'' of art. The old ideas of Plato and the Platonists that art is a spiritual substance only accessible to the higher feelings are evoked along with the ideas of Kant and his followers on the impartiality of real aesthetic judgement. Also employed are the mystical and egocentric ``prophesies'' of Nietzsche and his followers, and simplistic aesthetic conclusions of Freud from observing the human psyche in pathological states. ``The inferiority complex'', ``The Oedipus complex'' and ``The Eros and Thanatos complex'' became the ``scientific'' explanations for all kinds of truly pathological perversions in art, justifying them as a new stage in the artistic development of mankind.
Frank substantiations of anti-humanism made their appearance. Indeed the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset called one of his works which caused quite a sensation The Dehumanisation of Art. It is spearheaded against realist art, against art with social content, art as an instrument of cognition. He rejects the idea of art as a mass medium or as having an informative function. According to him it is only meant to 66
V. Serov. The Rape of Europe
serve the social elite. This means of spiritual elevation of the
aristocracy is alien to the plebs who are incapable of attaining
genuine aesthetic contemplation and are only able to seek the
object-prototype in what is represented, the thing itself, and
take art as a copy of life, where rough coarse passions and
emotions operate. ``To feel joy or sympathy for destinies, which,
let us suppose, a work of art shows us, is something entirely
different from genuine artistic pleasure,'' he writes. ``Moreover,
these sympathies connected with the human element in the
work of art are not compatible with strictly aesthetic delight.''
According to Ortega y Gasset, the modern art of the 20th
century represents the eternal tendency of the aesthetic sphere
to escape from ``the human''. The value of the new ``
extrahuman'' art lies entirely in its formal aspect. Professional and
technical refinement, technique, is the object of genuine
aesthetic perception, which only a few are capable of
demonstrating, those who ``possess the special gift of artistic
receptivity''. This will be art for the artist, but not for the mass
of people. Such is the complete programme of militant
antipopular art, diametrically opposed to that upon which all the
great realistic art of the past and socialist realist art, the most
revolutionary art of today, developed. It is a programme of
``deheroisation'' and ``depsychologisation'' of art. And it is not
67
surprising that Ortega y Gasset's programme was received so
sympathetically by the most extreme formalist currents in 20th
century bourgeois art, and that its ideas are still widespread
in bourgeois aesthetical and philosophical literature today.
Artistic practice in our age is marked by an incomparable abundance of extremely motley phenomena, whose essence is often extremely difficult to comprehend. Lenin's thesis of the existence of the two national cultures under capitalism helps us to understand correctly the class nature of complicated artistic phenomena. One must also be prepared to find complexity, duality and contradictions even in works by the same artist.
__b_b_b__The phenomena which have been dubbed ``modernism'' in aesthetic writings and art criticism cannot be correctly understood if we ignore this duality and contradictions and take the convenient but unproductive course of assuming a direct link between the political and aesthetic standpoint of an artist and his actual creative work. Such links do undoubtedly exist. But they are by no means as straight, direct and constant as some are inclined to believe. The artist often achieves a high level of wisdom and insight in the creative process that he lacks in other spheres. This is why perfectly justified rejection of the aesthetic credos of many artists connected with ``modernism'' and even its champions should not induce us to reject their works out of hand, without due analysis. Often we can find in the latter interesting emotional and artistic traits that are favourable to artistic progress. Connected with the democratic sentiments, albeit only indirectly, these may also be a form in which humanism is expressed.
Nor ought they to be exaggerated and overemphasised, for that would be to mispresent the historical place of the artist, and the dialectic teaches us to distinguish the leading, most important phenomena and trends. But it is from these traits and them alone that the real value of every artistic talent derives, and indeed the very recognition of talent in art. Lenin's reflections on Tolstoi undoubtedly have universal relevance. ``And if we have before us a really great artist, he must have reflected in his work at least some of the essential aspects of the = revolution.''^^1^^ The humanistic ideas that are present in every work of value are related in some way or another with the objective progressive movement of the epoch, with ``revolution''.
Le vieux guitarists (1903), one of Picasso's best known works of his early Blue Period portrays an emaciated old Spaniard with a guitar standing by a wall. This is not simply a genre _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 202.
68 scene. The angular bony figure of the old man, in which we can clearly perceive the tradition of the expressive and tragic images of Morales, but brought to a higher pitch, is perceived as a terrible symbol of the artist crushed by social oppression. Despite the mood of tragic loneliness that pervades the figure it also conveys the angry cry of a wounded heart, revolt and protest. In the artist's approach there is none of the philistine indifference or cheap philanthropy, masking smug self-- satisfaction, that was the invariable ideological and emotional content of works of bourgeois Salon Naturalism, so zealously defended by all official artistic institutions in different countries in those years. All that was genuinely talented in art set itself up in opposition to such technically skilful but pedestrian art, which readily but thoughtlessly applied the devices well tried by the classics in composition and colour, but cheapened the great bequests of their passionate social message and love of life, man and nature.Unless we bear all this in mind, we are in danger of failing to understand a great deal in the labyrinth the art of those years presented. What strikes one most when comparing the works of Picasso with the classics of the 16th-18th century is the tremendous depreciation of humanistic ideological potential. Nor does the artist attain the height of heroic humanism which inspired the progressive romantics, Gericault, Delacroix and Daumier. In Delacroix's Paganini the fire of inspiration burns, and a passionate, ``demoniac'' force boils and seethes. Le vieux guitarists is bent and broken, although he has not yet put aside his instrument. However, as already noted, there is no meek submission in the picture. It is highly expressive in a new way. The picture is the work of an extremely sensitive, perceptive artist. Let us now take a look at some typical examples of the salon art of the period. The Lonely Woman by S. Dene-Grasseau is a melodramatic scene: a girl of doll-like beauty, with bare arms and legs, sits on a rocky knoll, sprinkled with pink and blue tinted snow, with a mandoline and two pairs of sparrows at her feet, her only friends. George Watts's Hope is an unsuccessful attempt at producing a symbolic image. Again we have a musician. Woefully, but with studied grace, the hunched figure of a blindfolded girl sits on a vast globe amid some indefinable misty element (sea or air, it is impossible to tell which). She holds a cithara with only one remaining string.
There are no sounds, no songs, nothing but the unknown all around, the artist is saying: but he fails to achieve a vivid image, falling short of real art. As in the other picture, there is a great deal of superficiality and false sentimentality, and 69 we have saccharine-sweet prettiness in the place of beauty and cliches instead of real characteristics.
It was against this kind of art, or pseudo-art, perverting the taste of the public, that Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, and many other gifted artists raised an angry protest. Some of their work, however, itself revealed the increasing influence of the antihumanism of the surrounding world and lacked important social content. This was their great historical tragedy, due to the fact that they (or at least some of them, for a time) were unable to free themselves from the illusions of a life centred around purely professional problems and bearing very little relation to the sharp social and political changes of the time.
But an artist cannot but feel the spirit of his time. And when Matisse declared that he wanted a balanced, simple art, which does not disturb and upset, wanted a tired, overworked, harassed man to rest in contemplating his picture, he was clearly showing that he felt the pressure of capitalist civilisation on the individual. He remained a humanist, albeit within very narrow limits. And a humanist who tried to protect in man something that was really valuable and truly human, to restore to him his joie de vivre and optimism. His flat, decorative paintings, based on the interplay of bright colour patches, seem primitive and remind us of naive children's drawings, but the artist strove to produce this effect quite deliberately, and a great deal of hard work went into each of these apparently ``simple'' paintings. He himself spoke of this: "I take from nature only that which I feel to be essential for the fullest expression of the idea I have before me. I combine most carefully all means of impact, and establish the equilibrium between them that consists in mutual balancing of drawing and colour. This compositional unity to which everything is subordinated, even the size of the canvas, I do not achieve immediately. It requires a lot of reflection, mutual adjustment....''
His Femme nue assise (1908) does not appear to have required such preparatory work. It is a rapid, generalised sketch from nature. This work is typical of Matisse, who so often and so readily celebrated the beauty of the naked body. Without dwelling on details (thus the woman's face is presented without detalisation) the artist nevertheless shows the structure of the body very accurately and succinctly. But his main concern is characterisation. This is the body of an ordinary working woman, strong and vigorous. In his series Odalisques, Matisse embarked on another more refinedly hedonistic conception of 70
A. Renoir. Nude
woman as a delicate, beautiful flower, embellishing life and
giving it an ineffable aroma. This is a departure into an exotic world,
into dream. But there too, he was not to lose his interest in the
characteristic and abandon his search for expressiveness. He
was not one to pursue originality at all costs, but nor would he
put up with stereotype, or flabby thought and feeling. And it
71
H. Matisse. La Desserte, harmonic rouge
was this manner, spiced with a good measure of eroticism, that
the bourgeois Salon Art of the period cultivated, with its
constant recourse to the nude, and its portrayal of women,
purely in order to create a ``pretty picture''. Typical in this
respect is Cancaret Remorse exhibited at the Paris Salon in
1910, a ``competent'' work as regards execution, and
meticulously naturalistic, but completely empty, alongside which
Matisse's work immediately reveals its emotional power,
energy and talent.
Modigliani was one of the small group of modern artists with a serious artistic training who believed passionately in the eternal purpose of art to glorify man. He was especially fond of the traditional nude. The gentle, rhythmic forms of the female body enabled him to materialise the whimsical waves of his thoughts and feelings. They are usually extremely melancholic, very much in a minor key. The artist often looks at the world with a puzzled, questioning and reproachful gaze, and this lends his work a peculiar poignant poetry. But this is the poetry of the fragile, ailing body, strangely brittle in composition, perversely curved, the celebration and poeticisation
P. Picasso. Old Beggar with a Boy ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ →
72
[73]
K. Kollwitz. Widow
of a dim, infantile consciousness, and rejection of the colourful, powerful and tempestuous real world.Nevertheless, even in these forms, we can often perceive a sincere search, in a lyrically sharpened tone, for a lost harmony. Modigliani dreams of the ``Golden Age'' of the Renaissance, and it is no wonder that in some of his portraits he tried to revert to its tradition (especially Botticelli) although the result was at best a refined elegiac song of lost dreams and illusions.
Another example is a landscape by Vlaminck, who, like Matisse, subscribed to Fauvism. Vlaminck was one of the most interesting of landscape painters, an artist who lived a very tragic life. An opponent of machine civilisation, rationalism and science, and champion of instinctive creative power, he loved nature, although in his own rather peculiar way, looking to it for motifs providing a pretext for self-expression and selfaffirmation in rough and simple forms.
Landscape at Auvers (1925), one of his best works, reveals all the characteristics of his manner. Nature is astir. The shapes of the trees, the houses and road are presented as general masses, in powerful, heavy strokes. The artist is mainly concerned not with accuracy and authenticity, but with giving vent to powerful, passionate feeling. Nor is the landscape formless. The artist is very clear about what he is depicting. He is seeking ``depth'', he wants to express passion. True, he has sacrificed a lot in trying to achieve this and this alone (one has only to think of Corot or Monet). Yet how much he retains, how much more creative he is than the typical exponents of Salon Art, with their attempt to achieve dispassionate ``copies'' of every blade of grass, every leaf, and their vulgar ``effects'' of sunsets, moonlit nights, and so on, produced to please the bourgeois philistine.
Another thing must be mentioned in connection with the humanistic element in the works of the talented ``modernists'', and that is irony. This was a kind of ``intellectual armour'' to which the artist often resorted to protect his wounded heart and at the same time an intellectual weapon for expressing his involuntary protest against bourgeois society, a protest as a rule of an anarchic nature, mixed with a feeling of tragic impotence and loneliness. Certain Futurist, Cubist and Expressionist works do not make an apologia for horror, despair and pain, but rise above them, by reducing them to the bizarre and illogical. We find not intoxication with scepticism and nihilistic rejection of everything out of hand, not total spiritual desolation, but depiction of the incompatibility of all that is cruel, evil and terrifying with the world of man, and an attempt to destroy 74 the strong supports of the inhuman with thrusts of scathing irony. Suffice it to recall the Futurist revolt of the young Mayakovsky who flung in the face of the bourgeois reader the defiant lines:
And could you play a nocturne on a flute of drain pipes?
The sharp tones, unusual structural links between incompatible things, hyperboles, angular contours, brutality, the heavily tangible, expressive texture---all these means used for ironic rejection of the evil and the vulgar, for challengingly incisive expression of the artist's own standpoint---enriched the art and culture of the time. Otherwise, it would be quite incomprehensible how such artists as Kathe Kollwitz, Masereel, Otto Dietz, Deyneka, Mukhina, Cremer and later Guttuso, could have passed through the ordeal of Cubism, Futurism, or Expressionism and risen to militant, revolutionary art, overcoming the negative aspects of their former artistic enthusiasms, increasing their strength by wisely preserving what was worthwhile.
This does not mean any fundamental departure from a highly principled stand against modernism as an aesthetic doctrine that arose on a definite social, ideological and psychological
K. Kollwitz. To the Memory of Karl Licbknecht
[75]
F. Masereel. A Cat
basis and attempted to establish a particular view and perception of the world.In this respect the anguished thoughts of Franz Kafka, as noted down in his diaries, are extremely characteristic. They are also reflected in his literary works, which, although not entirely equitable with the diary confession, undoubtedly contain a great deal that has the same basis. This explains why even when Kafka shows his innate humanism, it is of a gloomy and bitter variety, spiced with grains of caustic irony and scepticism. The diaries are pervaded with notes of pain, anguish, loneliness, and despair sharpened to the maximum, refined and laid bare. On December~21, 1910, he writes: ``I feel as though I have been bound ana at the same time as if, were they to release me, it would be even worse.'' On May~4, 1911: ``A ceaseless image of a wide kitchen knife, rapidly and with a mechanical rhythm slicing off my side the thinnest horizontal slivers, which, from its fast work, fly away almost rolled into a tube.'' And on July 1st: ``The longing for boundless solitude.''
The set of emotional instruments of modernism is bound to involve aggressive imposition of this mood on the reader, spectator or listener, as the case may be, for modernism is essentially the preaching of illogical, morbid states, suffering and mysticism, all enveloped in the veil of aesthetic affirmation of ``individual freedom''. However, in this case the ``individual'' was enmeshed and constrained, expressing himself morbidly, fragmentarily and incoherently.
The Paris scene in the canvas of the Cubist Gleizes is a terrible phantasmagoria, an hallusination. The criss-crossing of geometric forms have destroyed the space and volumes. The painting might as well have been called The Reign of Chaos, this reign being aestheticised by the artist.
Braque's Still Life with a Cup also presents the world broken up into tiny fragments. In the illogical pluralistic perception of objects, in the halving and quartering of their separate elements, and the distortion of spacial zones, there is none of the irony such as one finds in certain paintings by Picasso in this style, which seem to be deliberately poking fun at pettybourgeois philistine's love of neatness and order.
A lyrical tone is also present in Russolo's Memories of a Night, but the vague chaotic visions that surround the dark bent figure staggering drunkenly on legs far too long for the body reveal the extremely narrow and wretched petty world of this ``lyrical hero''.
Finally, such paintings as Kandinsky's Landscape with Cottages or Composition Two are not abstract paintings, but the usual forms have been so changed and distorted as to be 76 unrecognisable. The small town is like an eerie vision, the eeriness stressed by the gloomy colour scheme. The latter painting presents an almost apocalyptic vision of universal destruction, although one can divine that it is based more or less on some simple motif of a country scene. In the centre is a strange rider on a monstrous, slimy horse, looking like a giant snail. A hopeless horror of the world is also present in the curiously elongated, fleshless Bathers by Heckel.
When an artist became anti-humanist, he ceased to see beauty in anything, and lost faith in his own Self. He often tried to invent a ``new science'', or a ``new religion'', but his path in art became increasingly more tortuous. ``Humanism is an out-of-date science,'' declared one of these artists who had lost all sense of direction, N. Kulbin. ``Not everything is for man. River and forest and animal, where is your right? Mount Ai Petri is more valuable than the people from Yalta who defile it.'' This kind of conviction became incompatible with the creation of aesthetic values actively serving man and society.
__b_b_b__For all its multifarious currents and trends, contemporary bourgeois art that is objectively opposed to realism is remarkably monolithic. Indeed it could not be otherwise, for when the natural link with reality, that inexhaustible source of content and form in art, is lost, variety can only be apparent.
The spread of Abstract Art and Surrealism, and their sensational success in narrow circles of rich collectors and snobbish bourgeois intellectuals are indicative of the deepening crisis of bourgeois society and its culture. The latter is becoming markedly anti-humanistic in character, partly due to its philosophical basis, which, as a rule, consists in the most extreme and militant forms of subjective idealism.
The art of blind, dark, anti-human instincts, pessimistic negation and hopeless casting around in the gloom is flourishing in bourgeois society today. That this is affectation, madness or charlatanism, need hardly be said. There is undoubtedly an element of all three in it. There is also cold calculation: the market exists for that sort of commodity, and it is being delivered. But Abstract Art (and Surrealism, too) is also a mistake. Not the personal mistake of a few misguided artists, but the historically conditioned error of many artistically gifted natures of our time, educated in the conditions of a deepening crisis of the capitalist social system.
A typical example comes to mind. At the International Art
Exhibition held during the Sixth World Youth Festival, the
S. Dali. Mae West
77 author happened to witness a heated argument between a number of people and the author of one of the paintings. The artist defended his picture with the passion and sincerity of a person convinced of his cause, explaining the sound and rich idea he had attempted to convey: the passing of the old world and a new bright edifice of human life going up. But how was the idea expressed? Through a kind of schematic window frame one could see a dim surface with cubes and pyramids scattered on it. It was quite impossible to tell what it was meant to represent. The artist's own perfectly sound idea had naturally never occurred to anybody. Here was a patent gap between the idea and its embodiment.However, was this particular work devoid of content? No, it was not. Did it not in fact propagate an idea? Indeed, it did: but one diametrically opposed to the one the artist had intended. The meagre, geometrical, abstract forms of the picture, the gloomy, bleak and unwelcoming, schematic landscape, all combined to suggest a pessimistic idea of the joylessness of earthly existence, produced a profound sense of gloom and sowed doubt in the possibility of changing anything. Subjectively the artist was a progressive, objectively, his art was thoroughly reactionary.
How could such a divorce occur? Clearly, among other reasons, as a result of people forgetting the law of unity of form and content. This is a basic objective law of art from which no artist is absolved. A particular content can only be expressed in particular forms.
When we oppose Abstract Art, it is a question of far more than simply defending the real appearance of the external world, which many Western artists have lost the skill to depict. It is a question of protecting the significant spiritual content of art, the world of important ideas, precious for all mankind.
The important thing is to realise that progressive, sound, positive ideas cannot be expressed in the forms of Abstract Art not only because these forms have been called into being by forces that bear the imprint of decay and decadence, and devoted to gloomy and reactionary ideas. Abstract forms are simply incapable of containing any clear, substantial, complex substance. They can only express a primitive sensory complex, elementary emotions, and nothing more.
But the ``novelty merry-go-round'' of modernism has already turned round to show another side---ever louder publicity is given to pronouncements of the supporters of so-called pop art and op art. Abstract Art was a revolt against rules and norms, rejecting depiction for what was allegedly a more 78 subtle and complete expression of the spiritual essence, the individual modulation of feelings. On the strength of these basic principles too, abstract art remained a highly subjective, narrow and elitist art style, despite vain attempts by its supporters and exponents to ascribe broad objective functions to it, presenting abstract compositions as an accurate, articulate, cogent reflection of the world, of processes occurring on the scale of the atom, molecular biological structures and even cosmic cataclysms. Ornamental colour or linear compositions had too narrow and shaky a foundation to carry a cognitive charge and convey a serious idea. They delighted bourgeois aesthetes and found rich patrons, who liked to flatter themselves with the idea that they belonged not only to the business elite but also to the spiritual elite of their society. But the ordinary people were nonplussed at abstract art exhibitions: indeed few ever went to them.
The ever more complicated social contradictions between labour and capital required, however, that ideologists of capital come up with an aesthetic programme of a wider, more ``popular'' nature. Pop art was particularly well-suited for this function. It was a turn in the direction of accessibility. Pop art is based on frankly facile aesthetic principles, elementary techniques and materials, and gives a light ``aesthetic occupation'' to all and sundry, often pointless, sometimes amusing. It employs features everybody is familiar with from advertising, design, collecting, the innocent pleasures of painting and decorating the home with flowers, bizarre stones and branches. This unassuming art was suddenly raised to a great height and proclaimed an aesthetic expression of the `` industrial society'', ``the consumer society''. The real material world was brought back into the aesthetic sphere. Not, however, to be more deeply appreciated and cognised from a new angle, to be aesthetically assimilated and changed according to a high social ideal, but to mask its true complexity and contradictory nature in the guise of trivia, to reject outright all that is spiritual and socially problematic, to throw artistic creation a long way back.
The boundaries between art and non-art are being consistently and deliberately erased. It is no accident that the pop artists (the heirs of the Dadaist traditions) are making use of raw utilitarian objects, such as broken bedsteads or doors, rusty bicycles, dirty rags, cracked vases and the like. Haphazardly combined and painted up, they are offered as exhibits in art galleries. This is nothing but a campaign against humanism in art, however much the champions of pop art might declare it to be another revolution in art. The supporters of 79 pop art proclaim that they are raising art to the highest level, with the artist embracing real life, directly introducing the world of real things into his works.
The American art critic and museum worker A. Solomon sees one of the principal merits of pop art in the discovery that artistic value can be found in any object, even litter in the street. A pillow and blanket splashed with paint, a bright canvas with a chair attached to it (``masterpieces'' by one of the founders of pop art, the American R. Rauschenberg) no longer satisfy. Not so long ago, an exhibition of works by the artist T. Bayrack opened at the Riverside museum in New York. One of the ``key exhibits'' entitled Self-Portrait was described by a visitor as follows: ``Looking around the black and yellow room, I spied something like a bench in the far corner. I went over to it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a lavatory pan plastered with bright, gay cock's feathers. I realised that this was another of the artist's works. You must admit, it would have been rather awkward to sit on a work of art.
``Suddenly I clearly heard something moving inside it. I could not resist it, and lifted the lid. And what should I see, but a pair of blue eyes staring up at me from deep down the pipe. It was HIS eyes! The eyes of the master! I recognised them immediately .... By the gypsum nostrils and mouth live newts, turtles, leeches and various other repulsive water creatures crawled. The eyes were inspired and prophetic.''
According to the exponents of pop art, such concepts as beauty and ugliness are meaningless.
Take, for example, the statement, made by Tom Wesselmann, a leading exponent of pop art, published in the American journal Art News. Asked what the purpose was of juxtaposing different kinds of representation, he replied that a painted pack of cigarettes next to a painted apple wasn't enough for him, because they are both the same kind of thing. But if one is from a cigarette ad and the other a painted apple, they are two different realities, and they trade on each other. When asked what aesthetics meant to him and his work, he said that aesthetics was very important to him but that it didn't deal with beauty or ugliness, which are not values in painting for him. He thought perhaps ``intensity'' would be a better emphasis.
These people have reduced the concepts of ``elevated'' and ``base'', ``good'' and ``evil'' to mere noises. Aesthetic definitions are very closely related to ethical definitions. But to have 3 cracked lavatory pan with plaster trimmings declared a work of art on a par with Rodin's Thinker or Maillot's 80
V. Vasarely. Atom
Pomona is a monstrous encroachment not only on the aesthetic
values of mankind but on the historically formed ethical
concepts as well. The human personality is ``emancipated'' from
moral criteria. The concepts of ``good'' and ``bad'' are
deprived of all meaning. All this has a definite social
significance. An individual thus conditioned becomes a very handy
instrument for all kinds of reactionary social adventures of
a fascist variety, for the advance of evil militarist forces
threatening mankind with nuclear destruction.
``Pure'' playing with abstract geometrical decorative shapes (which from some op art works can be transferred successfully to the sphere of applied art---advertising, packing, decoration, etc.) also turns out to have a certain social function when treated as an ``ideological'' occupation, when an attempt is made to declare it, too, to be a ``revolution'' in the arts. 81 The point is that the ``geometry'' of op art is designed to produce an effect of surprise, destroy the commonplace and affirm the illogical. All kinds of protuberances or hollows on surfaces, achieved by depicting bands, rhomboids, squares and circles, etc., that decrease or increase in perspective, which is a favourite device of the op artist, have, at certain dimensions, an oppressive or disturbing effect on the human psyche. If movement and real light are added, then such a dynamic phantasmagoria of spinning forms (such as is permissible within reasonable limits in window dressing, advertising, etc.) when heightened to an extreme pitch of intensity (to which op art and its offshoot, kinetic art, invariably tend) can induce fainting and severe shock. Such shocks, one need hardly mention, bear absolutely no relation to aesthetic experience.
Art ought to be widely accessible, should reach out to the masses, and belong to the majority. That is what the founder of optical art, Vasarely, has said. But that is not enough to ensure that art becomes truly a possession of the people. The important thing here is what art brings to the masses. Whether it enriches and elevates people, or compells them to adjust to a very inferior spiritual standard, imposing a set of primitive ideas and emotions on them. The coldly ordered ``optical world'' composed of a few standard elements, whatever its adepts might say, denies both the artist and the public any significant emotional experiences, serious reflections and poetic flights. At best it is a world of amusing kaleidoscopic tricks: more often it is a world of wearying obtiusive effects that stultify both mind and heart.
The American art critic Norman Smith in his short notes on the works of present-day Californian artists mentions a few dozen names from the older and younger generations of artists. He tries to infect the reader with his own enthusiasm for their work. He dwells on their ``bold'' use of material and efforts to achieve ``technical skill'', which he insists, is not to be identified with academic discipline and accomplished execution. What of the works themselves? Ron Davis, a leading exponent of the so-called ``vibration painting'' combines various optical devices in his box-like constructions thereby creating complicated, contradictory constructions. Another artist, who strives after simplicity, is Robert Erwin. His subtle pastel abstracts, which he calls ``fields of colour energy'', consist of thousands upon thousands of tiny coloured dots that seem to float on the surface of his grey and cream canvases, which have a slightly convex form achieved through careful calibration and a special process .... Then there is Larry Bell, who has rejected the life of a successful painter and devoted 82 himself to working with glass cubes that sparkle like precious stones, and experiments with catching light....
Indeed, when you look at such works you do not feel the repugnance and annoyance which many ``works'' of pop art evoke. They have the quality of well executed work about them. But it is hard to see what they have to do with art, that highly intellectual activity, where thought and a range of complex feelings mean so much. A cube on legs made of wrought iron and coloured glass. A precise geometric form, with clear lines and surfaces polished to a shine. Is it a small cupboard or chest? No, as it happens, it is Larry Bell's sculpture The Golden Box. Missing is the basic criterion of art, the sense (not to say understanding!) that artistic creation is a special cognitive activity. The artist is solely engrossed in more or less innocent problems of technique and craftsmanship. Around him is a world throbbing with human passions and emotions and erupting in violent social cataclysms--- a contradictory but beautiful world. Yet here is the artist busy smoothing the sides of a glass cube, a naive and empty toy, that vainly poses as the heir of the Venus de Milo.
In recent years several movements have risen on the crest of the latest wave of frantic ``avant-garde'' experiments in the West which are often grouped together under the heading ``anti-art'', since they all have in common a rejection of the aesthetic value and indeed the very nature of art. Here the artist's personality, feelings and ideas are almost entirely absent from the ``product'', and have practically no place in the ``creative'' process. This is equally true both of the movements that claim to be pursuing ``super-rationalism'', ``minimal art'' and the ``art of primitive structures'', the ``cold school'', etc. and of those movements that stand for `` selfexpression'', ``conceptual art'' and ``microemotional art'', etc.
The ``new wave'' rejects all and any traditions and denies any ties with abstract art, pop art and op art, which themselves developed under the banner of ``anti-traditionalism''. True, it is not very hard to trace a connection between, for instance, ``minimal art'' and the theory and practice of ``purism'' and ``geometric abstract art'', or between `` conceptual art'' and pop art. Nevertheless, there is no denying that ``anti-art'' wages a determined, albeit sterile, ``aesthetic revolt''. Socially, the movement has absorbed a wide range of moods and feelings, including some of genuine protest. Such protest is directed against the smugness of the so-called `` consumer society''. (This term, applied by many Western sociologists today to bourgeois society of the last decade, is misleading, although it does express the characteristic 83
T. Smith. Without a Title
reduction of social creativity in a society where the monopolies are
increasingly in a position to dictate their terms.) The aesthetic
revolt of anti-art is somewhat akin to the New Left which
has attracted a following of young people in countries like
France and the USA with its deceptive appearance of militancy
and in which dangerous extremism sharply hostile to scientific
socialism is often manifest.
The followers of anti-art object to pop art, op art, abstract art. Surrealism and so on, in that they retain a residual humaneness and while extending the aesthetic sphere beyond all known bounds and erasing the distinction between beauty and ugliness nevertheless try to keep within the realm of aesthetic categories, however slender their claims to aestheticism may be. The supporters of minimal art, for example, are strongly opposed to the ``poetry of things'' in pop art. Their ideal is the cold standardisation of industrial and mechanical forms. Carl Andre, for instance, produces ``plastic compositions'' by arranging on the floor standard lead, steel or tin sheets, which can be ordered by telephone from the factory. These ``impersonal forms'', it is claimed, best express the ``structure of thought''. The artist's role is reduced to ``freeing'' man from the ``burden'' of aesthetic forms. The 84 ``structures'' permit only minimal aestheticisation---rhythmic arrangement and the achievement of an effect of ``crystal coldness''.
From here it is but a short step to the idea of the ``creative superiority'' of the computer over man, who, we are told, has exhausted all his possibilities, had become emotionally inert in the ``post-industrial society'' (another term used by Western sociologists trying to blame the ``objective conditions'' of scientific and technological progress for the contradictions of capitalism).
This book does not attempt to examine the relationship between the scientific and technological revolution and artistic developments. That is a subject for special research. However, it must be said that while appreciating the success with which modern computer technology can be applied in reproducing and modelling art that involves the selection of complex compositional variants from a large number of elements differing greatly but with precisely fixed parameters (musical sound, speech phonemes, ornamental patterns, etc.), one must treat cautiously the far-reaching predictions that the artist is going to be completely ousted by the machine, and
C. Andre. Clippings
[85]
that the age of ``machine art'' is approaching. In pictorial art,
for example, the world of forms is infinitely variable, each
``element'' possessing an unlimited number of characteristics.
But there is another aspect to the uniqueness of each
genuine work of art.
The uniqueness of the work of a great master consists in the concentrated expression of his own personal experience and also that of the society that produced him. Moreover, his work contains to some extent the whole history of mankind and even of all life on our planet. These marks of history are imprinted in the genetic memory of the human body cells. To reproduce, or even approximately model this vast store of information in its historical dynamics is clearly beyond the capacity of any computer, however sophisticated.
In any case, it is surely unworthy of man to entrust to machines that which is such a source of pleasure and happiness for man and the whole human race. Let us recall the fine words on this subject of the father of modern cybernetics Norbert Wiener: ``To man, the human, and to the machine, the mechanical.'' Let the computer write poetry, compose music, finding clever rhythms and forms, let it draw cunning ornaments that impress us with their complexity and novelty. But only man with his enquiring spirit should assume the task of investigating the spiritual and aesthetic climate of society, the world of human life, and assess the measure of harmony in natural and social phenomena that is the basis of beauty.
We realise perfectly well that the chariot of modern art is not only driven by the forces of gain, speculation, publicity and fashion. There are also many sincere but misguided efforts being made---due to a mistaken, one-sided reading of the lesson of history and commitment to an experiment, the fallaciousness of which it is often hard to admit to oneself because one is already too deeply involved. It would be foolish to deny the obvious talent possessed by some of the adherents of the latest currents bearing the banner of `` aesthetic innovation''. It is a great pity (and a danger too) that bourgeois social conditions are not conducive to revealing the illusory nature of such experiments and preventing this sad waste of talent.
Our criticism of such art is primarily directed against its extensive ideological pretensions, its completely unwarranted claims to represent aesthetic progress, to be a new stage in the ``artistic revolution in art'', appropriate to the atomic age, the age of electronics, and supposedly ``liberating'' the artist and the artistic public from the cruel contradictions of our time. ``Art must be wide open to all that is new,'' say the 86 ``prophets'' and supporters of modern art in its ultro-- fashionable versions. But there is new and new. And the ``new'' to which they are so devoted, far from enriching man clouds and mystifies his aesthetic relationship with nature and society. This ``art'' has practically deprived the artist and the public of genuine aesthetic pleasure, spiritual growth and enrichment of the personality. Many pop art and op art ``compositions'' arouse in people, as already noted, a feeling of repugnance, irritation and even shock. Who benefits from this kind of transformation of aesthetic perception? Only those who would like art to become a kind of ``spiritual hashish'', who would divert it from cognisance of life and fulfilment of its great social mission of conveying truth and beauty to people, elevating their thoughts and feelings and arousing them to struggle for human rights and progress.
Can anyone deny that the works of the Italian realist sculptor Manzu or the frescoes of the Mexican painter Siqueiros are profoundly meaningful, humanistic and artistic? But one can say none of these things about pop artist Rauschenberg's Pilgrim, which is a canvas with an ordinary chair attached to it or about Oldenburg's Stove, which is simply a real gas stove with various pots and pans and food on it and under it. Possibly, this kind of ``work'' would make a good advertisement for gas stoves or various food products, but it will certainly not provide the answer to any serious ideological or aesthetic questions of our time.
As for what is called a ``happening'', where, by a kind of kinetic mechanism the ``work of art'', composed of a collection of wheels, levers, bits of old domestic appliances, and the like destroys itself according to an electronically controlled programme, here the idea of teaching the public to regard destruction as a ``supreme aesthetic principle'' is even more patent and ominous.
Self-destructive art! The very combination is outrageous! Art, which has always been the embodiment of creation, is suggested to consist in destruction. True, such art deserves no better fate. But it must not be allowed even for a moment, by the slightest association, to defile true art and corrupt the aesthetic taste of the public. The ugly grimaces of the old departing world must not be allowed to place a frown of sceptical disbelief on the rosy face of the young, vigorous world. ``Art is out of date,'' some ``intellectuals'' say. ``The sentiments of Romeo and Juliet, the profound reflections of Rembrandt's old men, the ardour of Delacroix's heroes, all this is absurd in the nuclear age, the space age, the age of electronics and global communications,'' others chime in. How 87 much this smacks of that nihilism of ``educated philistines'' of which Lenin spoke so devastatingly. No, art was born along with man, and developed reflecting his passionate efforts to understand nature, society and himself, to express his finest feelings and concepts, and it will always live with him as great spiritual creation, hand in hand with science, but approaching reality in a different way and enriching in its own special way both the individual and society.
Clarity and integrity of character are visible in the images created by those foreign artists who are led by their search to serve their people with their art onto the path of socialist realism. The pure, attractive figure of the Mexican girl painted by Siqueiros, the vivid Italian worker type in the paintings of Guttuso, the works of Sassu, Fougeron and other progressive
R. Guttuso. Workers
[88]
foreign artists, show that new aesthetic forces are actively
opposing the anti-humanism of modernism, which is poisoned
with pessimism and embroiled in formalist confusion.
Realism has always been opposed not only to the pseudoinnovatory experiments of modernism, but also to salon art naturalism, shorn of true poetry, lofty ideals and healthy feelings. The ``mass culture'' works, as they were called, flowed in a wide and turgid stream of sordid feelings; crime and sex were much relished, and ``strong-arm heroes'', the ``darlings'' of fate, were heavily advertised.
In recent years, modernistic trends have been pushed into the background. They proved inadequate when confronted with the strengthened positions of realism. Once they had received support from Photo-illusionism, the figurative branches of modernism---Pop Art and Surrealism, combined with the advertising sensationalism of the ``mass culture'' works---joined together Into the trend usually termed ``Hyper-realism''.
Despite certain elements which, in Hyper-realism, are of an objectively realistic-critical nature, its most important feature is external authenticity deprived of real = truth.^^1^^ The myth being embodied and justified by Hyper-realism affirms the unshakeability and the fixity of the material world and the glitter of technical objects, among which Man loses his predominant role.
``Contemporary realism can be regarded as such if it is connected with the reality of human society, and imbued with national features, due to the reality of its function, the consistent reality of its themes and content, the reality of its scientific basis, and its material techniques, the reality of its form, reality of style, and consequently due to its general realism. There can be no question of realism that is not humanistic, realism in which serving man, aesthetically, ideologically and morally, is not the pivot of its whole artistic activity. Nor can one speak of realist art if it uses archaic means of expression.''
These passionate words of Siqueiros's are a clear and concise programme of the new realism, corresponding to the spirit of the socialist revolutionary movement.
For art to turn away from realism means to lose itself, its spirit, its true freedom.
Only when it is turned to face life and derives its vital juices and colours from life does art advance.
Only realistic art is genuinely meaningful, rather than merely affecting meaningfulness. And what can really elevate an artist but the posing and solution of vital questions? This is his supreme freedom, and his supreme self-assertion. And this is what makes him a true heir to the great tradition of world art, _-_-_
~^^1^^ ``The Photo-Realists: 12~ Interviews''. --- Art in America, special issue. New York, NovemberDecember, 1972.
89 which has always been aesthetically lofty since it was always tackling important socio-humanistic problems advanced by the time.``Art has never abandoned man,'' Dostoyevsky wrote, ``it has always corresponded to his requirements and his ideal, always helped him in the search for this ideal---it was born together with man and developed alongside his historical life.''
__b_b_b__When, following fundamental social transformations, socialist art began to develop in the renewed Russia (its sphere has increased many times over in our time, extending to many countries and including the creative works of a large number of talented artists), it signified a mighty act of sanitation of people's aesthetic activity.
The fact that humanism was inscribed on the banners of socialist art from the very start and that it openly associated itself with the noble movement for real emancipation of man, for the most complete and basic emancipation of the working masses, the labouring classes, from exploitation, poverty and hunger, ignorance and superstition and fear of the present and the future---was in itself enough to elevate the new art far above bourgeois decadence, opening up a wide and bright path before it.
Art acquired an opportunity to actually participate in the revolutionary struggle and the creative labour of the people, to live by the same thoughts and feelings as the people, to turn to the people, and embody what they really cherish and value. The artist now had a beautiful reality to depict, of which so many artists in the past had dreamed, pining and suffocating in the oppressive atmosphere of the anti-humanistic exploiter society and often weakening and failing in fierce struggle with it, and departing from the truth because it was too joyless and soul-destroying.
Embracing the cause of the revolutionary proletariat and progressive socialist ideology provides the artist with unprecedented opportunities for creativity and stimulates his talent. Communists, Lenin noted, reject idle hypocritical and sentimental talk of ``absolute freedom'', but, taking into consideration the real conditions of class struggle, they help every honest artist to find his true place in the contemporary world, and to devote the maximum effort to serving society and his people and thereby to acquire genuine freedom.
``It will be a free literature,'' Lenin wrote in Party
Organisation and Party Literature, ``because the idea of socialism and
sympathy with the working people, and not greed or careerism,
will bring ever new forces to its ranks. It will be a free
90
N. Andreyev. Lenin Writing
literature, because it will serve, not some satiated heroine, not the bored `upper ten thousand' suffering from fatty degeneration, but the millions and tens of millions of working people---the flower of the country, its strength and its future. It will be a free literature, enriching the last word in the revolutionary thought of mankind with the experience and living work of the socialist = proletariat.''^^1^^What powerful historical optimism emanates from these inspired words! How much pride in man the creator they _-_-_
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.~10, pp. 48--49.
91 express and at the same time pride in the people whose labour ultimately produces all the values in the world and whose experience of life preserves the objective truth of history itself!The principle of Party allegiance organically comprises what we call innovation, artistic creation turning to new phenomena, facts and tendencies in life. Lenin regarded literature and art as a powerful means of cognising life and affirming what is new and progressive in it. The noble social calling of the artist is to truthfully reflect life in its historical flux and enrich the revolutionary thought of mankind ``with the experience and living work of the socialist proletariat''.
At the same time, Lenin firmly rejected the pseudo-- innovation of decadence, ideological and aesthetic eccentricities, formalistic tricks which the snobbish bourgeois public so readily encouraged.
Lenin loved realism in art, and appreciated truth, depth and aesthetic power in a work of art. Later, in a conversation with Clara Zetkin, he expounded his personal aesthetic views and tastes, ardently defending the great realist traditions of world art. ``We are too great `iconoclasts in painting'. The beautiful must be preserved, taken as an example, as the point of departure even if it is 'old'. Why turn our backs on what is truly beautiful, abandon it as the point of departure for further development solely because it is 'old'? Why worship the new as a god compelling submission merely because it is 'new'? Nonsense! Bosh and nonsense! Here much is pure hypocrisy and of course unconscious deference to the art fashions ruling the West. We are good revolutionaries but somehow we feel obliged to prove that we are also 'up to the mark in modern culture'. I however make bold to declare myself a = `barbarian'.''^^1^^
Noble ideological content, realism and commitment to the people are what Lenin and the Communist Party demanded from art which wishes to be in the mainstream of aesthetic progress in our time.
Service to the revolutionary people, and the embodiment of its feelings, views and ideals, became the most important thing of all for the innovatory Soviet art from the very first.
This was considerably encouraged by Lenin's historic plan for monumental propaganda, which, as the Petrograd newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta, noted in 1918, led to a ``profound change'' in the sentiments of wide circles of the artistic intelligentsia: "The competition and the conditions for entering projects of monuments to outstanding revolutionary figures and giants of our science and art to be erected in Moscow produced a great upsurge of enthusiasm and ideas among _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, On Literature and Art, Moscow, 1970, p. 250.
92S. Malyutin. Portrait of Dmitry Furmanov
them.'' Dozens of artists took part, including Alyoshin,
Alexeyev, Andreyev, Matveyev, Merkurov and Sherwood.
This plan had the significance of a general aesthetic programme: art was actively entering the life of society. For the first time ever, here was art deliberately as a matter of principle turning for subjects not to aristocrats and rich men but to truly great men in various creative fields. This was to become the general practice of Soviet portrait painters, who in the very first years of the Revolution began to produce a 93 gallery of portraits of representatives of the people. Suffice it to recall, by way of example, Malyutin's Portrait of Dmitry Furmanov, Ryazhsky's generalised portraits of Soviet women, and Brodsky's portraits of revolutionaries. The creative power of the individual and the atmosphere of freedom and unfettered activity surrounding him was being affirmed in art and the fullness of human life was being celebrated with clearly discernible self-discipline, organically comprised in the aesthetic ideal of the new man.
Certain drawings by Brodsky give a true and poetic portrayal of Lenin's energetic nature, his concentration, the strength of his spirit, as well as marks of exhaustion from the excessive burden of the vast state affairs which he bore on his shoulders.
Drawings by Alexeyev, Altman, Parkhomenko and other artists who had an opportunity to draw Lenin from life bring us the live features of the charming conversationalist Lenin could be.
The depiction of the leader of the revolutionary people was a new, unusually exciting, but also unusually difficult and socially responsible task.
Especially successful and noteworthy in this respect was the work of the sculptor N. Andreyev, who was given permission to work in Lenin's study in the Kremlin in May 1920, and in the course of two months made numerous sketches and sculpture studies, some rough, some more complete, depicting Lenin reading, writing with great concentration, his head bent forward showing us the high forehead, the deep crease above the nose, Lenin briefly engaged in conversation, Lenin smiling, a bright, warm smile. Andreyev revealed his brilliance as a graphic artist in these drawings, which are superbly executed, extremely accurate, spontaneous, lyrical and evocative.
Although we greatly value the fine photographic portraits of Lenin by such outstanding photographers as Otsup, Nappelbaum, Zhukov and Leonidov, we, the public, and especially the artists, will always treasure the sketches made by artists who saw Lenin in person, for they contain the incomparable fusion of portrayal and the emotional and intellectual reactions of the artist, delightedly observing at close hand the model man of the new society, with all his positive qualities, the man of today and at the same time the man of the communist future.
There exist sketches of Lenin made by artists who did not
understand or accept the revolution and were hostile to it.
These works are strikingly subjective, biassed and inaccurate.
Most of them fail to convey a superficial likeness even, but
distort the features of Lenin's face. Even in setting themselves
94
B. Kustodiyev. Festival in Uritsky Square in Honour of the Second Comintern Congress
the comparatively limited task of a documentary sketch from life, artists were only successful when they realised the social importance of this mission and were inspired by the ardour of revolutionary struggle.The importance of the artisfs outlook and political views was naturally incomparably greater in the case of a painting or monumental work of a more complete and independent character.
The main question that arose for the artist was how to show the new, how to find it and convey it in artistic images. What was the new, in fact, especially in people? In short, what exactly was the new hero like? ``We cannot go on plundering the treasures of the Revolution,'' the writer Alexei Tolstoy wrote in 1925. ``Cattle trucks packed with people, lice, moonshine, convulsive smoking, obscenities, and so on and so forth---sure enough, we've had the lot. But it's still a long way from there to the Revolution. These are phenomena on its surface, like crimson patches and swollen veins on the face of an angry man .... You cannot understand and encompass the Revolution through 'guts' alone. It is time we started studying the Revolution, it is time for the artist to become an historian and thinker. The task is an enormous one, there is no denying it, and many people may fail in the task, but we can have no 95 other task when before our eyes, directly in front of us, rises the great pile of the Revolution, filling the sky.''
Indeed, the literature of those years contained many ungeneralised empirical observations, and naturalism made itself strongly felt. But the pictorial arts, too, went through a period of considerable difficulty, for it was not enough just to ``go to life'': the important thing was to know what for.
It is thus all the more remarkable that so many important works were created during these early days of our society, works that vividly embodied the new life and celebrated the new aesthetic ideal.
Kustodiyev's Festival in Uritsky Square in Honour of the Second Comintern Congress, Deyneka's Defence of Petrograd, Shadr's The Cobblestone Is the Weapon of the Proletariat, Petrov-Vodkin's Death of a Commissar are just a few of the numerous classic works of Soviet art, in which in different, but equally novel ways the features of the totally new society and the new human relations and heroes it produced were embodied.
What joy must have sung and vibrated in the artist's soul for him to be able to paint, for example, such a bright
K. Petrov-Vodkin. Mother
[96]
K. Petrov-Vodkin. Death of a Commissar. A detail
optimistic work as Moravov's In the District Registry Office] How
firmly and deeply the new revolutionary life must have
penetrated every cell of the artist's being for him to be able to
extol so powerfully and with such conviction the unflinching
resolution and courage of the new heroes, as loganson did in
his Interrogation of Communists.
Apprehending life, overcoming alien, anti-realist tendencies inherited from the pre-revolutionary past and cultivated by the ``lovers of novelty'' who looked to bourgeois modernism abroad, young Soviet art actively forged its own revolutionary traditions.
One of the most important of these was the treasuring of all that was valuable in the artistic heritage of every people. From the very start. Soviet art developed as a multinational art.
Lenin's thesis that two cultures existed side by side in every national culture under capitalism helped distinguish between what was vital and democratic, and what was alien, historically moribund and obsolescent.
In different parts of the country art schools arose and national artists were trained. Artists from the Ukraine, 97 Byelorussia, Trans-Caucasia and Central Asia began to make a larger contribution to the treasury of Soviet art.
The works of the Ukrainian artist Krichevsky contain highly expressive figures of new heroes. The image of the emancipated Soviet woman is powerfully and vividly depicted in a poster by the Ukrainian artist Strakhov. In Uzbekistan, P. Benkov created a series of paintings of working women. The Turkmenian artist B. Nurali produced attractive bright compositions in a charmingly naive style. Kakabadze, the Georgian artist, a poet and experimenter in painting, celebrated the landscapes of his native land transformed by the labour of free men. The Latvian artist Klucis moved to Moscow, where he worked enthusiastically, producing revolutionary posters. Azim-zade, an artist with a vivid and succinct style, developed satirical graphic art in Azerbaijan.
All this was the fulfilment of Lenin's great ideas, embodied in the nationalities policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, which spared no efforts or expense to develop culture and art in the peripheral national areas of the former Russian Empire, where people had suffered from a particularly harsh, dual oppression, national as well as social.
Artists of the national art schools made a telling contribution to Soviet artistic Leniniana. In 1924 the Ukrainian Strakhov produced a striking memorial poster to Lenin, which was at once intensely tragic and full of heroic life-assertion. S. Erzya, a talented representative of the small Mordvinian people, worked systematically on the Lenin theme. The eminent Georgian sculptor Nikoladze produced some outstanding works.
Naturally, however, it was the members of the larger Moscow and Leningrad art groups which had highly developed traditions and the experience of numerous well-trained artists, that produced the most works on the Lenin theme.
Major milestones in the development of the Lenin theme were: Alexeyev's monument The Leader Summons (1924), a large marble portrait of Lenin by B. Korolyov (1926), the first monument to Lenin in the city named after him, Leningrad, executed according to designs by Shchuko, Gelfreich and Yevseyev (1926), the second monument in Leningrad (unveiled in 1927) by Kozlov, and the monument at the Zaporozhye Power Station by Shadr (1927).
Of outstanding importance was the continuing intensive
work by Andreyev, who produced several series of large
pictures of the leader commissioned by the Council of People's
Commissars, which were a development of his first
98
B.~Ioganson. Interrogation of Communists
remarkable attempts made under the direct impact of his studies and sketches from life (for example, the sculpture Lenin Writing of 1920).The large sculptural composition Lenin the Leader (1930--1932), completed after the sculptor's death by his brother, was a worthy culmination to Andreyev's Leniniana. First shown to the public at an exhibition in 1933, to mark the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Red Army, one of the most important reviews of Soviet artistic achievement, this monumental work with a high symbolic content immediately came to occupy a place among the classic works of Soviet art.
The figure of the leader is presented in an arrested majestic
movement: his right hand rests on the podium, his left hand
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B. Nurali. Portrait of Khaldji
is thrust in his trouser pocket, and the trunk is drawn up and tilted slightly to the right, following the movement of the head. The face, executed in precise portrait detail and at the same time highly generalised, is truly inspired, and testifies to a strength of character and powerful, vigorous intellect. This is the image of a resolute leader of the revolution and a thinker penetrating the future with his gaze ....This is the interpretation of Lenin towards which Soviet art in general had been tending, as it outgrew the initial phase of thorough documentation and somewhat naive symbolism and allegory, and strove towards more complex, profound and emotionally powerful artistic solutions.
In the mid and late twenties, Brodsky produced his famous compositions Lenin Addressing a Workers' Meeting at the Putilov Works in May 1917 and Lenin Addressing the Farewell Meeting for Red Army. Units Leaving for the Polish Front on May 5, 1920, in which the artist set himself the extremely important task of showing the leader as one with the people. Although not everything in these large, complex canvases satisfies us today---they are somewhat lacking in vitality and expressiveness, and excessive attention is paid to purely documentary aspects---they nevertheless represent an important milestone in the development of Soviet art, which turned to large-scale compositions to give artistic expression to a new understanding of the historical process, one based on a correct evaluation of its motive forces, and to show the historical hero in the right perspective.
Brodsky's Lenin in His Study at Smolny (1930) is one of the best portraits of Lenin. (At this point I shall conclude my brief review of the works of Soviet artists on the Lenin theme, which I brought up to show how a novel aesthetic task was approached by young Soviet art).
The revolutionary humanism of Soviet art is revealed most saliently in the way all its forms are somehow or other associated with the life and work of the people, and its main image is the image of the people, particularly the people as the real makers of history. ``Don't take too many pictures of me, comrade, take them rather of those who will be listening to me, the comrades leaving for the front'', was Lenin's advice to the film cameraman Tisse, and these words express a basic aesthetic idea that inspired all Soviet art.^^1^^
The affirmative spirit of socialist realist art developed and found more perfect aesthetic expression as socialist construction gathered momentum and the triumph of the new social system became increasingly evident.
_-_-_~^^1^^ Reminiscences of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Vol. 2, Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1957, p. 389 (in Russian).
100
A. Samokhvalov. Girl in a Sports Shirt
[101]S. Gerassimov. Siberian Partisans Take the Oath
At the same time the image of the collective came to occupy its legitimate place in the foreground of the art of socialist society.
Gerassimov's fine canvases Siberian Partisans Take the Oath (1932) and Harvest Festival on a Collective Farm (1937), strikingly beautiful with their fresh colours, convey remarkably well the monolithic unity of the people emancipated by the Revolution both in days of severe trials and in happy hours of festivity.
It does not necessarily take a large number of people to make a collective. Art disposes of powerful imagery which enables it to convey the whole through a part, the large through the small. Matveyev's sculptural group October (1927) consists of only three figures---a worker, a peasant and a Red Armyman. But they are extremely capacious images, expressing the quintessence of the life of the people as a whole.
The same applies, indeed more so, to Vera Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farm Girl (1937), a sculpture that became a magnificent symbol of the Soviet land boldly advancing despite all obstacles.
Soviet art was guided by such profound, truthful and
poetically elevated works in its subsequent development. This
development was not without difficulties and mistakes,
but it was marked, ultimately, by grandiose ideological
102
A. Matveyev. October
aesthetic achievements that enriched the treasury of the art of our age.We are accustomed to refer again and again to certain outstanding examples, and tend to forget the important fact that a process of transformation and development of the new has been going on throughout Soviet art, represented by thousands of artists and a vast mass of works. Many of the latter, although by no means masterpieces, nevertheless contain the wonderful charge of new, fresh ideas, and are truly valid aesthetically.
They bring us the typical features of the heroes of our time, fighters for communism. They present in high relief an extremely important feature, the integrity and firmness of an active, energetic and strong character.
This, one need hardly mention, is yet further evidence that humanism is revived and given a new lease of life in Soviet art, for integrity is the supreme indication of the soundness and vigour of the human personality, as Gorky shrewdly noted in his time, remarking caustically on the ``complexity'' of the bourgeois individual: ``Complexity is the sad and ugly result of extreme division of the 'soul' by the conditions of life in petty-bourgeois society, the ceaseless, petty struggle for an advantageous and quiet place in life. Indeed, ' complexity' accounts for the fact that among hundreds of millions we see so few outstanding people, with sharply defined characters, people possessed by a single passion---truly great people.''
The developed socialist realist art is firmly rooted in the facts of socialist construction. This is why in capitalist society even an artist who strives to work according to the socialist realist method, finds it difficult, if not impossible, to create a convincing image of the free collective and express the beauty and mobility of labour drawing on material from the life he sees around him. For the artist working in socialist conditions, on the contrary, socialist society ensures scope for creative search and exploration, enabling him to return to art much that it lost in the past.
The new society makes new demands on the artist. It shows concern for the development of every talent, since it is fully aware of its social value.
I should like to draw the reader's attention to a few examples of the work of non-Soviet artists who are among the outstanding masters of socialist realism.
Ever since the news that socialist revolution in Russia had triumphed spread across the continents, many artists have been attracted by the image of Lenin. In distant Mongolia, 103 where the people were soon to win their own freedom, Marzan Sharav, famous primarily as a traditional artist, although he had already turned to genre subjects and images from the life of the people, soon responded with a portrait of Lenin. This was one of the earliest portraits of the revolutionary leader in world art and one of the most expressive. The artist's poetic fancy ventured boldly beyond the limits of straightforward description. The portrait is treated as a symbol, with subtle use of the elements of lyrical heroisation, such as a strict compositional symmetry and lotus flower ornamentation. The map of the world---a modern feature--- in the background enforces the idea behind the picture (which is called Lenin's Invincible Teaching) and is a symbol of the struggle of the working people of the whole world. This work played a major seminal role in the development of revolutionary art in Mongolia.
A statue, The Steelworker, by the fine sculptor I. Samody, was unveiled not long ago in the new Hungarian industrial town of Dunaujvaros. The freedom and dignity of the steelworker's pose and the thoughtful expression on his face appear even more striking if we compare it with Meunier's Ouvrier puddleur which we have already mentioned. The exalted tenor of this figure of the kind of working man that the new social system produces is quite free of cheap idealisation.
V. Dimitrov-Maistora is a painter universally admired in his native Bulgaria. His unusual vision and representation of nature and people is highly distinctive, his palette is decorative and throbbing with impetuous vitality. His style began to develop long ago but it was only in the conditions of the new society that it acquired realist vigour and completeness. This is fully revealed in The Girl (1952), an extremely harmonious composition, whose fabric is simultaneously tangibly material, and as though ``woven'' out of sunlight.
It would be harder to find a greater contrast to the style of Dimitrov-Maistora than that of Willi Sitte from the GDR. His crowded compositions on modern subjects with their distinct lines and intense colour combinations, often contain sharp dissonances. These are an essential part of the image structure of his works, along with hyperbolisation and spacial distortions, betraying the artist's kinship with the national school which went through a period of ``Gothic apprenticeship'' and tasted the fruits of Expressionism. Indeed, genuine realism does not shun conventional devices justified by the content.
Because of its genuinely humanistic basis, socialist art does not tolerate narrow subject matter and poor artistry. 104
W. Sitte. Calling Along
Everything that interests socialist man, everything that belongs to
the sphere of his activity in life, and that can possibly be of
aesthetic value to him, takes its legitimate place in art:
history and domestic life, nature and things, the tragic and the
comic, the heroic and the mundane, etc. But the
characteristic feature of socialist realism is that it is all dominated by
the idea of transformation, by the sense of historical
perspective possessed by the builders of the new society ``from the
height of the achievement of the present, from the height of
the great goals of the future'' (Maxim Gorky). That is why
105
inertness and flabbiness, morbid introspection and corrosive
scepticism have no place in its presentation of man, and
motifs and moods of decay, destruction and blind submission
to elemental forces have no place in its depiction of nature.
Art is by its very nature elevated and profound, and, above all, humane. It is hostile to the idea of degradation and debasement of man, to casting him down into the slough of horror, anger and frustration, pessimism and despair with life. Is that not indeed why realism is so generally attractive to all people of healthy spirit throughout the world? And surely this is the secret of the exceptional creative power of socialist realism, whose works are close and intelligible to simple people of all countries and nations. These works contain a bright world of human feelings, the finest ideas of human progress, freedom and equality, the ideas of peaceful coexistence between countries and peoples, and peaceful labour.
The triumph of humanism in its supreme and fullest form: such is the idea that lies at the core of socialist realism and which makes it the banner of contemporary artistic progress.
[106] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The New Hero [107] ~ [108]Columns = of grim Red Guards marching out to defend Petrograd; a group of young girls racing up a steep slope; a tender mother nursing her sleeping child; suntanned boys watching enthralled as an aeroplane passes overhead; men of the Black Sea Fleet fighting valiantly for Sebastopol; fisherwomen on the seashore; the makers of spaceships---such is the diversity of themes and subjects in Deyneka's art. Yet for all this variety, his work is characterised by remarkable unity of purpose.
Deyneka is totally immersed in the new, revolutionary reality, and never tires of celebrating the heroic grandeur of the struggle and labour of the Soviet people. He never tires of admiring the beauty, strength and skill of working people, and is acutely sensitive to the rhythms of life born of the new socialist conditions. He is one of those artists who stride along with life.
A characteristic monumental terse style immediately distinguishes a work of his, be it an easel painting, a monumental mural panel, a mosaic or a small drawing. This is not simply a manner of drawing and painting: it derives from a particular vision of things, a system of generalisation of reality in artistic images. Hence the unity of his art, the inimitable ``Deyneka style'', which is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and vigorous phenomena in socialist realist art.
__b_b_b__People were concerned with questions of developing an artistic form appropriate to the new times when Alexander Alexandrovich Deyneka was still a young man, embarking on his artistic career. Nor could it be otherwise, when the field of world history had just been turned up by the great plough of socialist revolution, when the whole atmosphere of life was charged with electricity, when the new revolutionary reality announced at every step that there could be no question of direct borrowing from and continuation of the old. A new social world was in the making and it put forward new aesthetic problems, raised questions to which it was difficult to find the correct answer immediately.
Various Soviet artists searched for this answer along different paths, assimilating in their own way the immortal realist skill of the classics. But their efforts were only crowned with success when an artist had the courage to tackle a contemporary theme.
A work of art is a many-sided, composite but integrated organism. A real work of art is only produced where the artist achieves at least an acceptable minimum of unity of form 109 and content. In the twenties some artists sought such a unity in the direction of insouciant imitation and copying of old museum pieces. They failed to realise that a borrowed form in art is not only usually uncongruous, but constrains, restricts and often distorts the content. There were also others---and these were particularly numerous---who turned to the arsenal of devices of the formalist currents in bourgeois art, making a sincere but misguided attempt to adapt the formal experiments of Cubism, Futurism, Purism, Expressionism and even abstract art, to the aims of the revolution.
It would be dishonest and hypocritical to assert that Deyneka never had anything to do with this stream of misguided seekers. To begin with, he shared some of the ideas propagated by the supporters of ``Art Nouveau'', who reduced the task of reflecting the new, revolutionary reality to producing certain formal devices and absolutised ``dynamism'', ``rhythm'' and economy of the pictorial language. The theories of the Constructivists grouped around the magazine Lef and especially Vyeshch had a definite influence in the formation of such views. One of the programme articles published in the latter, for example, contained this passage: ``We regard the triumph of the Constructivist method as the main feature of our time. We see it in the new economy, and in the development of industry, in the psychology of our contemporaries, and in art.... Any organised work---a building, a poem or a painting---is a functional thing that does not lead people away from life but helps them organise it.... Vyeshch will study the examples of industry, new inventions, the language of conversation and the press, the postures of sports and so on as the actual material for any dedicated master of our day.'' The enthusiastic assertion of the present and defence of the active social role of art, clearly expressed in these lines, is undeniably very attractive. But the minimising of the spiritual, ideological side of art and of its humanistic essence is quite unacceptable.
It was in accordance with these principles that the artists Barshch, Vyalov, Dobrokovsky and others produced several of their works. Immersed in technicality and industrial motifs they often lost emotional interest in man and nature. Their paintings and drawings often remind one of a dry blueprint. In works like Kudryashov's Construction of a Straightforward Movement and Klyun's Works According to the Light and Colour Principle formalist experimentation for its own sake frankly reigned supreme.
Deyneka never indulged in such extremes. But in several of his graphic works of the early twenties, and also of the 110 later period when he belonged to the Society of Easel Painters (SEP), we can clearly discern an interest in abstract industrial constructions, their sharp outlines and a conventional spatial organisation not always compatible with that essential requirement of easel painting, a motif justified by life. Some of his works reveal the influence of Expressionism. The characteristic morbid trenchancy and distortion of form were popular with some of the Society members who saw it as a means of achieving a heightened expressiveness.
The members of this group, mainly young artists who had been trained in the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios (Vkhutemas), were genuinely enthusiastic about the revolutionary processes in life, and sought passionately for ways of asserting the new reality in art. Indeed their creative immaturity and one-sided approach were largely to be attributed to a sincere desire to develop as quickly as possible a new artistic language for expressing the innovations in life.
``Our youth was remarkable: we did not have separate flats, country dachas, cars and other 'objects' of material prosperity,'' wrote one of the members, S. Luchishkin. ``On the other hand, our enthusiasm for life was quite extraordinary! We were interested in everything, roused by everything, and wanted to be in the very heart of events. And we were!
``For us art was a weapon of struggle in the transformation of the old world and the creation of a new one. Even when we resorted to abstract art forms, we were convinced that we were doing something useful, socially necessary (which made it all the easier for us to abandon it when we realised its complete absurdity). The militant vanguard of Soviet art---Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and Meyerhold---possessed our minds and were a model we strove to follow.''
An avid interest in nature and man, and a keen artistic feeling saved Deyneka from aridity and aesthetisation of the base and ugly, and drew him towards the beautiful and sound.
He carried within him impressions of his native countryside, the smells of meadows and forests he had imbibed in his childhood, the chill of the dew, the colours and sounds of folk festivals. ``I now examine my memories,'' he was to write later, ``visual and sensory, recent and of long ago. Suddenly I hear distant but dear voices: my father and mother, the sound of singing from across the river, the mooing of cows, the calm voice of the teacher, an old woman's hopeless, faraway wailing over her dead son .... Then the smell of flowers---the most diverse and subtle smells---come to me, for each flower smells different, just 111 as every kind of apple or currant has its own smell; the outlines of the trees appear, even the birds in the forest, and much, much else besides.''
``I saw genuine gaiety in the poorest of people, the purest love for art in the most simple folk, and a carefree spirit in people living amid danger.'' All this created good conditions for the development of the artist's talent in the right direction. But this was not the main factor. Talent is something one is born with, but one needs the right place, the right conditions for it to develop. Socialist society provided Deyneka with these conditions. But also, unlike some of his fellows in the Society of Easel Painters, he managed to make good use of them, and respond sincerely and happily to the call of the time, the banner of which was revolutionary humanism. ''. . . The Revolution of October 1917 is strong, viable and invincible,'' Lenin wrote in his well-known article ``How to Organise Competition?'' ``because it... breaks down the old impediments, removes the wornout shackles, and leads the working people onto the road of the independent creation of a new = life.''^^1^^
The revolution also firmly led genuine artists' talents on the broad road of creativity.
The story of the artistic formation of any important artist is always instructive in that, whatever artificial obstacles are raised in his path, whatever byways detractors or patrons might push him onto, he will always be drawn irresistibly towards life, seeing its truth and beauty as the supreme measure of art. This was true in the past. But it is doubly true in the conditions of the new revolutionary society.
In this respect Deyneka's artistic career is similar to that of Vera Mukhina, Gerassimov, Mayakovsky and many other masters of Soviet art.
It would be hypocritical to close one's eyes to the influence of Futurism on the young Mayakovsky. Nor have we the right to relinquish his great talent wholly to Futurism. It is essential to take into consideration the basic tendency of his artistic development. He was ``Futuristic'' in his own special way. A great realist talent was gestating in him even at that complex, contradictory period, boldly weighing up and testing all available ways and means of imaginative expression and reflection of life. This is not to say that Futurism taught Mayakovsky a lot, but his later, mature works cannot be fully understood unless we bear in mind the path he had trodden in art.
History does not need improving upon or detracting from, even with the best of intentions: even negative examples _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 409--10.
112 are often instructive, helping us to avoid repeating the same mistakes.Deyneka became gradually more and more disillusioned with the creative practice of the orthodox Easel Painters. His interest in the diversity of human life, his love for the colours and forms of nature could not be crammed into the narrow framework of the ``industrial style'' innovation, for all that the industrial theme occupied much of his attention, being in tune with the voice of the time, which he heard with his keen artist's ear.
Industry became the frontline of the struggle to consolidate the revolution. The period of restoration of the economy ruined in the fire of the Civil War and foreign intervention was coming to a close, and the Party was setting the people's sights on modernisation and reconstruction of industry. Before very long, the First Five Year Plan was to be launched. The newspapers were full of diagrams showing the growth in coal and oil output, and iron and steel production. Skilled industrial workers were in acute demand and factory training schemes with a mass intake of young people were being got under way.
Deyneka's paintings Before Going Down the Mine Shaft (1925) and Building New Workshops (1926) are inseparable from this background of the nation's industry returning to normal and from the spirit of industrialisation that had become a feature of everyday life. In the figures of the miners Deyneka stressed physical strength and in their stocky figures there is none of the smart sportsmanlike quality that was to characterise his future works. They are awkward and rough. Yet dominant in the general emotional atmosphere of the painting is affirmation of the freedom of the working man, and of his straightening up and unconstrained stance. This is achieved not only by the expressive use of dark silhouette against a bright background, and the free disposition of the rhythmically united figures on a broad compositional area, which stresses their independent significance, but also by emphasising the powerful, ``cast'' volume of the central figures. In this respect, too, an essentially new content is achieved as compared to Deyneka's graphic works Donbass or Factory at Kolomenskoye (both 1925), where the motifs of physical exhaustion of the working man and his ``subjugation'' to the machine are constantly in evidence.
The new social features of the Soviet worker are even more evident in Building New Workshops, which is somewhat akin to the monumental poster or mural, the direction in which his individual artistic manner, originally developed in 113 graphic art, was in fact moving. The important thing, however, is that within the particular limits determined by the specific stage he was at in his artistic development, by his taste, sympathies and predilections, Deyneka made a determined effort to achieve a more fully realistic, artistically integrated solution. He was not satisfied with the superficial, albeit vividly effective, image, which his fellow artists were so fond of. While looking back to the poster, he forged ahead towards the many-faceted easel work, to an elevated monumental style.
The renovation of industry is personified in two female figures, depicted against an open-work background of a factory shop in the process of construction. The artist does not present them in a conventional way, in an elevated set pose or in an abstract grand manner. He finds a perfect combination of justified convention and verisimilitude. The powerful figure of the truck hauler pulling the truck and the cheerful working girl are united not only by the rhythm and composition but by live interaction. They seem to be looking at one another and talking to one another. The superbly worked volumes of the bodies (especially the one viewed from behind), combined with the broad, flat decorative planes of the background, introduce an element of spaciousness which can be clearly felt without being obtrusive and distracting attention from what is most important---the two figures.
The deliberate treatment of space ``in the relationship between perfectly flat areas and sharply stressed volume'' (Deyneka) was to remain one of the most interesting and original of Deyneka's expressive devices, deriving, as he himself notes, from the carefully assimilated and adapted experience of the great Russian icon painters. This particular picture, however, also harks back to the realist painting of the Renaissance, and testifies to a striving after a complete plastic characterisation of the people portrayed, in the manner of the classics.
The new society glorified the working man and his works.
Deyneka felt this very keenly. Thus, in his autobiographical
notes we find the following significant statement. ``We are
living in tempestuous times, and many impressions have
fallen to our lot. Perhaps that is why we pay such attention
to man and human dignity. Perhaps here lies the unity of
views, the key to our time.'' This sums up Deyneka's artistic
credo. It explains why, while taking what was best in the
Society of Easel Painters' programme, he officially broke with
the group in 1927. (Several other major artists in the group,
such as Y. Pimenov, who was irresistibly attracted to real life,
114
A. Deyneka. Before Going Damn the Mine Shaft
[115] also outgrew the narrow framework of its aesthetic platform. Indeed, a similar process was to be observed in other artistic groupings of the period.)But art is not a lesson in handwriting. The genuine artist does not work by copying fine models of style. He creates his own inimitable style for expressing his thoughts, his enthusiasms or dissatisfactions. For a long time to come, features of the SEP manner like hard contours, blackness, and sharp colour contrasts, having deeply penetrated Deyneka's style, would make their appearance here and there in his paintings.
His large painting The Defence of Petrograd, that was prominent at the exhibition held to mark the 10th anniversary of the Red Army in 1928, was not free from them either. Nevertheless, it has long since come to occupy its rightful place among the outstanding works of Soviet art. It marked a higher stage in Deyneka's work. Despite certain defects, it impresses one by its powerful cohesion, the ardent affirmation of the main idea, executed clearly and concisely, but not too obviously.
The people have risen up to defend the gains of the revolution and there is no power on earth capable of stopping them---such is the idea clearly expressed in the painting. The contrast between the springy, confident, cheerful step of the column of Red Guards below contrasted with the slow, laboured, sorrowful movement of the wounded passing over the bridge above heightens this effect. In contrasting these two groups imbued with a very different emotional tone Deyneka may well have taken as a model a well-known composition of the Swiss artist Hodler, but he sought after deeper psychological contrast, and a more complex image. His sketch for the work contains more motley details and is too blunt. Below is a column of Red Guards marching in close step, and above an equally numerous group of wounded, with Red Cross cars and a horse. The final version is freed from all superfluous detail, is more monumental and lends itself to broader interpretation. The pace at which the members of the detachment march is varied, introducing a time element: it is as though the ranks of the revolutionary army are being formed out of separate units before our very eyes. The fact that the first two rows carry their rifles at the shoulder, while the others have them slung on their backs, strengthens the impression of the revolutionary detachments gradually growing more disciplined, more of an army unit. The rows of rifles pointing skywards also magnify the figures of the Red Guards, monumentalising them. The composition shows the approach 116 and gradual departure of the columns, enabling one to discern not only the strong profiles, as though cast from metal, but also look into the faces of some of the Red Guards and see their drawn features, their firmly set mouths, and the resolution in their eyes. There is nothing abstract or schematic about the characters. We believe the artist---yes, the defenders of revolutionary Petrograd must have looked just like that---for he has not tried to imagine or ``invent'' anything, but sought to present an accurate reflection of life. He introduced portraits of people who actually took part in those historic events, artistically remoulded. But the fact that life and real people underlie the painting, the fact that the artist even attempted to convey the harsh light of a cold winter's day gives it a special power.
``When thinking of a future painting,'' Deyneka writes, ``I often dream of how excellent it ought to come out. But in the course of work on it, I find that the idea has not found convincing expression, has not become 'a live word' and I haven't achieved what I set out to do. That is why I am for experiment always and in anything .... There are not many eye-witnesses and participants of the October battles of 1917 left now. I am happy the picture The Defence of Petrograd, in which I included a few portraits of actual participants, turned out well.''
It was learning from life and drawing on the eternally fruitful tree of aesthetic joys that determined the consistent and rapid development and consolidation of the realistic principles in Deyneka's work and his emergence as a mature artistic talent.
__b_b_b__The part played in this difficult and complicated process by various objects and real-life motifs to which the artist gives his attention and creative passion can be assessed differently. Some accord pride of place to the sporting themes to which Deyneka was so devoted from the very start, with his love of the plasticity of the vigorous, well-developed human body. Others stress the role of landscape, referring to the great change that occurred in Deyneka's treatment of nature at the beginning of the thirties.
All this, although true, is something of an oversimplification. It would surely be more correct to regard the process of development of socialist realism in Deyneka's art as an integral process, for it was not the study of any particular aspect of life that determined his success. For an artist as versatile as Deyneka, who has tried many styles and even different art forms, a profoundly integrated grasp of life was 117 of primary importance. He took an inquiring interest in man and the new personality forged in the fire of the heroic everydays of socialist construction, combining the features of thinker and sportsman, active citizen and poetic dreamer. A broader assimilation of the artistic heritage also played its part.
In this respect his painting Mother (1932) is a particularly vivid expression of the inner processes that took place in Deyneka's art on the border line between the twenties and thirties. In this work Soviet art took up and continued an evergreen theme of world art, full of inexhaustible humanistic meaning and vibrant with an elevated sense of beauty. Mother and child is a simple, old, yet ever new, symbol of renewal. Deyneka does not avoid everyday life details in his treatment of the theme. The situation itself bespeaks it: the child has fallen asleep in his mother's arms. Yet this is not a genre picture. The image of the mother is aesthetically ennobled and poeticised, and given a supremely monumental meaning. It is majestic and heroic, without being deprived of human warmth, feminine softness and vulnerability. The strong well-formed torso of the suntanned young woman seen from behind, against an olive-green background, the pure profile of her serene face turned tenderly towards her sleeping son, the simplicity and clarity of the whole compositional structure, as indeed of the manner of execution, which is restrained, and tastefully severe, all contributes to the cohesion of the work that conveys the humanism of socialist society where love radiates a heart-warming light.
The intimate lyricism is fused with the ardour of social self-assertion of the new man, a strong, bold person looking fearlessly into the future. Deyneka's Mother is a blood relation of Ryazhsky's Delegate, Samokhvalov's Girl in a Sports Shirt, images of Soviet women, for whom the revolution had opened up a wide road. The image of the young mother emanates the same historical optimism that so charms us in Vera Mukhina's sculptural composition Worker and Collective Farm Girl, a work which expresses most powerfully the innovatory sweep of developed socialist realism, now turned directly to ``the facts of socialist experience'' (Maxim Gorky), whence it derived its strong life-assertive element.
Deyneka's Mother is a monumental work. And not only by virtue of the concentrated, generalised power of the content. The image is also presented in a highly original pictorial manner, by no means coinciding entirely with the traditional devices of easel painting, with its interest in subtle tone arrangement and its technique of moulding the forms out of 118
A. Deyneka. Mother
the colour structure of paint dabs. Deyneka's language is
severe, precise, unadorned, his lines are distinct and executed
in large strokes, and the composition contains an abundance
of planes placed on a single surface: in short, everything
immediately betrays the mind of the monumental artist, who
always clearly sees the smooth wall as the point of departure
and final result of his work. Naturally, this is no accident.
Deyneka with his strong predilection for large forms, strove
after ``walls''. He yearned for an outlet into architecture, in
order to acquire the irreplaceable force of artistic
representation of reality, strengthened by the sweep of organised space
and the power of strictly geometrical architectural volumes.
Deyneka himself admits to being primarily a monumental
artist as far as the main direction of his work is concerned.
The only qualification that need be made to this self--
characterisation is that the main direction is not the only one.
After receiving the opportunity to work in monumental painting and executing a number of monumental decorative panels, ceilings and mosaics in the thirties (a mural for the People's Commissariat for Agriculture, the central panel for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1937, frescoes for Ail-Union Agricultural Exhibition, mosaic ceilings for the 119 Mayakovskaya Station of the Moscow Metro, and others), Deyneka lost none of his interest in easel painting, studies and drawings, and book illustrations. A little later he was to try his hand at sculpture, including decorative sculpture, and also small sculptural works in porcelain and majolica. This is not to be seen as a purely personal feature of Deyneka's creative career, but rather as an expression of a remarkable aesthetic tendency of the new society, which normalised the social role of the artist, freeing art from capitalist market anarchy and the perverted, often non-aesthetic, demands of a small circle of ``clients''. At the same time it was freed from the narrow specialisation that had so often distorted and mutilated artistic talent in the past.
Of course, this general tendency did not make itself felt immediately in practice. It was partly a question of training, of the kind of artistic education art schools had given in the past. Many of the necessary conditions were only to be provided at a much later date, some of them only recently. Here, however, we are speaking of the principle at work. And indeed the work of a number of major artists, Deyneka among them, shows that the tendency to overcome narrow specialisation and isolation of the different forms of art was forcing its way to the surface more and more, although for the time being this was only achieved by very few. Nevertheless, the number of those who extended their field of artistic endeavour grew constantly. Nor were they isolated individuals surrounded by a wall of misunderstanding. The practice of socialist art was setting this very kind of varied and often composite task. This was bound to have a new kind of beneficial effect on the development of artistic talent, which is by its very nature comprehensive and synthetic. Indeed, if we take any of the golden ages of art, we can see that the work of the artist, especially the outstanding artist, was never narrowly specialised.
Deyneka himself wrote on this highly important matter:
``I often wonder why I found myself working in such a variety
of artistic styles and techniques. I feel it was not simply a
quality of my own character, but rather a feature of our time.
New tasks are arising before the country, and new artistic
forms are emerging.'' And further on: ``In a great style, the
boundaries of the major and minor arts are erased, and so
are 'guild' and other features among monumental and easel
artists, portrait and landscape painters. Great art is not
divided into such categories. Which was Vera Mukhina,
a monumental artist or a portrait artist? She was both. It
would be more accurate to say that she was a great
120
A. Deyneka. A Model
sculptor. And what about Michelangelo, was he a sculptor or a painter? Why, he was an artist of the great style of his time.'' Deyneka modestly omits mentioning his own name here, yet he is undoubtedly an artist equally representative of the ``great style'' of our Soviet art.Deyneka's monumental works did not conflict in the slightest with his easel work. There exists a profoundly erroneous interpretation of the specific tasks and features of monumental art. Schematic forms, primitive drawing, conventional 121 colouring, are what some try to present as the features of monumental painting. But one has only to take a close look at Deyneka's monumental work for such misconceptions to be immediately dispelled, for it evinces and asserts fullblooded realist skill.
Let us examine, for example, a few aspects of the ceiling decoration in the restaurant of the Soviet Army Theatre (1937). The architectural and technical conditions for the artist were extremely difficult in this case---a low ceiling above a spacious room, less light falling on the central portion of the ceiling. The artist's task was to paint it with a light-suffused colourful scene in a major key, on a set subject Red Army Men on a Cross-Country Run. In view of all this, it must be recognised that Deyneka was remarkably successful (despite his own highly critical appraisal of the results).
A bright arc of blue summer sky, high and transparent, opens up in the ceiling above the low dark room. Round the edges, on the ground, are the energetic figures of the runners in bright sport dress. The composition is organised in such a way that as we move around the room we pass through the crowd of runners, as it were, and see them running towards us across our path and away from us. A group of girls with an orchard in the background provides a touch of emotional relief to the composition, adding an element of calm, a kind of major chord built on the same tonal pattern as this whole bright epic melody. In the figures cf the runners Deyneka revealed a perfect mastery of portraying the forms of the human body in complex motion. One is struck by the superb sense of rhythm with which the runners are organised into groups and individual figures, inscribed as they are in real space and with necessary elements of plein air, although of course, not impressionistically. The ``three dimensional'', clearly and severely drawn figures of resolute, well-trained sportsmen vividly manifest the special ``Deyneka'' touch and are at the same time typical in many respects of the Soviet concept of the ideal individual, where physical strength is combined with moral purity, will-power and intellect. Deyneka is always averse to brute physical strength alone, but insists on grace and spiritual plenitude.
The same applies to the mosaic ceiling of the Mayakovskaya Station of the Moscow Metro, even where it is not man that is depicted. Here a panorama of the life of the young country unfolds, with all its inspired labour and heroism, beauty and freshness. We can hardly do better than quote the artist himself: ``Thirty-five domes, thirty-five plafonds. 122 What wealth of themes this produces in the mind! A whole series of pictures pass before one in succession: construction sites, tractors and combine harversters working in the collective farm fields, flowering orchards, ripening fruit, planes flying in the skies, young people working heroically and relaxing splendidly, preparing themselves for labour and defence .... Life in the USSR is beating full pulse round the clock.''
That is how the theme ``The Land of Soviets Round the Clock'' took shape. We shall not examine the technical aspects of the work, the complex and absorbing task of ``cutting through'' forty metres of earth with the magic of artistic imagination and giving the viewer a ``way out'' to the sky, how the very technique of smalt mosaic work which had acquired such power and splendour in the hands of the Hellenistic and Byzantine artists had to be resurrected from semioblivion, for the artist himself describes this very well in his book. From My Working Practice. I shall confine myself here to a few words about the ideas and artistic aspects of this multiple monumental cycle. To be more precise, about one basic feature of the artistic execution of the theme: namely, the profound interpenetration of the epic and lyrical elements. Not in all the plafonds are they fused organically enough to produce a noble alloy (this is partly due to the haste with which the sketches were translated into material form). However, in the majority of cases we can speak of ``epic lyric'' or ``lyrical epic'' as forming the ``core'' of the artistic fabric. A happy mother lifts her child up, showing him the sky: powerful planes cut across the blue sky with their powerful propellers, the sky in which a bough with apple blossom is naturally inscribed; the strong, flexible bodies of swimmers diving from a high board are immobilised for an instant against a background of fluffy clouds .... Here is both the scope of wide ranging thought and the heightened lyrical feeling of the artist, perceiving the world through contrasts between large and small, rejoicing in it and affirming it.
Here, too, we cannot do better than quote Deyneka himself, his words eloquently expressing the sharpness of his perception and spearheaded against schematisation, onesidedness and superficiality in an artist's work. Although referring to his work on the murals for the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, they are undoubtedly generally applicable.
``When painting the walls of the Exhibition, I remembered my insignificant landscapes, flowers, sketches, without which I could not, as though without a soul, achieve my huge 123 works.'' We should ascribe the epithet ``insignificant'' entirely to the artist's excessive modesty, and note for ourselves how important in the work of this artist who seems to be able to ``generalise'' reality so easily and simply was attentive study of nature, tireless training of the eye and hand, the absorption of feelings and renewal of the storehouse of his memory. Here are a few extracts from Deyneka's diary notes written during his stay in Sebastopol in 1932: ``I spend hours covering the pages of my sketching pad with illiterate, schoolboy 'sniper' sketches of Dynamo divers, so convincing in their dynamic truth. Every minute a man flies through the air. For an instant the flying silhouette is retained on the retina. The next instant, before the diver's head emerges from the water, I dash off my impression. And I am content and think happily how it will lie organised on the paper, and how the umber shades of the mountains and the turquoise of the cruiser will emerge below the flying man.'' But this is only the material for the artistic image, which cannot be ``copied'' directly from nature. ``The more you draw in the open the more unsteady the planes become, the tone is lost and the details force themselves to the fore.'' He is constantly admonishing himself to generalise individual observations, always striving towards the image from the very start. ``Work should be simple and clear, for what is composition but selecting what is most important and essential. I like to look for a long time and test things, but see immediately, work at one fell swoop.''
It is highly instructive to be given a direct insight into the live flux of the artist's thought, persistently seeking a finished image, the thought transformed into rapid pencil strokes, hurried brush dabs .... The composition of Deyneka's wellknown, extremely popular painting Future Pilots (1937) arose almost immediately. But it took him a long time to find the capricious outline of the strong stone parapet, which contrasts with the changing surface of the sea sparkling in the sunlight, affirming man's power, energy and will, providing a tactfully unobtrusive, heroic background to the three thin suntanned boys who sit with their backs to us, completely absorbed in a seaplane taking off, giving these ``future pilots'', for the time being still young dreamers, a special strength and scale.
The artist collected a great deal of material during his trips abroad in the mid-thirties. Rapid sketches of typical characters among crowds of passers-by in the streets of Rome, Paris and New York alternate with landscape sketches and more detailed, thorough studies in water colour and gouache such 124 as Place de la Concorde, The Seine Embankment, Small Street in Paris and Italian Street. The artist's eye was continually picking out social contrasts that the superficial gaze of the tourist generally skims over. Several times Deyneka returns to the subject of monks in red soutanes and black hats, contrasting them with nature or quiet city back streets. He draws the solid figures of the working men, an eccentric sick old man. Finally, he achieves the ``solution'', and a vivid image, with a strong element of contrast, appears: in the distance, down to the steps (as if into the past) two monks in read are walking, and towards us (into the future) a young worker comes striding confidently along. The composition exists in two versions, one in water-colours the other in oils. The difference between them is slight but significant. In the final version, the oil painting, everything is more severe, the worker's stride is younger, lighter, more springy.
The rhythm of walking, and indeed human movement in general, holds a very important place in Deyneka's work in general. Such is his ability to capture and convey movement, different in each particular case, so entirely effortless does it seem, that it is almost as though nobody had ever tried to do it before him, although this is certainly not the case. What is special about Deyneka, however, is that he was interested in capturing the live dynamics of movement in development. P. Fedotov left behind him an unforgettable series of sketches entitled How People Sit Down. Among Deyneka's American drawings is a series entitled Ski School, where with amazing virtuosity he has captured the unsure, comical movements of the beginners at skiing, young and old.
The accuracy with which the artist conveys the complex movement of the free fall in The Parachutist (1939) is truly amazing. One is reminded of his later work Ace Pilot Shot Down. Here, too, we have man falling through the air. But what a difference between the two! In the first case one feels lightness and abandon, which speak of the happy landing, whereas the latter is pervaded with the despair of the doomed man. In this connection it will not be amiss to recall an interesting pre-war painting of Deyneka's Nikita, the First Russian Pilot, a colourful festive work. It expresses through an historical theme, rare for Deyneka, the artist's keen interest in the sky, in man's conquest of the air, as well as his interest in bold movement.
In looking at Deyneka's Left March (1941) one has the distinct impression of actually ``hearing'' the thud of sailors' boots on the wooden bridge floor, as the first line of men 125 by which the artist has chosen to immortalise the glorious revolutionary cohort of the Red Baltic Fleet, goes marching by.
This skill in conveying the life-like diversity of dynamic movement helped Deyneka to create one of the finest battle scenes in Soviet art. The Defence of Sebastopol. ``I was entirely gripped by the heroism of the defenders of Sebastopol,'' Deyneka recalls. ``The war was raging, and I had just returned from the front near Yukhnovo. It was a harsh winter, the offensive had begun with alternating local successes and fierce battles, when the soldiers left red patches from their wounds in the snow and the snow was blackened by explosions. Nevertheless, I decided to paint The Defence of Sebastopo! for the exhibition, because I loved the town for its cheerful people, sea, boats and aircraft. And I saw in my mind's eye how everything was flying into the air, how the women had stopped laughing and even the children felt what it was like to be under siege. I saw a photograph of Sebastopol from the air in a German newspaper. It was a terrible photograph, not at all like the city I had seen a few years before. In short, my picture and I were merged into one in the process of work. I have completely lost track of this period of my life, it was entirely swallowed up by my one desire to paint the picture.'' He hit on the ``nerve'' of the future work almost immediately in a preliminary pencil sketch---the massive figure of a soldier lobbing a hand-grenade. But a great deal of hard work was required before he reached the final solution and produced an image of unforgettable emotional power, a sailor hurling a bunch of grenades with both hands into the advancing line of fascists, which expressed the feverish rhythm of fierce battle requiring the exertion of every ounce of human strength!
A careful study of the image structure of this work reveals an amazing variety -of episodes closely knit together in a precise construction. This is a sign of the completeness of the work, of great, mature artistry. The picture is equally viewable both as a whole and in its separate parts, in fragments. And throughout, as a golden thread, runs the motif of heroic selfless struggle waged by the Soviet people.
Such outstanding works of Deyneka's as The Edge of Moscow
(1941), permeated by a sense of profound anxiety combined
with firmness and resolution. The Burnt-out Village (1942) with
the tragic smoke-blackened chimneys of the stoves that have
survived the blaze stretching up like charred hands begging for
revenge, and Evening. Patriarch's Ponds. 1941 (1946), one of
the highly expressive series Wartime Moscow, which vividly
126
A. Deyneka. The Defence of Sebastopol
depicts the unquenchable life-force that was present in those already distant days of trial, remain unforgettable artistic documents of wartime.It was surely this same innate love of life, which never abandoned the artist, his unshakable faith in the triumph of life and the Soviet people's victory, that enabled him to create, in 1944, his grand, fresh, life-asserting canvas Sweep. The delightful figures of the young girls running headlong up the steep slope embody the irresistible advance of our armies at the front, the sense that victory is nigh. And when victory did arrive, the artist responded to this historic event not with a pompous canvas in the ``great style'' despite the aesthetic norms connected with the personality cult that were becoming more and more firmly established, and that demanded heavy pomposity. Deyneka produced his outwardly very modest work Berlin. On the Day the Declaration was Signed (a small water-colour with tempera, 1945), which nevertheless is worth many canvases metres long, so powerfully and vividly does it express the triumph of the Soviet people, who went through the fiercest war in history, the supreme joy of victory and anxious reflection on the destiny of the defeated country.
127A student of Deyneka's works is perplexed by a fact which at first sight appears hard to explain. After the abundance of splendid paintings in the prewar, wartime and immediate postwar period, there follows a long lull in his creative output. The artist was kept occupied by several large but uninteresting monumental orders, he continued his usual work on studies, produced a series of still lifes and showed a growing interest in sculpture.
Partly this must be attributed to the need to pause and take stock. But it must also be very largely ascribed to the mounting disapproval with his original style which certain figures in the arts at that time tried to present as lying ``beyond the pale'', outside the ``legitimate'' stylistic bounds of socialist realism.
Deyneka had a new creative upsurge in the mid-fifties, producing two major works in 1956, By the Sea and The Tractor Driver. These paintings represent major milestones on Deyneka's creative path and simultaneously a major contribution to the development of the theme of labour in Soviet art, a theme that is of such fundamental importance in Soviet aesthetics and artistic practice. ``The Tractor Driver, the painting I called Spring, was not at all unexpected for me as regards the character of the composition,'' the artist remarked. ``It was simply the result of many earlier trial efforts. The strength of this picture, anyway, lies not in the composition, but in the warmth of the young frank face of the tractor driver, his calm step, the simple spring landscape, the live bubbling stream, the chorus of birds, and the sense of the future that pervades the whole picture.'' Generally, when artists speak of their works, they fail to separate the idea from the execution, which is why their appraisal of their own works is often so one-sided and subjective. But in this case, one cannot but agree with Deyneka's assessment: he very accurately defined the new element which had burst forth in his ever vital and developing art at the time when the fresh wind of new revolutionary ideas that were so fully and vividly embodied in the decisions of the historic 20th Congress of the CPSU blew into every corner of the life of our society.
The core of the image content of The Tractor Driver is simplicity and humanity, both man and nature looking remarkably unconstrained. The young lad surveys the fields springing to life with an almost naive amazement and healthy youthful excitement overjoyed and a little awed to feel the tremendous strength bubbling forth in nature and himself. And parallel to the high flight of his pure dream the white trail of a plane is written on the limpid spring sky.
A. Deyneka. The Tractor Driver ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ [→]
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[129]
Deyneka continues to seek the large-scale, monumentally severe and clear form, a firm, balanced composition, returning to some of his compositional devices of the prewar years. Yet interest in the diversity of the living environment and in man himself has grown immeasurably compared with the rather conventional, generalised, decorative compositions of the preceding years.
This same protective solicitude for life and lucidity of mature wisdom is also present in By the Sea, where it forms the basis of the unusually attractive pictorial solution. The subject is of epic simplicity: young women are unloading the catch and stringing it up to dry. In the slow, unhurried rhythm of the movements of the strong young figures, in dresses and overalls the artist has embodied the beauty of emancipated labour. Air and light abound in the picture, which seems to emanate impulses of healthy joie de vivre, the idea of happiness, beauty and peace as something perfectly natural and inevitable confidently opposing misfortune, ugliness and violence. The artist does not resort to artificial embellishment of the subject, but poeticises it naturally, embodying in it his love of beauty. That is why the figure of the woman standing far right, with her back to us, has been completely transformed from the rather heavy, clumsy figure in the original sketch from life and acquired the clear, harmonious rhythm of soft, feminine outlines and of a light, graceful step.
At about that time, Deyneka began work on a most important commission: two murals for the Soviet Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair. To convincingly express the substance of the life of Soviet people, the results of their efforts for peace and the achievements of Soviet science and culture was an extremely difficult and multiple task. This inventive, resourceful artist, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of compositional ideas was here, as he himself admits, taxed to the limit. He spent more time and effort on the preliminary work than ever before. It was a year before the sketches on the subject For World Peace and Peaceful Construction were finally selected. Then for two months the artist worked with a team of assistants in the indoor tennis courts at Sokolniki in Moscow to produce the vast monumental decorative panels, eight metres by sixteen, which proved worthy of the Soviet pavilion and received a high award.
Deyneka's pictures of the peaceful working life of the
people are always poetic. He manages to crystallise,
illuminate and assert this poetry in beautiful, harmonious
movement, in the depiction of the supple, athletic bodies, in faces
130
A. Deyneka. By the Sea
full of healthy calm, youth and purity. This has all been evident in his later monumental works---Peaceful Construction (1959), The Dairymaid (1960--1961), and the mural The Conquerors of Space (1961). In the figure of the milkmaid carrying pails full of milk we
feel the regular rhythm of work, despite the fact that she is
depicted as having paused for a moment. It is there in the
position of her legs, the turn of her head, the folds in her
white smock stretched tight over her blooming, young body.
It is also in her young face, slightly guarded and severe, yet
radiant with human happiness and contentment with life.
Large mosaic fragments are used remarkably effectively to
create this rhythmic harmony of surfaces, lines and volumes,
while for the face and hands the artist has used
tiny pieces that reproduce the live flesh as subtly as
paints. Having worked a great deal with mosaics,
Deyneka achieved especially complicated and fine painterly
effects in Peaceful Construction and especially A Fine
131
A. Deyneka. The Dairymaid
Morning, with unforgettable virtuosity of the depiction of the changeable surface of the sea and the live plasticity of tanned bodies, bathed in sunlight.The dairymaid is unmistakably our contemporary. If we recall the young working woman in the artist's early work Building New Workshops, the contrast is quite amazing. In the latter, we have a naive, playful girl who clearly knows very little about life; in the former, an experienced, cultivated working woman, beautiful and graceful. Although no technical appliances are visible near the dairymaid, we nevertheless sense in the measured manner of her movements that here is a person who has long been used to operating rhythmic mechanical devices.
This inner rhythm of the person who has grown up and developed in conditions of scientific and technological progress is very much a feature of the central figures of the panel The Conquerors of Space. The well-built, strong young man and woman, preparing to launch a small rocket are smart in their dress and work. The artist has not attempted an authentic re-creation of the scene of events from a technological point of view. He strives to achieve a symbolic solution. And although the marginal scenes surrounding the central group are, in my opinion, rather over-cluttered with real-life detail, the main idea of the young vigour of the scientific and technological upthrust of the Soviet land is convincingly embodied in the central figures of the work.
It would be a mistake to ignore the fact that science and
technology, which have become such an intrinsic part of the
life of Soviet people today, influence their outlook, lending
it a special kind of objectivity, and create new features and
habits. Suffice it to recall the role and significance of the
cinecamera and the tape recorder. They are not simply
extensions and amplifications of the natural human sensory organs,
but instruments with a powerful impact on man's entire
perception and social behaviour. Naturally, this cannot be
abstracted from social conditions. The cinecamera captures
impartially and accurately not only the most important things,
but all the casual, fortuitous and even superfluous human
movements which we do not normally notice owing to the
generalising and selective nature of our visual perception.
The tape recorder reproduces with equal impartiality and
accuracy the prolixity, pauses and frequent superfluous
interjections littering natural everyday speech. Thus a precise
mechanical copy often becomes a vicious caricature. Both the
cinecamera and the tape recorder in the conditions of socialist
132
A. Deyneka. A Fine Morning
society teach us precision, economy and expressiveness of movement and speech and the simplicity and naturalness that are hallmarks of culture, and which we can sum up in the old word ``grace''.It would be a serious mistake to imagine, for example, that a photograph or the movie film taken from nature without direction and editing contain the fullest possible information about the object or phenomenon represented. A verbatim copy can never be a substitute for the artistic image in which the information is selected, illuminated and concentrated. That is why the following statement by a film and photographic expert is by no means as paradoxical as it might sound: ``The photographic quality, as a passive reproduction of nature, is also alien to art photography. Art photographers themselves are as much against it as painters.''
133Deyneka draws extensively on the experience of photography and film-making, not in the sense of straightforward copying of photographs but for the purpose of developing that special ``photographic vision'', which, in view of the rapid progress made by photography, no artist in the traditional art forms can afford to ignore, since such vision is an organic part of the modern perception, with its heightened interest in the immediate situation, unusual angles, and a free approach to the treatment of space.
Deyneka is extremely successful in capturing many characteristic features of the time. He is fond of both unusual angles and the new rhythm of movements, of placing man in relationship to technology, seeing the two as natural allies and deriving particularly colourful harmonies from associating industrial structures and raw nature.
One of the special merits of Deyneka's works is the way he is always concerned with the broader and highly complex aesthetic problem of representing the new perception, the new outlook of Soviet people who have grown up in the atmosphere of the all-embracing scientific and technological progress of our time.
Many young artists evince an interest in Deyneka's work, and some even frankly try to imitate him, and borrow certain external features of his characteristic style. But very often the substance of his work is not properly appreciated, and even unwittingly minimised. Yet Deyneka's art is highly instructive, and not only by virtue of its modern subject matter and its striking formal devices. It is also instructive in that the artist seeks and finds the way to reveal the inner meaning of our modern age, where the working man has become the master of complex machines, where sport has become a natural requirement and has been ennobled by intellectual interest, where the speeds and rhythms of the time refracted through the prism of social transformations have exerted a powerful impact on the individual's physical and spiritual sphere. Deyneka's heroes are strong, skilful, confident and highly intellectual people. This applies equally to fisherwomen and scientists.
Even in the naked young men resting on the shore (A Fine Morning, 1961), the artist celebrates the power of the superbly cultivated bodies of people for whom physical and spiritual flabbiness, and passive contemplation are totally alien. These are working men, with a fighting spirit and an active approach to life. The same features can be noted in the ice hockey players in his dynamic and extraordinarily colourful mosaic composition, a work which, together with 134 The Danymany, A Fine Morning, and The Red Guard earned Deyneka the Lenin Prize in 1964.
Deyneka is a poet of rationally cultivated physical grace. ``I love sport,'' he writes, ``I can watch runners, pentathlon competitors, swimmers and skiers for hours on end. I have always felt that sport ennobles man, like everything that is beautiful. I like the sportsman's ability to control his will.''
Deyneka is a committed artist. He never simply states something and leaves it at that, but invariably either approves or condemns. He is able to draw attention to things that have come into life and become usual, but which would have amazed people in by-gone centuries, or even a few decades ago. Deyneka is fully immersed in his time and hence is an innovator. But he does not forget what prepared the present. He knows perfectly well, for example, that before the masters of sport in the USSR there were superb athletes immortalised in the statues of Policleto di Coli and Myron. Their experience has gone into his own works as a component element of his plastic vision, his style. He admires the contemporary man with a healthy mind in a healthy body. But he is also well aware, how the great masters of the Renaissance or the great Russian painter A. Ivanov admired the harmoniously developed individual. Michelangelo's athletic figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the powerful biblical characters of Ivanov .... Surely much in Deyneka's mature works comes from this pure spring. In his own characteristic way, he affirms our life as an embodiment of the great experience of all mankind.
__b_b_b__Deyneka's art seems to be extremely straightforward and accessible to all. But it would be wrong to ascribe this valuable quality to a facile, or even ``primitive'' approach, as some of his critics have done. One must not be in a hurry with him, letting the eye skim over the picture or mosaic, although even a cursory glance is sufficient for them to impress themselves in our memories without any apparent effort on our part. But such haste is fraught with danger especially for those who would sail in his wake, thoughtlessly rocking on the steep wave set up by his great, bold talent.
In actual fact, Deyneka's art, representing an important facet of the diverse, multinational art of the USSR, is complicated, subtle and extremely polished. The clarity and vividness of his style, which is so irresistible in his best works, is the fruit of hard, serious and highly intelligent 135 work, a philosophical appreciation of life and consummate artistry.
This mastery did not arise at once, automatically. Behind it, as we have seen, lies a long and difficult path of gradual growth and development of his creative talent along with the development of socialist construction and the creation of the new, socialist culture, a talent that readily tried the most diverse themes and styles in order to find its forte and the most appropriate means for conveying revolutionary reality. Deyneka is bound by the strongest ties of kinship with the life of the revolutionary people, and cannot be conceived of either as a man or as an artist, outside our socialist present. This is indeed Deyneka's strength and joy.
[136] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Work and Days of the People [137] ~ [138]If = an illustration is needed of art that is simple and natural, of the organic link between the artist and the life of his people, the name of Arkady Alexandrovich Plastov immediately comes to mind, so vivid and unassumingly honest is his work, and so firmly rooted in the popular soil.
Plastov is one of those artists for whom work in the confines of the studio is inconceivable, as indeed is work within the narrow sphere of artistic interests and strictly professional problems. His art is wide open to life, to the complicated, hard, and beautiful life of the labouring people, forever renewed and renewing the artist's soul.
Plastov's artistic aims, the ardour and enthusiasm of his work, is dedicated to the working peasantry. It has been so since his childhood. Born in the small village of Prislonikha in Ulyanovsk Region, he has remained true to this day to his love for country life, for his native fields, and the people to whom he is bound by ties of kinship. In the town, as he himself admits, he can merely exist: he can only live and work in the country. He spends almost half the year in his native parts, where he first came to love the customs of simple working folk and their craftsmanship, the sturdy sleighs and painted shaft-bows, such as we see in Surikov's Boyarina Morozova. There too he was reduced to a state of ``sweet torpor'' by the pungent smell of tar and horse sweat, by neighing and the creaking of carts driven by the bearded carters, and by the tales of the old Nanny Stepanovna about Ilya Muromets, Egor the Brave, and Alyonushka and the white weeping stone.
Here, in his own environment, he has found an inexhaustible font of themes and images for his paintings. To the public, the heroes of his works may be anonymous, but in fact they always represent actual people. Indeed, we can sense this and always have the feeling that his characters are ``copied from life'', that they are living people and never ``thought up'' or ``invented''. Not that the artist approaches nature as a verbatim reporter or copyist. He depicts it with passion and delight. His brush does not dwell on small details but sweeps boldly on, moulding rich forms, generalising tones, creating on the canvas a remarkably live and at the same time almost fantastically vibrant symphony of colours---now a summer morning, now a winter's day, now autumnal twilight....
Plastov's art is always optimistic. His very first significant works, painted in the thirties---Harvest Festival on a Collective Farm, Watering the Horses, The Herd---already evinced this organic feature of his talent. Yet it was his profoundly tragic work, Nazi Plane Flew By, that brought Plastov nation-wide fame. It literally stunned people when it was shown at the 139 Great Patriotic War Exhibition in the hard days of 1942, so powerfully, truthfully and sincerely did it convey the profound pain and sorrow of the people for the desecration of their land by the enemy, and for the blood and tears the war had brought. Not that the picture arouses only feelings of sorrow and pain. The senseless brutality of the strafing of a harmless herd of sheep and a little shepherd boy by a nazi plane arouses a burning hatred for the murderers and an impassioned protest against violence and militarism. And it is all the more powerful for the fact that there is nothing exaggerated or forced about the picture, and that it is set as a typical tranquil Russian landscape scene, tinted with the gold and crimson hues of early autumn.
Here was expressed one of the most permanent features of Russian art, deriving from typical traits of the Russian national character---emotional modesty, an innate aversion to violent passions and any kind of affectation. We can recall the extremely subdued expression of feelings in the tragic crowd of streltsi, calmly awaiting death, in Surikov's painting, or the simple and apparently matter-of-fact tone of Tolstoi's dramatic Tales of Sevastopol. We are not suggesting the intrinsic superiority of this feature of character and artistic interpretation. Every nation has its weak and strong features. Here we are simply referring to a deep-rooted characteristic of Russian culture in the broadest sense of the word. The fact that Plastov perfectly naturally and organically manifested this characteristic in his painting is further evidence of his firm inner ties with the Russian national soil.
__b_b_b__With every passing year Plastov's work became more and more powerful, full-blooded, and wide in scope. Nevertheless, poetic presentation of collective farm life and work has remained his chief concern in the postwar period. He only turned to a more tragic theme on one other occasion, but his News from Korea cannot be regarded as a success. However themes in which his life-assertive outlook and boundless optimism could find expression have been invariably successful.
In Haymaking, generous vibrant summer fills the large
canvas: the blazing sun in the warm azure sky, ceaselessly
warming the land, has called to life thick luxuriant grasses and
plants. Four mowers, a young lad, a woman and two bearded
old men, make their way side by side through this exuberant
growth with serious, thoughtful expressions on their faces, for
their work taxes all their strength. Nevertheless, one feels
a sense of joy in them, an emotional uplift from stepping out
into the fields in a bold, comradely advance. This was in 1945,
140
A. Plastov. Nazi Plane Flew By
the year of the Soviet people's victory over fascism, and the artist's joy spilled over in the colours of his painting. ``When i was painting this picture,'' Plastov recalls, ``I was thinking all the time: Now you can rejoice, old boy, rejoice in every leaf, for death is over and life has begun!''But shrewd, sober realist that he is, Plastov does not only celebrate the joy of living. He also notes and conveys its hardships. Thus, his picture shows that the able-bodied are away in the army and it is only women, youngsters and old folk that are left to run things on the land. This fact unobtrusively brings home the realisation of the hardship of life on the home front during the war and is expressively presented in Reaping, painted at about the same time (1945).
141
__CAPTION__
A. Plastov. Reaping.
Like the motif in the preceding work, here, too, the artist had been thoroughly acquainted with his subject since childhood, and the image had long matured in his imagination and cried out to be transposed to the canvas. But as is often the case in art, it took a small detail, a small impulse, for the idea to assume reality and the artist's hand to stretch impatiently towards the canvas. One day he actually saw the scene he had dreamed of, saw it in a reaped brown field, beneath a grey autumnal sky. And, as he recalls, he immediately made a thumbnail sketch. Then followed a water-colour version, and finally he began work on a large canvas. Many were nonplussed and could not understand what the artist saw in the subject: an old man with his grandchildren having a meal in the field. It seemed static, prosaic and quite dull. While hostile critics added that it was not even contemporary.
What remarkable terms ``contemporary'' and ``not contemporary'' are! And what free and facile use is often made of them in aesthetic polemics! How hard, how painfully hard it is for art to find its way to the ``contemporary'', overcoming the fetters of tradition with its firm roots in the distant and not so distant past. Yet how freely and easily, too easily sometimes, the ``contemporary'' makes its way into art. How is it that these apparently mutually exclusive situations arise? It is because the contemporary itself is complex and contradictory, like a limbo between past and future. It contains a great deal that is fortuitous, temporary and superficial, but which attracts attention, while what is truly profound and fundamental, is hard to perceive because the necessary time lapse is lacking and history has not yet made its wise choice. That is why so often art theorists and artists solve the problem of, say, artistic reflection in our own time, so simply, by emphasising its outward features in concrete objects of everyday life, dress and people's appearance, in landscapes, etc. These are, of course, important, but only where associated with new features of character, human relationships, new fruits on the evergreen tree of knowledge, new outlook in general. Indeed, there are cases when there is no need for the outward tokens, since it is more important to show the new in profound and basic things than to up and put a fashionable tie on the purely traditional hero, borrowed straight from the past, or to put fashionable spectacles on him, this dreary attribute of the ``intellectual''. For a time the new does not feel the need to break external form, developing slowly deep down and putting out roots and shoots. But it does not thereby cease to be new. This is where the artist needs real perspicacity and wisdom.
142A. Plastov. Haymaking
Plastov concentrates on the manifestations of life that occur deep down below the surface, although he does not ignore external features where they are necessary. In Reaping they appear to be entirely lacking, but the artist's mind and hand was guided by the desire to show life truthfully, as it really is, and when all is said and done, the victory was his.
Plastov is no champion of the petty truth of the individual fact, but he searches to achieve the great universal truth of life. His large, monumental canvas spoke forcefully of the power and indestructibility of life and expressed the artist's poetic reflections of the fortitude and stamina of Russian people, their ability to overcome the most severe hardships and privations. In the ``spunky old man'', to use the artist's own words, he expressed ``stubborn, unyielding Russia, which finds a way out of any situation, and resolves any task that history sets''. Here it was clearly not a question of indulging in memories of the past, still less of celebrating the old patriarchal ``peasant Russia''. The painting is entirely contemporary. For only in Soviet times did the peasant finally come into his own as a producer of great wealth and really come to feel that he was master of the fruits of his labours, a real citizen. It is this new perception of the world that accounts for calm, confident atmosphere and monumental grandeur of the painting. And although Plastov might be presenting bearded old men, who, 143 as regards their external appearance, might have come straight out of the paintings of Perov, Myasoyedov or Savitsky, the discriminating viewer will always feel in his best ``old men'' a decidedly different emotional tone, producing a completely different ``pictorial music'' that is in harmony with our time.
The paintings I shall proceed to discuss continue the line of Plastov's achievements, and show excellently coordinated composition, and a clear and powerful imagination at work. They are Kolkhoz Threshing Floor (1949) and Tractor Drivers at Supper (1951), undoubtedly the most important of Plastov's numerous works of the forties and fifties. However, they had a less fortunate fate than Reaping and Haymaking (1945), and did not immediately come to occupy their rightful place among the classics of Soviet painting. No doubt it is the pure truth of these pictures that is to ``blame'' here, which, in the period when views and evaluations associated with the false tendencies of the personality cult were prevalent, was often taken by some as a mistaken, one-sided concern with details. Plastov's paintings were often compared (unfavourably) with Yablonskaya's Grain. Without wishing to detract from this highly poetic work, I must say that it is indeed through such a comparison that the special merits of Plastov's paintings stand out particularly saliently. His pictures celebrate peasant labour, but while dealing with its more cheerful side they also present it as serious, strenuous work. The process of labour as depicted in Plastov's paintings often reminds one of a heated battle, and a pause in the work, of a rest after battle.
As soon as we look at Kolkhoz Threshing Floor our attention is drawn to a red patch in the middle, the shirt of the man who carts the sheaves. Flushed from hard work and the heat, he is drinking thirstily from a bucket held up for him by a small lad. We do not see the face of this powerful man, but we can feel that he is a person who is not only hard-working but ``raring to go'', as it were. He has only stopped work for a moment. Everything about him burns with the heat and passion of intense toil, and he is in a hurry to drink so that the water is splashing down his chest---hurry, hurry, there's no time to be lost in the busy season! The picture expresses the idea of the ardour of selfless labour, the new, collective kind of labour. There are many people in the picture, and all of them throb with the same passion for work in the battle for the harvest. Further back, another man strains under the weight of the sheaves on his pitchfork as he feeds them into the hopper of the threshing machine, to the right women are rapidly cutting the binders round the sheaves, while further away others are working busily by the threshing machine. The truthful 144 picturesque depiction of a hot August day, with scorching sunlight making the heavy sheaves shine gold, also helps to convey this important content.
Time was when certain critics totally rejected this fine work, dismissing it with the curious assertion that it only showed ``how invitingly cool was the water splashing in the bucket on a hot summer's day''. This testifies to an amazing blindness to the essential quality of the work (which is rare even today)---an authentic depiction of the busy season on the land, of the thrill of hectic work.
The picture includes machinery, which (although insufficiently as yet) had taken a place in collective farm life, but these inanimate objects are ``humanised'' by the general poetic feeling pervading the picture and we are shown the beauty of machinery. This factor does not find sufficient expression in the works of Soviet artists to this day. Many of them are still excessively concerned with the beauty of the so-called ``unspoiled nature'' and refuse to see poetry in the instruments of human labour---the most poetic and human of all man's activities. Indeed, the inclusion of machinery and other industrial elements is often regarded by them as ``blasphemous''. Yet this fear of ``marring poetry with prose'' is quite unwarranted. The important thing is that everything should be in its rightful place, and in the necessary measure.
This is naturally not to say that it is wrong to produce works where machinery is for some reason not shown. Agricultural work is a special kind of work. No matter how well supplied with mechanical equipment, and thereby brought closer to industrial work, it nevertheless retains its fundamental quality of being concerned with live organisms---plants and animals--- and revealing man's close ties with nature. The warm, freshly ploughed soil, smoking slightly with moisture, the expanse of fresh green meadows, golden corn fields, and the sky, now grey and gloomy, now radiant with sunlight---all this is part of the environment of agricultural labour, its essential element. And all this contains powerful aesthetic-emotional elements, which it would be absurd to ignore, even were it possible.
``Nature cannot contradict man, if man does not contradict its laws,'' Herzen remarked. Love of nature is perfectly in accord with love and respect for man and his works, given a human measure of evaluation. Moreover, only the artist who knows and appreciates nature as the natural environment of his life and work can really capture its human aspect.
Plastov held this view of nature as an equal partner in work from his very early years. As a result, in his paintings people and nature form a remarkably harmonious whole.
145Tractor Drivers at Supper is also a very fine work. The subject is different: not ardent toil but rest, a break for supper. Yet the idea is the same, the idea of hard, but enjoyable work. The labour theme is expressed indirectly, as through the folk saying ``he eats for two men and works for four''. The faces of the elderly tractor driver and his young assistant reflect satisfaction in a good job well done, healthy exhaustion and the impatience to satisfy the good appetite they have worked up.
This work, like the preceding one, gave rise at the time to talk of ``Impressionist tendencies'' in Plastov's work. There is no denying that Plastov has long been familiar with the Impressionists, and greatly admires them. There is nothing surprising about this, just as there is nothing reprehensible in it. After all, the emotional, colourful painting of the Impressionists was a notable stage in 19th century European art. In point of fact, however, Plastov's colourful canvas is in complete contrast to the Impressionist approach to painting. Impressionism is characterised by an attempt to capture the fleeting moment, to represent the flux and change of life's phenomena, whereas Plastov is primarily concerned with showing what is essential and deeply rooted in the soil of life.
Undoubtedly, Plastov drew on the plein air achievements of the Impressionists but here too it is necessary to see their real place in the structure of his painting, and especially his colour scheme, which is quite modest since the artist is concerned not with the transitional nature of the motif he is depicting, which was the main thing that interested Impressionists.
Plastov's paintings refute the contention that an image in painting has an individual visual impact sufficient unto itself, and cannot be regarded in terms of the true diversity of life.
His best works are suffused with life, full of not only visual images but the smell of the soil, grass, plants and flowers and hot metal, the tinkling of icicles, the laughter of young girls, the flowing melodies of an accordion, the sensation of the wind and warm sun's rays, in short, they encompass much of the real diversity of nature and human activity which realist art never ignores, although it cannot convey it directly. Art always has this wealth of life in view, striving after truth, trying to achieve the veracity of the image that forces the spectator to implicitly believe the artist and go along with him accepting both his warm feeling, his love or repugnance, and his bold, inquiring thought about life and people, their affairs, accomplishments, plans and hopes.
146A. Plastov. Tractor Drivers at Supper
This is not to be taken as a call for naturalism, which reveals its inferiority and impotence even in the purely expressive sphere, since in setting out to show life in all its diversity it invariably finds itself stuck with the individual isolated object that is incapable of serving as a vehicle for transmitting the dynamics of life, the process. The naturalist image is therefore sterile. We meet such tendencies quite frequently in the works of contemporary artists, who are even popular with the less discriminating public. For them the aesthetic element is largely 147 associated with the actual motif portrayed, and they make no attempt to expand upon it, strengthen and illuminate it by the magic of art.
Contemporary art is moving along numerous paths towards clarity and precision of form in conveying a rich content, inspired with powerful thought and conviction. This is true of Korin's rugged style, Saryan's graceful forms, and Deyneka's monumentality. But very often attempts are made to achieve this clarity on the path of over-simplification and schematisation, as a result of which painting is transformed into a kind of large-scale illuminated graphic art. In some cases, such works are admittedly quite effective, displaying fine technique and meaningful content. But one is assailed by the nagging question: is the artist wise and justified in so constraining himself? Why should we renounce the wealth accumulated by so many generations of enthusiastic, hard-working artists, some great, some small, especially as it is fraught with the gravest dangers for art? Can one and should one rejoice that some artist, usually unexperienced, has suddenly struck out into ``innovation'' of this sort, when instead of artistically eloquent economy we are offered something very approximate, meagre and flat. The strength, integrity and beauty of pictorial form is a means of easel painting that produces the strongest aesthetic impact.
And it must be said that many of Plastov's paintings are an excellent example of this. The powerful, and at the same time gentle moulding of the forms in Tractor Drivers at Supper is impressive even in a reproduction. In the original it is quite remarkable. The sure energetic brush work is quite striking. One has a perfectly tangible impression of the warm, damp soil recently upturned by the plough. The old brown grass of the year before and the fresh green blades seem to be done at a stroke, yellow and blue patches combine smoothly to convey the young girl's white gown. The heavy stream of thick cool milk pouring from the jug is done quite differently, in broad, slow, oily strokes. How much poetry is contained in the orange-red globe of the setting sun. And the sultry air, and the solemn silence of boundless space, which is not violated by the tractor standing some distance away, its motor quietly chugging. From all this emanates the extraordinary beauty and power of genuine art, of true artistry.
What is the source of this artistry? That is a question that is asked by many young artists today who are searching for the road to great art. The experience of artists like Plastov helps us to understand the age-old truth, which some are only too keen to forget, that the source of artistry is study of life 148
A. Plastov. Spring. At the Bathhouse
[149]
A. Plastov. By the Spring
and nature, study that is at once passionate and sober, enthusiastic and reflective. Plastov himself wrote: ``I am perfectly convinced that however much of a born master of colour or texture you might be, you must always go to Mother Nature lor advice, to the truth of the environment, and patiently listen a hundred times to what she has to tell you and reveal to you, and it will always pay.'' This is the credo of a convinced realist. The path it invites you to take is not easy. But it is the only one on which true accomplishments, important achievements, genuine discoveries are possible, where he who seeks will find.Almost all Plastov's paintings represent some sort of aesthetic discovery. It may be of greater or lesser importance, it may be more or less artistically complete, and more or less internally integrated, for art can never advance in a smooth upward curve. But the important thing is that each one of them confronts us with remarkable real-life material and gives us a certain aesthetic attitude to it.
One has only to recall what a stir his painting Spring. At the Bathhouse (The Old Village) (1954) caused. The new pharisees were shocked by the nude motif. Various other accusations of a more serious nature were made against the artist, although they seem quite absurd to us today. At one discussion of the painting somebody even said that it was insulting to the Russian people and was not ``patriotic''. Which is singularly irrelevant to the subject in question. Plastov saw nothing negative in the primitiveness of the old way of life. Nor was criticism the purpose of his work, which was concerned with the beauty and health of his people, which was always powerfully present, despite all the hardships of their life in the past. In the strong, well-built body of the young woman who is tying the shawl on the little girl after her bath, out in the cold, one feels such an inexhaustible reserve of energy and strength that it fears neither frost and wind, nor hard work and privation. Its graceful, fresh forms are like the poem to the triumph of life. Indeed, the whole bright atmosphere of the picture conspires to strengthen this impression. The only criticism made at the time which is possibly valid is that from the point of view of colour the figure of the woman does not fit in well with the plein air solution of the background. We feel the effect of studio lighting, and the pearl and rosy tones of her body look rather contrived.
In the slightly earlier By the Spring, a smiling, gentle work, full of summer sunshine, on the other hand, we have amazing artistic integrity. It is a contemplative work, which comes as something of a surprise after all his energetic, lively canvases. 150
A. Plastov. Noon
Plastov himself speaks of excessive tribute to contemplation
here, but we must surely ascribe this to an excessively critical
approach to his own work, for nature must be contemplated,
too. It is an important human need to contemplate not only in
order to perceive its often hidden and unmanifest beauty, but
also to listen to oneself, acquire the necessary balance and
collect one's strength. In short, it is a good idea to contemplate
the world every now and then, while remaining in one's spirit
an active transformer of it. To observe how the spider weaves
its web in a ray of sunlight, or how the timid squirrel turns
its head nervously this way or that and then streaks up the
tree trunk into its hole, how the scudding clouds are reflected
in the still waters of a pond, how a stream of pure spring
water glitters like a flow of diamonds, pouring into the bucket
placed below it.
A light-footed girl, staring into the spring, is an enchanting image of youth, suddenly pausing to reflect on simple, eternally repeated and unexpectedly complicated things. Perhaps they are to do with her falling in love for the first time. Let us rather turn our attention to something else---in what perfect harmony a human being is with its surroundings, and how benevolent nature is to it. This is a fundamental 151 feature of Plastov's view of life. He is an extremely positive artist and his element is never tragedy or conflict in any form at all.
This no doubt explains his aversion to everything that smacks of ``the sublime'' and theatricality. There is never any posing and artifice in the characters in his pictures. The facial expressions, movements and gestures are all natural and unassuming. The artist had to have seen a thousand times in life and properly appreciated the careful, restrained and dignified gesture of the old man dipping his spoon into the stew to later convey it so simply and expressively on the canvas (Reaping). He had to have observed a thousand times the determined, almost awed manner in which the peasant cuts a slice of bread, holding the knife towards him, to convey this in Tractor Drivers at Supper. He had to have seen a thousand times how gracefully a bare-footed girl carries a yoke with full pails on it, how the peasant treasures every drop of cool clear water on a hot day, to convey so poetically and truthfully the simplicity of man's relationship with nature, their living together in harmony, as we see in the painting Noon (1961).
There does not seem to be anything poetic about the actual subject itself---a man and a woman, exhausted from travelling on a motor bike, have stopped to refresh themselves at a well. Yet the painting is like a song to life! Everything is transformed by the poetic brush wielded by an artist in whom a passionate soul rejoices. The rich succulent grass is bathed in waves of warm air, suffused with sunlight. The sky generously casts its deep blue on the water of the well, and the woman's dress and the man's vest are bathed with blue and breathe freshness.
The earlier work Potato Picking (1956) was also an aesthetic discovery, the result of numerous observations of life, in which the artist returns once again to his beloved theme of farm labour. The fact that farm work is usually exhausting and extremely hard is never masked by Plastov behind decorative trappings, yet he manages to find in the work itself, as already .noted, its aesthetic component so to speak, its fine human substance (although a feature of the new socialist conditions, it nevertheless remains outside the traditional interests of many trained artists).
In Plastov's image structure we find echoes of another
outstanding painter of peasants and their labours, the French
painter Millet. A consistent realist, Millet attempted to present
a comprehensive picture of French peasant life in his time,
neither overlooking nor playing up its darker aspects. ``In the
Woman Going to Draw Water,'' he wrote in a letter in 1860,
152
A. Plastov. Potato Picking
``I tried to show that she was not a water-carrier, or even a servant, but a woman going to draw water for the house, for soup, for her husband and children. That she should not seem to be carrying any greater or less weight than the bucket's full... I wanted her to do her work good-naturedly and simply, without thinking anything about it---as if it were a part of her daily labour, the habit of her = life.''^^1^^In the bent figure of the elderly peasant woman in Plastov's painting, too, there are years of habit. The habitual movements of the big work-soiled hands are sorting the freshly dug-up pink potatoes. But the painting speaks of a different perception of life both in the artist and the person portrayed. There is not a trace in her of the sense of monotony of village life which pervades Millet's painting. Indeed, Millet actually wrote: ``I want the people I represent to look as if they belonged to _-_-_
~^^1^^ Jean-Francois Millet, Peasant and Painter, London, 1881, p. 141.
153 their station, and as if their imaginations could not conceive of their ever being anything = else.''^^1^^ Plastov in his picture affirms the idea of life's variety. Hence, the complex rhythmic pattern the figures form, for despite the sharp curve of the central figure, there is an abundance of vertical lines in the picture that neutralise it. The fragments of figures above and to the side introduce the motif of an ``extending field of vision''. The spectator automatically relates the scene in the picture to a wider panorama of Soviet country life and associates it with other aspects of work on the land. Unlike Millet's characters, we can always imagine Plastov's characters in a variety of situations, apart from the one depicted. The young woman on the left, also picking potatoes now, might well have worked in the farm office in the morning and be going to make an appearance at the social club in the evening. One can quite well imagine her driving a tractor or at the wheel of any machine. Nor has the older woman ``a hopelessly earthbound'' rhythm--- the yellow, white and blue tones in her dress are not fortuitous, and help interrupt the basic rhythm of the outlines.Plastov does not like using models, to which some artists are so addicted, usually the kind who have never been closer to real country life than a visit to a country villa or a short trip to the country on business. Plastov is interested in a different kind of nature, far more gratifying for the artist, incomparably richer in poetry and the beauty of life itself. Of course, he does not dispense entirely with ``staging'', he sets volunteer helpers compositional assignments, and they are delighted to perform his, as he himself admits, often very difficult tasks. But, to begin with, these assignments are never at odds with their ordinary life experience and habits, and, secondly, they are enthusiastic volunteers, not professionals, which explains how Plastov achieves such a remarkable freshness and naturalness, as though his pictures were a window suddenly flung wide open onto life, an impression his best works invariably give.
One cannot imagine The Nemlyweds having been painted using models. It would have been impossible for a start to find such highly original yet at the same time highly characteristic types and quite out of the question to rehearse and inculcate the exuberance of the young man with the accordion and the somewhat flirtatious, arch admiration of the young woman--- strong yet subtle feelings, with which both these morally and physically healthy young people are overflowing. This can only be taken direct from life and even then only with a firm, sure, but extremely careful and sensitive hand, and, before that, with the heart.
_-_-_~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 142.
154
A. Plastov. Girl with a Bicycle
[155]Thought means a great deal in art but not for its own sake. And however cautious we are of contrasting thought and feeling, and mind and heart in art (which is excessively stressed in some theoretical articles and statements), it must be said of Plastov's art that the heart occupies a very important place in it. And this adds a great warmth to his work, be it drawings or book illustrations, among them his illustrations for Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don, portraits or subject paintings.
The artist's heart, eternal seat of love! What a tender, sensitive, responsive and wise instrument it is! Sometimes it alone is able to remove the veil of idle opinions and break the shell of hardened mistrust, the inveterate fear of discovering what lies in the deepest recesses of the soul. Belinsky was right when he said: ``Love is often mistaken, seeing in the beloved object that which is not there... but sometimes only love is capable of revealing in it beauty or greatness that is inaccessible to observation and reason.''
This determines Plastov's special style as a portraitist, a side of his versatile talent that was revealed particularly powerfully in the late fifties when the artist produced an extensive portrait gallery of Prislonikha locals. His portraits are always ``flattering'', although he does not depart from his principle of honestly presenting things as they are. Sometimes the portrait, like the concrete figures in his paintings, is masked by a general name. At first sight it is simply a type, but this first impression is soon dispelled on a closer inspection. Take Girl with a Bicycle, for example, where there can be no doubt at all that this is not ``any'' girl in ``any'' scene, but a very vivid picture of a particular person. Indeed, the artist himself set out to produce a portrait and not a country ``type''.
We cannot say that she is a beauty, but she is extremely
charming. And not because she is an ideal person, an ``angel
incarnate''. Nothing could be further from Plastov's art than
this kind of approach. He does not idealise what he portrays,
and this girl is by no means a contrived positive hero. The
artist frankly presents the whole truth about a person. Yes,
this girl, whose swarthy face and whose simple red blouse and
blue headscarf are transformed by the artist into a magnificent
piece of painting, strides firmly across the ground. Her hands,
accustomed to the roughest work, firmly grip the handlebars of
the bicycle, and her slightly frowning face is not distinguished
by fine features. One feels, moreover, that her speech is not
particularly refined either. What is it then that makes her so
wholly attractive? It is the integrity which Gorky insisted must
be found in man, lamenting that it had become extremely rare
156
A Plastov. Portrait of Vanyushe Repin
under the shattering impact of capitalism. And man needs it, for it gives him clarity and strength. Although the girl in Plastov's painting is not entirely free of coarse features, she is not coarsened and primitive. On the contrary, the attractive facets of her nature are brought out quite distinctly. An insuperable vitality and strength of character can be clearly felt in her, a keen mind, a fierce chaste feminine pride, and at the same time a latent love for unrestrained gaiety ready to burst forth at any time, a love for dancing until she drops, saucy jokes, and singing into which she puts all her heart and soul.There is nothing idealised about the figure of the old wise Gulyayev or the young Vanyusha Repin, looking inquiringly at the world (the images of children in Plastov's works are a special and fascinating subject, in analysing which one could say a great deal about his special interpretation of the factors that mould character in a particular environment). Their portraits are not a prosaic copy of life, but a passionate search of the genuinely human and fine, though perhaps not as completely polished and finished as we might like it to be.
The stableboy Pyotr Tonshin is no invented ideal hero either. But what powerful goodness and strength radiate from his open face and manly figure, enveloped in a vast, shaggy sheepskin coat. He is just like one of the heroes of old straight out of a folk tale. Yet there is no mistaking it---he is our contemporary all right! With his understandable human weaknesses but also his bold, frank gaze and his firm, kindly character. Not simply a cog in a wheel, but a real creator and master of life.
I remember an incident that occurred during the Exhibition of Russian and Soviet Art in London in 1958. It was on the eve of the opening, in the dim, austere rooms of the Royal Academy of Art. The paintings were already hung and the rooms were tidied and ready. We exhibition workers and organisers were making a first tour of inspection with the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Wheeler. We came to Plastov's Kolkhoz Threshing Floor, flooded with light from the arc lamps resplendent with the gold of ripe wheat, gay and cheerful. What a truly Russian picture it is! How magnificently it harmonised with the big icon Three Prophets visible through the long enfilade of rooms and equally resplendent with gold and cinnabar. Sir Charles Wheeler stood in front of the picture for a long time, gazing spellbound for the nth time. Right from the start Plastov's manner had greatly impressed him. Finally he spoke groping for words, to explain how much art of this sort, realism, gives a person and how he could now understand from this picture how the Russian people had managed to 157 withstand so much in the war and win through. People who can work as enthusiastically as that are not easy to subdue. He said he was most impressed with Plastov. I remembered the words of this wise, elderly and exacting artist, and I remember how happy I was to hear it said, both for Plastov's sake and because they showed how exactly the idea, the meaning in his superb work is understood by the most diverse people, including those who are far removed from us in social habits and political views. This is because the realist image irresistibly attracts and convinces with its truth. And it does not admit misinterpretation. It is at the same time many-faceted and definite. It quivers and vibrates with shades of meaning, bearing all the variety of life and yet at the same time is integrated and clear. Plastov's works are yet further evidence that only from life and his national soil can an artist draw the vitalising juices that he transforms into the bright flowers of art.
[158] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Beauty of the World [159] ~ [160]Art = is hard, exhausting work. But it is work that brings joy. Without joy, work is torture, and artistic work is meaningless, becoming a tedious drudgery. Joy is what gives work wings. It increases the artist's powers beyond measure, giving him boldness, confidence and daring, and an extraordinary lightness in the treatment of material, indeed, all that is generally called artistry.
Nor is it a question of the complexity of technical tasks. True artistry is often to be recognised in the apparently most simple means and limited technical possibilities being elevated to a supreme level (one has but to recall Paganini playing on one G~string).
Often an attempt is made to dress up vacuity in the splendid attire of sophisticated, complicated and whimsical ``technique'' that is completely unwarranted and not justified by the subject. True artistry is fine because it is natural and organic. It is born as a hymn to the beauty of man's humanity, or to nature subdued by human labour and by the human mind.
``Painting is not a verbose art, and that, in my opinion, is its considerable merit,'' Delacroix remarked. He was referring to the fact that the modest painterly image may conceal a highly rich content, a multitude of shades of feelings and impressions. If the main, characteristic features are presented truthfully, the picture will live and reveal the essential details to the spectator, even though they may be only hinted at. If this is not a universal truth, Saryan's paintings are evidence that its sphere of influence is pretty extensive. When Saryan's style was still in the process of formation, and various, often very dissimilar, influences, traditions and creative ideas were being fused in his work, when in the crucible of his artistic search the decorative discoveries of Serov's later years, Vasnetsov's monumental idiom, the splendid colour of Korovin, and the experience of the French Post-Impressionists, Gauguin and Matisse, were all being melted down and compounded, as well as the colour system of the Eastern miniature, his art was even inclined to make certain sacrifices in order to prove its truth. His characteristic laconism was often bought at a high price. Sometimes the chill of stylisation, albeit moderated by a bold youthful temperament, emanated from the artistic image. In his later works too, the artist is sometimes too engrossed in narrow professional problems. But this only applies to a few of them: the basic tendency in his artistic development was towards strengthening ties with life, the urge to grasp and express its real beauty and poetry. The artist's soul was opened more and more to life and never tired of 161 thrilling to the beauty produced by nature itself and created by the skilful hands of man.
The works of Martiros Sergeyevich Saryan immediately exert a great attractive power. Some are attracted by the characteristic motifs---bright flowers and fruits, the white walls of houses in a southern town, the radiant sky, sunscorchcd earth, luxuriant green vegetation, and majestic peaks. Others are impressed by the artist's characteristic vision, his inimitable ``touch'', the ineffable charm of his artistry. It is quite possible to adopt another approach to his art, too: to derive pleasure from the jug of clear water, scooped from a powerful stream, without noting its turbulent, wilful course, the scenery on its picturesque banks. But we have long since ceased to be satisfied with such a one-sided approach to art, which can easily lead one along a mistaken path.
One can only perceive the grandeur of an aesthetic achievement or understand the reason for a failure when one has comprehended the artist's outlook, the special features of his aesthetic views and the distinctive aspects of his skill in an integrated form.
Great art is not created in divorce from reality. It never breaks with the soil of life. It imbibes the thoughts, feelings, views, concepts and dreams of the people, it is the crossroads, the focus of the ideological, moral and aesthetic currents which compound social life.
But great art is not only a vivid reproduction of life, with all its intertwining developments, various undercurrents and layers. It is also reflection on life, the affirmation of this, the condemnation of that, it is also a challenge, and a dream. The artist is a creator. His hands produce not a double, not a reduced or enlarged likeness of reality, but its condensation, in which everything bears the reflection of the artist's ardent feeling and inquisitive mind.
To begin with, it seems very easy to enter Saryan's artistic world! It seems to look out at one with an open, welcoming gaze from his canvases, beckoning us with its bright, vivid colours. Even a single painting, taken on its own, radiates a joyous, festive air, and when there are a lot of them together (as was the case at the large exhibition held in Moscow in June 1965, the most complete exhibition of his works) they create an elevated, jubilant atmosphere, which refreshes and, I would even say, rejuvenates those who view them. But this impression is increased hundredfold when we make a certain effort to rise above simple, naive contemplation and to reflect, to consider our impressions, and try and divine the thoughts, judgements, dreams and poetic feelings that the artist himself was filled 162 with, advancing deliberately along the stony path through the land of beauty in the master's wake. Then we discover something else.
The simplicity of Saryan's art is deceptive. Like all great simplicity it is really very complex. His art charms us with its artistry, the apparent ease of what must in fact have demanded extremely hard work, the wisdom of the tireless explorer and transformer of life.
Saryan's talent might well have developed along a very different path. He might, like many of his fellow students at the Moscow Art School (which he entered in 1897) have been attracted to misguided, pretentious complexity or impoverished simplicity. But even at that time his heart was always fired by love for realities, and this love protected him later, too, from the aesthetic extremes of the time, enabling him to hold out in that difficult period of mass preoccupation with sterile but fashionable trends. Of course, this was partly thanks to the fine realist training he had received under Serov and Korovin, and his personal subscription to the great tradition of Russian realism, which had by then added many a glorious page to the history of world art.
How often, however, this proves to be insufficient, and we find an artist unable to rise beyond conscientious imitation and epigonism. In order to be a continuator of fine traditions, the artist must not be fettered by them, he must have the courage not only to reject the obsolete but to leave to others what does not correspond to his own particular gift. The process of coming to terms with himself and really finding his own voice is of inestimable importance for the artist. Saryan took a broad view, even at the early stage of his artistic career, both of the past and the present, and he began early on to feel out the direction in which he was to lay his own original artistic road. He was not drawn in the slightest towards the art of social criticism, and the dramatic conflicts of the age did not appeal to him. He felt his vocation was to affirm beauty, to arouse in people a desire for what is fine, for a better world.
He was irresistibly drawn towards beauty. But he felt and understood beauty differently from the delicate, refined and rather faded, autumnal beauty of many works of the World of Art group, at whose exhibitions the young Saryan often had works displayed. Nor was his beauty quite the same as that towards which the Blue Rose artists aspired, with their dreamlike, visionary canvases, where reality lost much of its material clarity and was suffused with the gentle, tender shades of fanciful dreams. He did not reject this conception of beauty entirely, but the power of his love for reality was too strong to permit 163 him to abandon himself entirely to the world of dreams. The chromatic wealth of the Knave of Diamond artists might have attracted him, had it not been for their rather vulgar and coarse exuberance and their enthusiasm for the flesh to the extent of debasing thought, and in many cases aesthetic feeling itself. For, even at this early stage, Saryan greatly prized these components of art, having inherited the artistry of Korovin and Serov and their sense of proportion.
Saryan's talent is of a harmonious cast. But there are many different paths to harmony, and indeed it may be based on very different principles. The harmony of classical Antiquity was in many ways synonymous with ignorance of the contradictions in the world, although the Greeks, while elevating and glorifying calm, spiritual balance, the ``ethos'', realised that the path towards it lay through struggle with the base, the gloomy and evil. In the years of Saryan's artistic formation, harmony, that supreme aesthetic quality of art, embodying the noble idea of the triumph of good, light and truth, was greatly undermined by artistic practice and the whole social system of developed capitalist society.
Art is inconceivable without an elevated aesthetic ideal. It surrounds some things with an aura of beauty and condemns other things, as the case may be. Bourgeois Salon Naturalism, being supposedly impartial and indiscriminate, nevertheless affirmed trivial accommodation, celebrated comfortable indifference, tasteless pomp and exotic opulence, as the aesthetic equivalent of the supreme value of the bourgeois world--- capital. Vacillating between rejection of the bourgeois and service to it, modernism made an astonishing tolerance of ugliness its basic aesthetic credo and opened wide the doors of art to physical and moral decadence, motifs of decay and decline, composing its weird hymns and odes to sterility and unbelief, immorality and violence. In the process, the actual expressive devices of painting, the very laws of artistic creation were often violated, distorted, eviscerated and made nonsense of.
If one looks calmly and soberly at historical truth, one is
bound to admit that even the great art of critical realism, with
its immortal contribution to human culture, was unable to
break out of the historical orbit of its time and largely reflected
the sharpest historical contradictions of capitalism. While being
extraordinary powerful and innovatory in investigating the
hidden mainsprings of social life in exposing social evils and
showing broken characters and lives, while highly effective in
its social, civic criticism, only in comparatively rare instances
did it achieve the power of affirmation and direct celebration
164
M. Saryan. Mules Laden with Hay
of beauty. This was only natural, for beauty was being driven out of life and for many artists its future seemed extremely dim.Criticism of ugliness, for all the historical necessity of this phase in the artistic development of mankind, was inevitably attended by the cluttering of the aesthetic sphere by various elements that had no real place there and could only be temporary, all kinds of everyday trivia, the shattered remains of ``evil genii'' broken by the hammer of irony and sarcasm, the tawdry tinsel attire of pseudo heroes, and trickles of rouge and powder washed from the wanton faces and bodies of the mercenaries of capital.
This is indeed why the aesthetic experience of the artists of classical Antiquity and the Renaissance stands so high, why their art, containing the ennobling light of beauty and harmony, is one of the most important and irreplaceable sources of the art of Communism.
The harmony which Saryan sought was not, and could not be, the harmony of the ancients, for he was a man of the twentieth century, who clearly saw and knew the world with its real cruel contradictions. But its sources lay in Antiquity, for it was thence, across the ages, that his own time inherited a passionate poetic dream of the norms of human life and faith 165 in man's noble purpose. Many aspired to this. Suffice it to recall, for example, the canvases of Zinaida Serebryakova of the first decade of the century, in which modest, mundane real life motifs are moulded by the artist's life-assertive talent into splendid, harmonious images (that are miraculously in accord with this distant future---our own time). Saryan was a master at portraying people (how expressive, for example, is his early pencil portrait of his brother [1900] or the portrait of the poet Myasnikyan [1909], classic in its graphic completeness and inner heroically moulded quality), but he was primarily interested in nature and the material world in which man lives. This was not only due to the dictate of his own particular talent. In nature as such the artist sought a firm support for harmony, being not yet quite clear as to the means of its achievement in social life. Later, when he saw his way ahead here, the natural environment was to receive a very different aesthetic interpretation.
In the initial stage of his artistic biography, Saryan produced images in which the thrill of immediate delight in the lifegiving power of nature was combined with a rather naive dream of beauty, existing somewhere in a ``pure form'', as though ``parallel'' to the life of man. And this was to leave a special mark on his works at that time, although right from the start the ingenuousness of so-called ``naive'' or ``primitive'' art (such as that of Henri Rousseau, which received such exalted praise from some art critics of the day) was quite foreign to Saryan's talent.
The aesthetic complex in Saryan's work is as though sifted
through an intellectual ``sieve'', on which only the larger
particles are caught. The forms are faceted in large surfaces, placed
in clear, almost posterlike, applique contrast, the colour is
cleansed of haze and vibration of shades. Eastern motifs are
treated, however, not in terms of the exotic, as often is the
case, entertaining the philistine with a fantastic motley of
bizarre colours and forms. They stand before us as images of
a special world, real, yet almost fairytale, where clarity, purity
and grandeur reign supreme. Such, for example, are the famous
pasteboards of the Constantinople and Egyptian series (1910
and 1911). Saryan was never, in fact, to become a genre
painter. He was never particularly interested as an artist in
the material features, domestic environment or moral
atmosphere of everyday life and its conflicts. But these early works
are quite devoid of genre features. Although people are present
in many of them, it is only as part of the general artistic
ensemble. Depicting a Constantinople street scene at noon, the
artist is interested not in the features of everyday life but the
166
M. Saryan. The Date-Palm
[167] harmonious line of the blue-shadowed verticals of the houses extending into the distance, with the brightly illuminated edges of the roofs, and the exciting contrast between the deep blue of the sky and the bright yellow road, with the dark figures of a few passers-by. These are not conventional signs or ciphers of people, Saryan accurately represents their characteristic appearance and the rhythm of their movements. But that is all: search in vain for any everyday features. The artist was pursuing another aim here, that of creating an image to convey the idea of the harmony of life. This is also the artistic charm of The Date-Palm, in the centre of which stands a magnificent fruit-bearing tree, straight and majestic, with the little figures of slow, unhurried people below it. In the foreground, like some strange exotic plant, rises the head of a camel on its long neck. And once again we have a harmonious contrast between bright blue, blue-green, yellow and rusty brown tones, which has a very real basis but is aesthetically revealed, decoratively heightened, sharpened and enlarged in accordance with the poetic aim of affirming the world of harmony and beauty. The decorative use of colour as a characteristic means of
organising a work was to become one of Saryan's favourite and
most effective devices. But it, too, was to change as his mature
talent responded to the sharp historical changes of the time.
The compositional features of his work were also to undergo
considerable modification, although the artist was always
drawn towards simplicity in organising the main patches and
lines, and a clear balanced structure of Lhe whole. Another
essential feature of Saryan's style is the absence of a direct
``access'' to the picture. Saryan invites us to look attentively
at his picture but never draws us into it. He always makes us
feel the intellectual nature of the artistic image, sense a distance
between reality and the represented world. In his early works
(due to his general conception of the image) this often led to
a contrast between them. The artistic world has become
a beautiful fairytale decoration, as it were, an almost unreal
setting where it is hard to imagine human life going on. This
is the case, for instance, with Night. Egypt, with the ghostly
moonlight and black shadows, which is like a stage set the
characters of some fantastic play might suddenly come running
on at any moment. Or Constantinople Dogs, where the animals,
although drawn on a large scale and seemingly close to us,
are, moreover within the limits of the ordinary as a motif;
at the same time the whole structure of the picture suggests
something out of the ordinary. And the viewer cannot simply
``walk into'' this unusual world. The strange creatures,
rhythmically placed, casting bright blue shadows, seem to
168
M. Saryan. Lady in a Mask
form a precisely organised decorative relief, into which no paths lead.Such a conception of the painted image was not characteristic of classical easel painting, the channel in which many leading Russian painters expressed their innovatory ideas for many, many years. The picture as a kind of ``spatial breach'' or window on to an imaginary world convincingly recreated was an approach we find in the works of Repin, Surikov, Levitan, Arkhipov, Serov, Kustodiyev, and so on. It was an essential feature of their work as primarily critical realists, interested in the intersection of social and personal life, and the real circumstances surrounding people. But when they were setting themselves a different task, they turned to other kinds of 169 picture, as did Serov, for example, in his Rape of Europe, or Nausicaa. The same generalised decorative type of easel painting, more suitable for embodying the poetic dream, was cultivated in those years by Rerikh. Several artists in the West, too, among them Gauguin and Matisse, expressed their creative ideas in this pictorial form. Without attempting to examine here their talented, interesting and undoubtedly contradictory work, I shall simply confine myself to noting that the valuable side of their artistic experience (as indeed of other talented Post-Impressionists) was firm rejection of the petty ``dictate of reality'' (which celebrated its destructive triumph in bourgeois Salon Naturalism) and defence of the conception of art as aesthetic evaluation and the artist as creator and transformer of life upheld by the realist classics.
Saryan was familiar with the works of these artists but it would be wrong to draw the hasty conclusion that there was a direct parallel between his art and theirs, for a certain similarity ought not to blind us to quite considerable differences. Gauguin, who sought the land of ``pink reveries'', is often tragic, even in his Tahitian paintings. A touch of scepticism is to be felt in the vividly decorative canvases of Matisse, if only in the not infrequent ``liberation'' of the representation from the essential features of reality, which transforms them into subjective conventional signs.
Saryan is more optimistic and more stable, his view of the world is clearer, wider and more humane. It can safely be said that this was due to the broader social basis of his art, and contact with the soil of Armenian culture, which he began to feel his kinship with from his first visit to Armenia in 1901.
It is highly indicative that when the great storm of the October Revolution swept the country, cleansing the atmosphere of Transcaucasia, too, and the Armenian people acquired a real socialist homeland, Saryan went to live in Yerevan and began to play an active part in public life (he was Director of the State Museum, and the first Chairman of the Armenian Fine Arts Society). The real creative activities of his own people now provided a firm support for his poetic dreams of harmony, illuminating them with the unfailing light of historical truth.
A great talent always has many facets. It never sticks in the rut of a single style or form. But certain social conditions are necessary for all its potentialities to blossom. Soviet Armenia tenderly and carefully nursed Saryan's talent, which waxed greatly in strength in the new conditions, in his free native land. Without losing his originality, without departing from his special devotion to the world of nature, the artist now painted 170
M. Saryan. Portrait of the Poet Alexander Tsaturyan
many very interesting portraits, worked on book illustrations
and stage sets, and tried his hand at historical subjects.
The new revolutionary life not only enriched his art from the point of view of subject matter. The ``firm support for his poetic dreams'' mentioned above influenced the very flesh of his art, the image fabric, basically transforming its structure. The artist remains faithful to his bent, and continues as before his constant search for beauty and harmony. But he now finds them close at hand, right beside him, in the land of his ancestors that has acquired its freedom. It requires sensitivity to note them, an attentive and loving eye to discern what is 171 half concealed behind the screen of the future, and the deft, strong hand of the master to express what is seen and felt vividly, accurately and movingly. But Saryan possesses these three qualities in abundance. His art sings the glory of a happy land and the people who transform it according to truly human laws, the laws of beauty, and become great themselves in the process.
One of Saryan's interesting and characteristic pre-- revolutionary works is his portrait of the poet Alexander Tsaturyan (1915). It is colourful and highly decorative, but this cannot conceal the restrained tragedy of the image. This is felt not only in the thoughtful sorrowful expression of the poet's handsome face, but the figure also produces a sensation of constraint, the sensation that it is cramped and hampered from taking independent action, which the artist has expressed tersely but vividly in the structure of the image, presented in a severe, almost schematic outline and wrought statically, as though ``thrust'' into the surface of the painting. The portrait of the poet Egishe Charents (1923) produces an entirely different impression, although here, too, the face bears the imprint of sorrowful reflections and his eyes contain great repressed pain. Moreover, beside his face is a decorative tragic mask, leaving us in no doubt as to the nature of his Muse. Nevertheless, he is presented as a free agent, which is suggested by the bold angular fragmentation of the figure, the subtle, but powerful, three-dimensioned modelling of the face (especially striking against the flat colour bands of the background). Another important new feature is the democratic nature of the image: it is as though we had casually dropped in on the poet in a moment of intense creative concentration.
The world of the portrait subject is united by much firmer and more diverse ties with the real world of the spectator. It is not so much that more external features of reality are let in and that the representation of man becomes more capacious and greater attention is devoted to characteristic details (especially in pencil portraits). It is something more basic and profound: man is aesthetically interpreted as a maker, actively interfering in the environment. There is no longer any need for the heroic stylisation that Saryan had at one time resorted to in order to ennoble the image of man and remove him from the trivia of everyday life. To the same end he had at one time made use of ironic grotesque, sharpening the unusual nature of the situation, motif or the angle from which the model is viewed. Portrait of S.~I. Dimshits (better known as Lady in a Mask, 1913) is remarkable in this respect. The human image in this apparently impetuous, exuberant work, with its bright
M. Saryan. Armenia ~ ~ →
172
[173]
oranges and reds, contains an element of inner anxiety,
fragility and the impermanence of the masque ball character,
whose costume ``life'' is confined within narrow temporal limits.
Now the artist adopts a very different device, which extends
the time limits of the image, as it were, and produces the
awareness of the smooth flux of time, the essential harmony of
the relationship between the new man and the new life (Lusik
Saryan. Triple Portrait, 1935). But even where he is still doing
the traditional kind of portrait, Saryan seeks and stresses in
man his active nature, reveals his intellectual flame, that now
burns bright and steady with a constant supply of ``oxygen''.
In this ``key'' he produced a large gallery of portrait paintings
and drawings of leading figures in Armenian and Soviet culture,
including the poet Noannisyan (1926), Academician Tamanyan
(1933), the architect Toramanyan (1934), M. Abegyan (1935),
Avetik Isaakyan (1940), Academician Orbeli (1943), the
composer Khachaturyan, the poet Lozinsky (1944), and many
others.
One easily recognises the famous actor Ruben Simonov, for Saryan has accurately captured the characteristic traits of his virile, plastic face (1940). But this is something more than a portrayal of an individual, interesting and vivid though he may be,- here we have a typical example of the contemporary Soviet intellectual. We see Simonov ensconced in a comfortable armchair, yet everything about him contradicts passiveness, relaxation, and cosy leisure. His face and figure exude restless energy, and his eyes burn with keen thought and passion. A wide spectrum of artistic means all combine to produce this special effect: the energetic fragmentation of the figure, the sure, light and distinct brush work, the rapid and elegant moulding of the forms, the elastic rhythm of the lines and patches. The colour scheme of the work also merits attention. We have already spoken earlier of Saryan's preference for decorative use of colour as an expressive device. Here, too, the colour tones are festive and lively, put on massively, without excessive breaking down and detalisation, and strikingly contrasted. The figure is placed against the background of a bright decorative cloth with a flower pattern. But the purpose is not simply to create a cheerful atmosphere. Like everything else with Saryan, this decorative fabric has an important semantic function: it contrasts with the white of the shirt and thus heightens the emotional tone of the image, providing an outlet for the actor's colourful temperament. In Saryan's own words: ``The material served as a kind of additional key to the investigation of the spiritual organisation of the man. It helped stress the features of his artistic nature.''
174M. Saryan. Portrait of Egishe Charents
Continuing on the subject of decorativeness, Saryan rejected a narrow and flat ``ornamental'' interpretation of this important painterly device: ``Decorativeness is sometimes understood here simply as an attempt to 'adorn' the canvas. Yet graceful form, vividness and the discovery of new colour combinations---all this, I repeat, is a medium. And it is subordinate to the main thing, the meaning of the work.''
The decorativeness of Saryan's canvases derives from a fusion of nature and poetry. His colours are inspired. He does not make use of coarse, ``material'' colour, speculative ``local colour'' or impressionistic blurred, fragmented, changeable shades. He is concerned with extracting from nature the colour harmony it contains and cleansing it of incidental foreign bodies and dissonances. In this Saryan is a careful but original follower of the colour method of Korovin and Serov.
We can discern the natural origins of Saryan's colour in his most refined and vivid decorative constructions. Only at first glance, and that a superficial one, can his famous painting My Family (1929) be taken for a free colour improvisation. The extremely beautiful, subtle hues---pale pinks, quiet greens and lilac-blues---are by no means arbitrary. Both in their 175 selection and their distribution on the surface of the canvas, the artist took into consideration the laws of natural colour, the relationships between auxiliary colour hues and their spatial distribution (it is no accident that the foreground is done in darker, heavier tones, while further away, in the wall, we have restrained pink and yellow hues).
But Saryan would not be Saryan if he were only concerned with this. Pushing off from the real-life motifs, forms and colours, he creates an original, inimitable artistic world. In this family portrait, too, we are confronted with something more than an ordinary domestic scene. The individual characteristics and traits of each of the subjects have been captured faithfully and, at the same time, their images are endowed with a special kind of spiritual ``stability''. Not that we find in them the timeless, static quality of ancient Egyptian portraits or icon painting. The faces and figures of Saryan's wife and children have a relaxed, natural air about them, are soft and plastic. But he stresses the moral balance attained, the calm and harmony. And indeed all the means at his disposal serve this end---the beautiful, somewhat subdued colours, the appropriate degree of flattening of the forms, the clearly discernible rhythmic organisation of the lines and patches. Here, too, Saryan uses his favourite device---the inclusion of a decorative mask in the portrait composition, as a key to the emotional tone of the picture (here, it personifies ``grace'' itself).
Yet the mask is also a graphic affirmation of the idea of art as the aesthetic conversion of reality. The Muse-mask in Saryan's self-portrait (1933) has a serene face, while the face of the artist himself is marked by the hardships and worries assailing an artist gazing penetratingly at life, investigating, and reflecting on what he sees there. To transform into the harmony of art the motley colours and diversity of the phenomena of life, and to reveal their inner meaning---surely this is the priceless essence of the creative act?
I have been discussing Saryan's portraits, an important part of his work, especially since the revolution. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, despite the great versatility of his talent, he reveals his original qualities most fully in landscapes and still lifes. Not that Saryan is at all ``blind'' to man. He sees him alright, and as we have been able to note, he can present him strikingly, sharply and profoundly. The reason lies rather in a preference for synthetic images containing a poetic fusion of dream and reality, for the symbol embodying what is stable in the flux of life, what is powerful and eternally renewed. In the soul of every poet, the landscapes of his native land have the quality of tremendous permanent value, which, as Gaea to 176
M. Saryan. Portrait of Ruben Simonov
Antaeus, gives him strength, consoles and encourages him,
charms him and calls him forward. Armenia is a land of
contrasts, a land of lofty mountains, steep rocky roads up
ancient passes, and of fertile valleys, a land with civilisation
stretching far back into the mists of time, a land devastated
again and again, and brought back to life by its people who
have now made it flourish as never before. Here man and
nature do not coexist. In order to survive here man had to
177
compete with the elements and triumph over them. And love for
nature here acquires a special shade of human self-affirmation.
Saryan never ascribed to the view of a mood landscape, where nature acquires a sensitive quivering ``soul'' obediently responding to the questioning calls of the artisf s heart. Nor does he seek an impressionistic changeability of forms and colours, excluding a clear poetic meaning and purpose. For he had aspired to such clarity from the very earliest period of his work. In his mature years he began to search even more intensely for simple, clear landscape motifs, and the new social situation led him onto the path of broad synthetic generalisations.
Having witnessed heart-rending scenes of the devastation and havoc wrought in his country during his visit to Armenia in 1915, Sarvan was now eager to create a generalised image of his reborn nomeland. The result was Armenia (1923), which is attractive in its bold artistic imagination, and the freedom with which the artist handles the natural motifs to create a pleasant rhythmic decorative ``spectacle''. However, this work is still too frankly conventional. Nature is excessively organised and systematised, producing the impression of cold rationalism, which was also to affect several later works where Saryan showed a preference for this method of constructing a generalised image.
But the main course of development of his landscape work was to be in a different direction, towards the synthetic image emerging from a concrete, real motif, a ``portrait'' of a particular landscape. An important milestone was the painting Mountains (1923), in which the decorative quality is built on a real basis that is immediately apparent to any unbiased observer. The bright patches of the fields, the yellow and green mountainsides, the rows of luxuriant trees, all is placed in a particular spatial channel coordinated with the real-life motif with which the foreground scene of oxen pulling a plough is also connected. It does not merely enliven the landscape, like the inclusion of real-life elements in Armenia. Here man enters the world of nature as its conqueror and transformer, and nature proudly displays the various marks of man's labours--- roads and houses, cultivated fields, lovingly tended orchards--- like a beautiful woman wears jewelry. This was to become a characteristic feature of Saryan's landscapes.
Saryan loved working out of doors, and admited that painting from nature was his greatest pleasure. He felt perfectly happy overcoming the difficulties of changing light, when blue shadows appear in the place of bright patches, and the wind comes up, often carrying dust, and he had to hurry, working 178
M. Saryan. My Family
rapidly and intensely. Only an artist who loves life to the point
of self-oblivion can keep his high emotional pitch in these
conditions and sing with the same clear, pure voice and
maintain the same technical standards as in the studio.
Despite the great variety of themes and motifs in Saryan's landscapes, it is easy to spot a number of firm favourites with him. He was a past master at painting the picturesque corners 179 of an old town, blossoming fruit trees in the orchard, a bridge over a mountain stream, a part of the rocky shore of deep blue Lake Sevan, lit by the setting sun. He was also fond of doing the odd industrial landscape, and was indeed the author of one of the most popular industrial landscapes in Soviet art. The Alaverdy Copper Works (1935). Again and again he returned to the town panorama, scrutinising the new as it took an ever deeper and more permanent root. As frequently he turned to a country landscape of an epic nature, a grand panorama, with the majestic peaks of Ararat and Aragats as the background, with green, lovingly cultivated valleys spreading at their foot.
His large canvas Old Yerevan (1928) is a bright, sunny picture, imbued with the languor of a scorching summer's day. The low flat-roofed houses cling to the ground, casting dark blue shadows, people go slowly about their business, and donkeys drag along with heads hung wearily. A year later the artist returned to the same motif. We have the same summer's day, with the same scorching sun, and the same houses casting the same blue shadows. In actual fact, however, they have changed somehow, and the whole tone of the view is different. It is as though everything has risen and straightened itself up. The angle of vision is different: the panorama is wider, and vertical lines thrust upwards in the buildings more strongly. The trees, too, have a kind of springy, more bouncy rhythm about them, human life seems better organised, and, as a symbol of the new, we have a small, cheerful group of Young Pioneers, marching vigorously to the beating of a drum, led by a standard-bearer. He seems to express the new energetic rhythm of life (The Old and the Brand-New, 1929).
Quite different is the rhythmic drawing in the extremely interesting Ashkhabad cycle, for example, A Collective Farmers' Yard in Ashkhabad (1934). It is highly whimsical, yet, here, too, we are aware of an undercurrent of life's plenitude, of the springs of popular energy released. We also find this where Saryan either omits man altogether or only includes him as an auxiliary characteristic feature of his native national landscape, as in Ararat (1947) or Poplars with Ararat in the Background (1955), and others, the artist conveying the new in our life through the actual forms of nature.
In Ararat from Dvin (1952) or Ararat from Byurakan (1957)
the artist puts the spectator ``face to face'' with nature. The
broad expanse and the mighty upthrust of the mountain range
seems calculated to strike the imagination, to impress man with
a feeling of awe and a sense of his own ``minuteness''. Yet this
does not in fact happen. In Saryan's landscapes quite different
notes sound, and they produce quite different feelings in those
180
M. Saryan. My Patio
that contemplate them---a surge of energy, and pride in man. These landscapes are heroic in tone, and they also arouse admiration for the accuracy and apparent facility with which the artist has mastered the most complicated subject and for the boldness with which he stares at the stern face of millennial elemental forces.Just think how many details such a landscape contains in reality and how difficult it is to select from among them those that are most typical and characteristic in order to produce an integrated, synthetic image, that is both veracious and elevated! It is so easy to get over-engrossed in petty details and slide down the unproductive path of schematisation and simplification of the image. Saryan tried this path once, but eventually became convinced of its limitations.
The Ararat Valley from Dvin (1952) is one of Saryan's finest landscapes, an outstanding example of the way the artisf s eye accurately ``combs'' a vast area, and his hand deftly ``builds up'' this space on the canvas. One involuntarily recalls the landscapes of Alexander Ivanov, with their rare fusion of objective veracity and restrained poetic delight. Saryan presents numerous interesting details, but they are all in their place, all reduced to a ``common denominator''---submitted to a precise spatial and colour rhythm, which encompasses the whole picture producing a feeling of extraordinary clarity, organisation and harmony, without in any way impinging on inner freedom and naturalness.
The role of rhythm is extremely important in Saryan's image structure in general. Lines, surfaces, volumes, colour patches, are all submitted to a strict organising principle, despite the highly emotional nature of his art. His rhythm is rather special. It pulsates, as though breathing. All the time one feels echoes of the present. For the rhythm of Saryan's canvases is always uplifting, taut and precise, like the rhythm of a well-trained heart, the rhythm of a powerful, skilful hand, of a keen, observant eye always trained straight at the object, the rhythm of rapid, ramified but logically developing thought.
His landscapes are distinguished by a constancy of mood, life-assertive clarity, the boldness and resolve of a fearless investigator. They always emanate, too, a poetic sense of the grandeur, power and beauty of nature. The people living in such a land must be giants. And these people are always present in his work, and together with them we boldly scale steep slopes, look down precipices and gaze into the infinite blue sky. Saryan is fond of choosing a high angle of vision, from which broad vistas open up, and this is one of the features of his heroic humanism. In the artist's own words: ``Man rises 181 above the earth in order to better apprehend it.'' And in this he is echoing the humanists of the Renaissance who loved to consider landscapes from high places, seeing nature as though spread out at their feet. Collective Farm at the Village of Karinj in the Tumanyan Mountains (1952), characteristic of his later landscape cycle, is in fact appealing in its poetic sense of harmony between man and nature achieved as a result of man's bold, unremitting struggle with blind elemental forces. And in this lies the peculiar historicism of Saryan's landscapes.
Saryan's painting is poetic philosophy, reflection and meditation on the world, intellectual encompassment of reality in artistic form. And this even in such specific style of painting as the still life, where the sensory delight of the world of things is always brought to the fore for us to admire it. In depicting some luscious southern fruits or bright flowers, the artist is naturally inviting us to delight in their sensual charm, but he also takes us further, into reflection on the vital power of nature, the perfection of its life-giving ``mechanism'', which man must make wise use of, without primitive barbarity, without upsetting its subtle organisation. The complicated, graceful rhythm and decorative artistry of Saryan's still lifes constantly remind us of this. Especially rich in this respect is Flowers of Armenia. To the Armenians Who Took Part in the Great Patriotic War (1945), where the artist has generously filled the canvas with an abundance of different garden and wild flowers, which make one vast colourful carpet. This unusual painting is like an exultant song to victory, at once solemn and extremely modest. The flowers stand in simple glass jars, and are themselves devoid of intrusive ``prettiness'' and cheap splendour. Really valuable things are never gaudy, and with its superb colour combinations, subtle decorative qualities, and the clarity and harmony of an extremely intricate, whimsical rhythm of lines and forms, this picture is truly exceptional, even among Saryan's works. As a special tribute to the Soviet people's victory over fascism, it is unique.
Even where the world of concrete objects of the still life does not actually involve nature, as in Still Life (1925), where the centre is occupied by Eastern household objects, Saryan is interested not in the material element for its own sake, but in the natural proportions and harmony of the forms and colours of the objects, their internal rhythm, that is correlated with rational, bright and beautiful human life.
Saryan's art also reveals its contemporary quality in the intellectual content of the image, which includes subtle, accurate analysis and simultaneously a synthesis of sensual perceptions and intricate, multi-levelled concepts, in the conceptual element 182
M. Saryan. Fruit of the Rocky Slopes of Mount Aragats
of the portrait, landscape or still life. It uplifts, distracts from
petty details, and activises the spectator's intellectual,
emotional and volitional complex.
According to Saryan the artist's mission is not simply to give pleasure, but to educate through pleasure, to fortify and elevate people's spirit. Not to pander to people's tastes, but to lead them upwards. So you are tired and exhausted from gloomy thoughts and bitter experience? Pull yourself together, and take 183 a look at the beauty of the world, see how much beauty there is in the most ordinary things around you---in flaming poppies, in juicy grapes, bulging on the vine, in the tree in blossom, in the noisy mountain torrent rushing headlong on its way. It makes no difference that these are landscapes of the South. The northerner, too, will immediately respond to its call. One has only to look at the world with one's eyes wide open to immediately feel all pain soothed, feel a surge of strength, the real joy of living and the joy of surveying beauty. Such is the life-assertive force of true art.
A different path to the same end may be taken, ``through suffering to joy'', as Beethoven applied Schiller's words in the finale of his Ninth Symphony. It can be done by taking the thoughts and feelings of the spectator through dramatic cataclysms to confront him with the complexity of life, to stir his soul and free it from all illusions, to fortify man with the strength of knowledge and then lead him forward to struggle, to joy and light.
Saryan takes his own special path, but it leads to the same destination, to joy. ``Happiness is the best university,'' Pushkin noted wisely. Looking at Saryan's pictures we attend the university of happiness, we learn to appreciate beauty in the people and in nature, and to rejoice in them. This is no naive, unthinking joy, but wise joy that knows the hardships and trials of life and all its storms, but nevertheless leaves them beyond the limits of its perception, in order to build up internal strength. Saryan's art seems to tell that the purifying storm has passed over, that the black clouds have dispersed and the sun has come out brighter than ever and the colours are shining more strongly than ever.
Such is the artistic world of Saryan's canvases. A beautiful world of powerful nature and man strong in spirit. To find the way into it is to make friends with beauty for ever.
[184] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Truth, Nothing but the Truth [185] ~ [186]Soviet = art does not bypass life's dramas and tragedies. Its organic optimism, its gravitation towards beauty, does not contradict a close attention to cruel conflicts that shatter people's habitual views and produce explosive waves of feeling, and sometimes destroy people. But the important thing is that even in such a difficult situation the new revolutionary art does not cease to search and find objective strongpoints, enabling people to withstand and retain their human and civic dignity. Life itself, which is charged with ``creative force'', helps the artist here. It is not surprising that the concept ``optimistic tragedy'' should have arisen, the cruel personal destiny of the hero being translated onto the higher plane of the historically conditioned growth of the group, the collective, the class to which he belongs, not out of obligation but because of conviction and heartfelt devotion.
Art is called upon not only to bring joy, to elevate and caress the soul, but also to fortify. To mobilise people's spiritual forces and concentrate them. The mire of falsehood and sweet illusions, of indifference and indolence often claims people's souls. Great is the role of art which washes away all tarnish and arouses people's conscience, even where it rubs raw wounds or inflicts new ones. They are not fatal, the blows of art. They are always healing. The human spirit is tempered by them, although it may be tormented for a time.
There are artists whose works refract life as through an aesthetic prism of conscience, relentless in their search for the truth, uncompromising in expressing what the artist considers to be right, the convictions he acquired through long and painful reflection on the destinies of his contemporaries. The art of our time is drawn towards philosophical reflection on the essence of things. But in some works you can feel that the artist is forcing himself to be ``deep''. The artists we are speaking of are never forcing their talent when they produce a problem work; it is natural for them to reflect on hardship, difficult and important matters, and sometimes even on terrible things, for it is not only their mind that goes into them but their hearts too. They have not their heads in the clouds: their feet are planted firmly on the ground, the hard and beautiful earth. Gely Korzhev is one of these.
Ever since his painting In the Days of War (1954) was shown at the first Moscow Exhibition of Young Artists and the public learnt of a new original talent, there has hardly been a single major exhibition that has not included at least one work of his. And every one of his works has been thoughtprovoking and given rise to lively discussion. Discussion not only of aesthetic problems but of life's problems too, for all 187 these works were born out of reflection on life, and various streams of life flowed into them, felt and perceived by the artist.
Korzhev found his own range of themes and his own hero almost at once: they are the themes of courage and trial, and the ordinary person who has passed through a hard school of struggle and has learnt both the bitterness of defeat and the joy of victory. But this man tempered by life has not become a superhuman giant with finely polished virtues. He remained simple and modest, the ordinary working man and soldier in the ranks, to whom nothing human is foreign, including spiritual and bodily torment.
The man in the worn tunic sunk in painful reflections and the tired middle-aged woman resting sadly against him in Korzhev's Lovers (1959) are a far cry from the traditional ``loving couple''. But the artist is not inviting us to a festival of love. He has brought us to the cold, uncomfortable shore by a river or lake where two people who love each other have found a temporary haven---he has brought us here in order to make us doff our rose-coloured spectacles and take a look at life as it really is. Indeed, in human life, especially in the immediate postwar years, there arose many complicated and painful situations, in which fine, beautiful, sincere human feeling was sometimes a sharp thread cutting through the hearts of several people. A dramatic conflict arose, in which all the participants were right in their own way.
And the artist is in no haste to draw conclusions. He invites us simply to be present as onlookers, but sympathetic onlookers, watching people who are apparently infinitely dear to one another but whose love may well have caused pain to others, brought tragedy into the lives of other people who are also dear to them.
Everything is perfectly simple for those people who do not care, who only seek to amuse themselves, who play with feelings or play at having feelings. But true love is quite another matter. Hence the mournful expression of the man's face, the face of a strong, rugged man, with deep furrows on his brow and round his mouth. Hence the pose of feminine defencelessness of his girl-friend, who must have experienced a great deal in her time too and would seem to be tough and strong-willed.
Korzhev has a way of choosing a sharp expressive point of action which, as soon as one notices it, draws one powerfully, irresistibly into the relentless course of the characters' lives, to become a party to what is happening. This point in the action by no means necessarily corresponds to the external, 188
G. Korzhev. In the Days of War
dynamic culmination. Korzhev avoids sharp demonstrative
gestures and poses. He is interested in the internal,
psychological dynamics.
The hero of the painting Picking up the Banner, the central picture of the famous triptych Communists (for which the artist was awarded the Repin Prize), is depicted at the point where he is gathering his strength, preparing to hurl himself forward with the red banner that is still lying on the cobbles. 189 The picture is striking not so much for the external sharpness of the composition but for the rare strength of concentration and compression of thought, feeling, and will, conveying the real power and grandeur of the new hero of the age, the revolutionary proletarian. It is not the quick short moment of elan that the artist has chosen to show in this image, but unyielding strength and tenacity; it is an image which has absorbed features of many anonymous worker revolutionaries who have risen up to struggle for freedom. The man's body, like a taut spring ready to suddenly unwind, stresses the inner fire, expressed primarily in the face, which, although not handsome, is inspired, the eyes full of anger and the passion of struggle.
The artist once saw an old man picking up dog-ends in Piccadilly Circus in London, indifferent to everything around him, and terribly alone amid the city bustle, and the sight filled him with pain and sympathy. ``Can you imagine his eyes? I shall never forget them, the eyes of a man who has reached the limits of despair,'' Korzhev recalls.
Such, too, is the expression of the exhausted woman, the hungry girl-companion of the pavement artist in The Artist (1961). This scene is quite astounding for a Soviet person, but
G. Korzhev. Lovers
[190]
G. Korzhev. Picking up the Banner. The central part of the triptych Communists
a perfectly normal sight for the inhabitant of a capitalist town. One has only to go to Piccadilly Circus or the pavements along by the National Gallery to see artists making a few pennies from ``pavement art'', and there are gifted artists among them too.Korzhev is as ever reserved. There is no mawky sentimentalism in his presentation of the strong but bent figure of the kneeling ginger-headed young artist in the brown sweater, his beret, into which someone has casually dropped a few coins, the pavement and the feet of a couple of passers-by. But this is not to be confused with cold objectivity as can be seen most clearly from the depiction of the young woman, who leans hunched against the tree, sunk in gloomy thoughts, her expression full of restrained anguish and despair. She is like a wounded bird.
The artist is reflecting on typical phenomena of life, speaking of things of universal significance. But what is characteristic of him is his simultaneous interest in the particular. His characters are strikingly individual, and can never be confused with anybody else. Moreover, in treating their features, he scrupulously presents the essential details without ever descending to petty naturalism. As a rule, every external detail 191 has its internal counterpart, its essence and content, an aesthetic idea charge.
At the Moscow Zonal Exhibition in 1965, and later at the Sovietskaya Rossiya Exhibition, Korzhev's triptych Scorched by the Fire of War (1964--1967) was shown. This was a trial run, so to speak, for a big, complicated project, a polyptych of the same name, on which the artist was working hard at the time. Korzhev displayed his pentaptych in 1967, two of the pictures---The Mother and The Scars of War---already familiar from the earlier triptych.
The large faces (considerably larger than life-size) are brought right up to us, like a film close-up. This device solves two tasks at once: it elevates and monumentalises and permits detailed individual characterisation, avoiding the excessive generalisation which makes for the commonplace. How did this multiple structure actually arise? It provoked sharp debate and differences of opinion, even strong criticism. The solution did not arise out of formal considerations: it was determined by the difficult and complicated artistic task Korzhev had set himself---to aesthetically affirm, through the bitter, terrible and tragic, the bright, heroic and truly human in life. In this he was not being entirely original, for several Soviet prose writers and poets tackled a similar task, and so did artists too (viz., the early canvases of Iltner, Jokubonis's sculptures, Salakhov's Repair Workers). But in his approach to the task, and especially in his solution of it, Korzhev demonstrated undoubted originality, and---one of its most important features---consistency.
In The Mother, a bareheaded elderly woman sits sadly meditating, her heavy head resting on her hand, coarsened by excessive toil. The situation is extremely clear. The woman has completely abandoned herself to anguish and despair. She is crushed by sorrow, numbed by the pain of loneliness. Originally occupying the central position in the triptych, this image was not quite what one normally associates with the generalised concept of the Mother, embodying not only a suffering woman but also a heroine, capable of overcoming and surmounting her personal grief. Now, along with others, it reads more naturally and more convincingly.
The image of the war invalid, the soldier with the burnt
face, who has lost one eye but none of the keenness of his
gaze, courage or purity of spirit, is one of the most impressive
ever created on a canvas. And what is really astonishing is
that as one regards the mutilated face of the hero, the ugliness
which hits one so painfully at first glance gradually recedes
and fades in our perception, being replaced by a growing
excitement, admiration and joy for the inner wealth and beauty
192
G. Korzhev. The Artist
of the man. Such is the power of the penetrating, sincere gaze transmitted by the artist.Some people speak of an excessively physiological approach, insisting that such close attention to the material signs of life's trials and sufferings is inappropriate to the truly artistic image. But art never paid heed to such aesthetic barriers set up in its path to the depths of life by those who favour calm, pleasing beauty. Otherwise one might well cancel out half the treasures of world art: Hellenistic portrait sculpture, Roman statuary, the paintings of Griinewald and Bruegel the Elder, many of the portraits of El Greco and Velazquez, Goya's etchings, the 193 canvases of Gros and, nearer to our own time, the works of Ka'the Kollwitz and the frescoes of Diego Rivera. True enough, a particular person may be unable to bear the sight of so much as a drop of blood, but in that case he is hardly in a position to appreciate the aesthetic principle in the hard and noble profession of the surgeon. The artist has every right to speak of everything in his art. For his brush, chisel or pencil there can be no artificially invented prohibitions. The important thing is that when dealing with horror, cruelty and sickness, art ought not to savour it, but affirm the bright, pure and sound. It need hardly be proved that Korzhev, while having no qualms about showing the spiritual and bodily injuries, is far from suggesting that we should admire them. In fact, the special power of his courageous talent lies in the way he, despite all the gloom, elevates and aestheticises the sound, pure and genuinely human. The boundless grief of the mother is perhaps excessively gloomy, but it is nevertheless a great and genuine human feeling. The very capacity for such feeling ennobles man. As for the image of the war invalid, one does not cease to be amazed at how, in treating such an exceptionally complicated subject, the artist succeeded, while remaining perfectly faithful to the truth, in producing an image full of inestimable spiritual greatness, a veritable song to the inexhaustible courage, firmness and nobility of the Soviet man in a war of unprecedented ferocity.
The other pictures in the composition are also about the war and human endurance. In the large central canvas Cover, the Hitlerites have lined some Soviet people along the breastwork of the trench and behind the cover of their bodies are scanning the ground ahead, preparatory to launching an attack. An elderly rural intellectual, clearly a teacher or an agronomist, and a woman with a baby are actually visible, but the line of anonymous martyrs continues beyond the picture. It is a bright day, bathed in light of the indifferent summer sun. The faces and the postures of the doomed people are quite calm and composed. We can discern many familiar details in their appearance and in the sparingly drawn landscape. But we must not conclude from this that the artist's brush is indifferent. On the contrary, throughout the picture, succinctly but quite distinctly we can feel the throbbing anger and passion of the artist-citizen. They are restrained by strong will-power, which explains why they seem to be absent at a first, cursory glance. But one has only to ask whether a calm, impassive artist could find such an expressive composition, find types of people so perfectly suited to expressing the idea, and one's first impression immediately vanishes, revealing itself to be quite false. 194
G. Korzhev. The Mother. Part of the pentaptych Scorched by the Fire of War
The artist is true to himself. Behind the outward facade of
calm there is tremendous tension in the picture. It bursts forth
in the burning red of the little girl's dress, it is present in the
stern expression of the old man's face, it is there, too, in the
contrast between the brightness of the figures of the Soviet
people, bathed in sunshine and the dark heads, like shadows,
of the Hitlerites at their feet. We realise that the compositional
solution of a perfectly ordinary summer's day, at first
glance so ``inappropriate'' for tragedy, is perfectly justified
after all.
We must remember these heroes, every feature of them. It is as though we are present at their translation into legend. No wonder this small group looks rather like a memorial sculpture, rising on the background of an azure sky. It is a symbol of the simple folk of the land, who know all too well what terrible hardships war of conquest brings, and how much sorrow and tears militarism causes.
195
G. Korzhev. The Scars of War. Part of the pentaptych Scorched by the Fire of War
The Farewell, which opens the series, shows a typical scene in the first days of the war. A man who has been called up, who only the day before was still working in his normal job, and a woman clinging to his chest, are parting, who knows for how long, perhaps forever. They cannot know how long the war is going to last, how exceptionally bloody and destructive it is going to be. The whole picture emanates tremendous power and strength, and aesthetically affirms the special spiritual cast of the Soviet Russian. But one small detail calls for attention in the atmosphere of the picture. The artist has captured and conveyed with amazing accuracy an extremely important note now almost imperceptible in the mist of time, a note of calm confidence that it would soon be over, which so many naively felt in the first days of the war. ``Well, war's no picnic, but don't you worry, darling, it'll soon be over!'' the strong, confident young man in his brand-new uniform seems to have just said or be about to say in the brief moments of parting. His whole trim figure radiates calm confidence, despite the fact that his face is sterner and has heavy shadows on it. The woman is hardly visible, but her cheerful orange dress with white polka dots seems to be the epitome of peace and homely comfort.
This is the foreground. Even if the picture contained nothing else it would still be interesting, for it bears the imprint of live human feeling, related to the truth of the time. But it contains far more---the dynamics of life. The heroes of the picture are shown on two different time planes, as it were. The bright, lyrical melody of their relationship has a tragic accompaniment expressing the hard experience of a later time. The small, confined courtyard, like the narrow defile of a slit trench, the red brick wall, as though dripping blood, and the rows of windows with a leaden, cold shine, contain shades of the difficult days ahead, while the sharp, unbearably bright scarlet slash of the soldier's tab is like a fresh wound.
Old Wounds concludes the series. The old soldier unable to sleep, troubled by his wounds, and more especially by oppressive thoughts and memories, lies in bed quietly, without moving, for fear of disturbing his wife.
There is no action at all here, and yet the artist has managed to convey extremely vividly the impression of intensely pulsating thought and to reveal a real psychological process. It must be said that for all its merits, the picture is weaker than the others in the series from the point of view of technique. Its effect is reduced by the artist's failure to find an appropriate colour for the body (which, in my opinion, is too cold, especially against the bright splash of the red blanket 196
G. Korzhev. Cover. Part of the pcntaptych Scorched by the Fire of War
[197]
and the pillow). Nevertheless, it is an extremely important and
essential part of the whole composition.
The artist was not attempting to give a painted ``history'' of one particular hero. If he had, the result would most probably have looked rather naive and resembled a series of illustrations to a particular biography. But, to some extent at any rate, the heroes of the first and the last pictures of the composition are akin to one another. Yet between them lies a great gulf, the period of the war, years of trials and maturing experience. The artist does not produce any physiognomical likeness, but he does hint at a relationship between the two paintings by giving both of them distinctive broad red patches.
A pentaptych of this scale is an innovation in easel painting. It provided the artist with very special artistic means enabling him to say more than would be possible in an individual painting. Painting spoke in the language of complex, ramified literary, or rather cinematographic, epic, without losing the essential painterly qualities of static visual materiality. Only time can show to what extent such a complex compositional structure is universally applicable, or even necessary and desirable in other subjects. But it is already clear that it requires from the artist an intense process of ``germination'', a clear conception of both the general idea thread and the particular ``shot'', to borrow a term from the cinema, a clear presentation of the composition in time, dynamically. It requires not only artistic enthusiasm, but philosophical wisdom in investigating life through the means of art. On the other hand, it provides broad scope not only for close observation of numerous phenomena, but also for presenting them in sharp contrast that may lead to interesting conclusions and for suggesting parallels that produce a chain of poetic associations, and much else besides.
This pentaptych is evidence of the ceaseless development of Korzhev's great, original talent. The artist penetrates the depths of social life, leading us along with him. He is not moved by idle curiosity or self-indulgence. His brush serves truth and goodness, and his responsive heart is also capable of intense hatred.
Korzhev's images are profoundly contemporary. Not by being strikingly typical or by demonstrating special contemporary expressive devices. They are indeed expressive and typical, but in their own way. They do not loudly proclaim their typicality, and do not strike one as emphatically vivid. Perhaps the most attractive thing about them is that they are so ordinary, so simple, as though one had seen them a thousand times before. But the one thousand and first time, on the 198
C. Korzhev. The Farewell. Part of the pentaptych Scorched by the Fire of War
canvas, they rivet one's attention and make one stop and think,
ponder over life, its meaning and its processes. Korzhev's
images activise and stimulate people, and that is doubtless what
explains their great attraction and the strength of their
ideological and aesthetic impact.
Korzhev's paintings stand out among the countless genre and historical works that are appearing today. These are intelligent works by an artist who reflects seriously on life and human destinies. This is what so clearly distinguishes his works from those of a naturalistic variety, produced by skilful and perspicacious artists who for one reason or another fail to make a clear assessment of what they are portraying, fail to select and generalise. Why are we mentioning this here? Because every now and again certain members of the public (and even some professional art critics) discern naturalism 199 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1976/HA242/20060412/243.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2006.03.0) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ now in the everyday simplicity of his types, now in his colouristic devices, in his predilection for detailed depiction, or in the unsophisticated style of his painting, devoid of all external virtuosity and brilliance, and so on. But one can hardly seriously associate these features of the artist's manner with Naturalism, whose essence is an objective, dispassionate attitude to what is being depicted, an artificially objective approach to reality which conceals a fear of looking reality in the face, a desire to escape the contradictions and difficulties of life for the narrow little world of pleasant, innocent pastimes. ``I see a fence, so I paint a fence; I see a waist, so I paint a waist.'' How many such ``fences'' and ``waists''--- evidence of thoughtless copying of life---to our great shame make their appearance in our art, are even shown at exhibitions and purchased!
Our time has no patience with cliches and stereotypes. The high flight of the dream also requires accuracy, must be wellfounded. Korzhev's art affirms the material quality of a thing apprehended in a special way and thus generalised. The materiality of his work, and ramified detalisation is an artistic means of achieving convincingness. This is a far cry from cold observation for its own sake, a cold look at ``sores under the microscope'' that some misguided souls imagine they perceive in his work.
A great work of art invites thoughtful reflection, and any hasty, unconsidered opinion is harmful. ``Service to the Muse does not permit haste'' the poet said, referring to creative work. The same goes for aesthetic perception.
The works of Gely Korzhev teach the noble science of struggle and inculcate important social sentiments. They are inspired with genuine revolutionary humanism.
[200] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Diamond Facets of RealismThe = piece of canvas surrounded by a frame opens up a special world to us, created by the colourful brush of the artist. A world that is both similar and dissimilar to the real world, and which draws us to it like a window onto a stage where a play is in process, full of bright colours, vivid images and beauty.
It can safely be said that a contemporary person's concept of painting is primarily, if not wholly, associated with easel paintings. We see them at exhibitions and art galleries. The easel painting (as distinct from the work of monumental painting, which is closely related to architecture) is an exceptionally flexible and mobile form of painting, and has also come to play an important part in people's domestic life, decorating the walls of town apartments and country cottages.
From its emergence in the early Renaissance, easel painting began to develop as a ramified system of genres, including the subject painting, the portrait, the historical composition, the landscape and the still life. Not all easel painters concentrated on one genre, but the very existence of these genres presupposes a certain tendency towards specialisation, the development of the artist's talent in a particular direction.
With the birth of easel painting art acquired a new powerful channel for penetration of life and active influence upon it. The artist now received an instrument for embodying the most diverse creative ideas, responding sensitively to the smallest movement of his heart and spirit. The easel painting promoted aesthetic assimilation of various aspects of life, but its rapid development is bound up first and foremost with interest in and close scrutiny of everyday life, man's natural and material environment, appearance and psyche. The art of the great masters of the past revealed the essential qualities of easel painting as a form of painting that offers diverse and flexible opportunities for artistic cognisance of life in its real complex dialectic and for expressing the widest spectrum of thoughts and feelings and embodying various facets of the aesthetic ideal prevalent in a society.
Not infrequently at exhibitions in recent years one could hear remarks of the following kind: ``It may be interesting, but it isn't an easel painting!'' or: ``Look how well the artist has employed easel painting techniques!'' Some are delighted to note features of monumental painting in easel canvases, while others regard this as an unnecessary concession to fashion. Yet others detect a departure from the principles of easel painting in the use of highly expressive forms derived from graphic art, and in particular from the poster. While there are such as are prepared to reject everything in the 203 __RUNNING_HEADER__ The Diamond Facets of Realism • Reflections on Easel Painting history of art and declare easel painting itself an unnecessary anachronism. In short, there is evidence of different interpretations of easel painting and its ``permissible limits'', a certain bewilderment over the tremendously diverse artistic search for new forms of easel painting that is now in progress.
Notable processes requiring careful study have been going on in the development of realist easel painting. One of the most important points to bear in mind here is the change in the social category for whom easel paintings are intended, and indeed in the whole social basis of easel art. This is revealed with special depth and breadth in the artistic practice of the new socialist countries. Soviet art was the path-finder here.
There is a close affinity between the work of the easel painter and that of the lyric poet. Both are moved by the fire of inspiration to pour out their joy and pain, and their dreams. But the genuine artist is the one who has imbibed the joy, sorrow and dreams of his people and his time, who does not create as a recluse, isolated from life, but plunges himself into the thick of it. The Revolution provided Soviet artists with the most extensive field of activity: their art was now addressed to the popular masses, millions upon millions of people. And this greatly increased the civic responsibility of the artist. Our easel painter is producing his work not for a bourgeois client, for a snobbish clique, not for an elite, nor even for a comparatively narrow circle of the democratic intellectuals as in the nineteenth century.
With the paintings of Rylov, Petrov-Vodkin, Nesterov, A. Gerassimov, Konchalovsky, Saryan, S. Gerassimov, loganson, Korin, Serov, Deyneka, Plastov, Chuikov, Nissky and other talented artists, Soviet easel painting added a glorious chapter to the history of world art, showing the essential features of the new society, giving aesthetic expression to the new world outlook, the new aesthetic ideal.
Certain remarkable features arose in the image structure of easel art, connected with the greatly increased tasks of affirming the beauty of man's labours and exploits. The easel painter now is especially persistent in the search for cohesion, clarity and strength. Hence the energetic rhythm in one case, monumental imagery in another, the emotional and decorative use of colour in a third, and so on.
The live practice of art in all its diversity did not entirely avoid mistakes and ``deviations'': hasty, superficial solutions, and erroneous tendencies of a naturalistic and formalistic order made themselves felt.
In the process of communist construction the aesthetic taste of the broadest sections of the masses has been developed and 204 polished. Time is relentlessly putting an end to flat illustration, cliche, drabness and empty formalistic artifice both in the creation and perception of works of art. The new generations of Soviet artists are consistently seeking out the path to vivid, expressive art, art that raises important problems and is richly imaginative, drawing on the extensive and varied experience of the classics and their senior comrades, and peering intently into life.
Easel art today is developing along many different paths. I shall mention but a few outstanding works of recent years: Portrait of D. Shostakovich by I. Serebryany, Family. 1945 by V. Ivanov, the triptych Soldiers of the Revolution by I. Zarins, Earth by Y. Moiseyenko, the pentaptych Scorched by the Fire of War by G. Korzhev, 1918 by G. Mosin and M. Brusilovsky, After the Battle. Spain, 1937 by E. Gribov and M. Malyutin, On a Saturday Evening by Y. Kugach, Family and Gymnasts of the USSR by D. Zhilinsky, Strike by A. and P. Smolin, and the canvases of L. Kabachek, Ali Djusupov, I. Svazas and T. Yablonskaya.
There is a marked tendency to note and solve essential problems of the time in a highly individual way, to respond lyrically to the calls of life, to invite people to ponder on its complexity, to affirm beauty in the ordinary everyday things. One is struck by the great diversity of manners and styles, the abundance of different types of easel painting.
One of the fundamental traditions of easel imagery is an interest in the ``dialectic of the human spirit'' and the complex vicissitudes of man's social destiny. It finds a new expression in Moiseyenko's Earth, for example, or Kabachek's Spring. A dramatic conception of the image, characterised by attention to life's contradictions and to the difficulties of toil and struggle, usually produces a dynamic compositional structure with sharp light and shade and colour contrasts. Moiseyenko makes use of these devices in his portrayal of three tractor drivers, who have broken off for a moment's rest and are standing in the middle of a freshly ploughed field deep in thought. There is an equally strong dramatic quality about the young woman in Kabachek's Spring. But the lyrical excitement of a person communicating with nature at the time of its spring awakening softens the motif of suffering and relegates it to the background.
Both Moiseyenko and Kabachek turn to an everyday life subject, which has always been the central theme of easel painting. But both of them, each in his own way, treat it very differently from the tradition of genre painting, and seek to extend its frontiers to embrace wide philosophical reflections 205 on life. The drama of life is presented not in the subject itself, not in conflict between different characters, but in the flux of live human thought, which the artists attempt to convey in the externally static image.
Sharp lyrical feeling does not necessarily involve drama and demonstrativeness. On the contrary, one can note a tendency in art today towards external emotional restraint. But this is not to say that emotion is unimportant, let alone totally absent.
I. Zarins's Soldiers of the Revolution (1965) is about different people, and a different period---the early days of the Revolution. The Latvian riflemen in the front line of battle are severe figures, with rugged, ``chiselled'' features. The central canvas, The Speech, seems to draw us into their midst, the fragmentary nature of the composition inviting us to imagine the line of soldiers continuing. Yet there is nothing to suggest that the situation is impermanent or transitory: on the contrary, the artist has gone to great pains to assert stability and firmness (as testified by the deliberately heavy, measured vertical rhythms of the upright figures). The superb handling of sharp light and shade contrasts---an unexpected, but highly effective use of the Caravaggian tradition---also serves the same purpose.
The artist chooses the unusual triptych form for his work in order to be able to embrace a wider range of subject matter. This form of easel painting has become increasingly popular in the last few years, and we have already become fairly accustomed to it. Yet there is much that is unusual about it. True, there are echoes of the traditional altar triptychs of the early Renaissance. But they have been much updated and undergone considerable transformation.
In easel painting today (and indeed this is true of the fine arts in general) there is a growing interaction with both old art forms, such as architecture, decorative and applied arts, literature, the theatre and music, and also new art forms like the cinema and television. This interaction is sometimes quite sharp, involving certain miscalculations and casualties, but on the whole it is proving very fruitful. It is objectively inevitable since the period of isolation and self-sufficiency of the arts in general and different forms and styles of art, too, has come to an end. This is the result of the emancipation of social selfawareness from rigid compartmentalisation under the impact of the profound revolutionary changes of the age. As recently as the latter half of the 19th century Kramskoy's statement that an easel painting was distinguished by an integrated, isolated image and that no second or third canvas was necessary to reveal its essence had the ring of incontrovertible truth
I. Zarins. Soldiers of the Revolution ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ →
206
[207]
about it. But time introduced its amendments: there is no
reason why an easel painting should not consist of two, three
or even more canvases. The contemporary artist strives to give
his subject a wide spatial and temporal scope. But internal and
external unity is an essential condition for a polyptych. Zarins
achieved this, but not all triptychs one sees are really
integrated and internally warranted. Some are trivial and flat in
conception and stereotype in execution, and one cannot help
wondering why a triptych when one canvas would have been
quite enough, if that!
There is nothing more tenacious and viable than a stereotype. It can adapt itself to anything and find sustenance absolutely anywhere. Like a kind of ``spiritual virus'', it is born of Philistine indifference to man, to his complicated intellectual and emotional needs. It is out to subdue and dominate or at least to poison what is progressive and growing. A widespread aesthetical interest has arisen among the public in large-scale compositions in which fundamental problems of life are resolved, and such formal devices of monumental art as a heightened decorative element, clear-cut construction, and conventional treatment of space, and generalised forms are used, and hey presto! before we know where we are the ``aesthetic epidemic'' of externally monumental yet empty, sterile canvases is spreading like wildfire. As a result some begin to doubt the merits and justification of the truly innovatory, fruitful search to ``monumentalise'' easel painting. How doubtfully such canvases as Salakhov's well-known Repair Workers or even more recently Zhilinsky's Gymnasts of the USSR were received! Yet their monumental quality is perfectly appropriate to easel painting. It is achieved by a complex fusion of forms deriving ultimately from the monumental frescoes of the Renaissance, icon painting, and indeed also from the great easel paintings of the 17th to 19th centuries. Most important, this fusion is reserved for special tasks the artist has undertaken---in one case, to reveal the stern romanticism and heroism of daily labour, in the other, to present harmony and beauty in the ordinary and mundane.
The storm of debate over the Smolin brothers' Strike and 1918 by Mosin and Brusilovsky has not yet abated. I feel bound to point out, that in my opinion in the latter work the artists did miscalculate when, possibly unintentionally, they placed the emphasis on the elements of the spontaneous and the sentimental in presenting the image of the revolutionary people. On the other hand, the images of the Red Armymen are excessively rigid, and their human essence tends to be oversimplified. Yet these are but details. The main thing that
__CAPTION__ D. Zhilinsky. Family
[209]
gives 1918 its great power and visual expressiveness is the
skilful way the emotional atmosphere of the time is conveyed.
It is the time of fierce mortal combat for the cause of the
Revolution. The stern, powerful figures of Sverdlov and
Dzerzhinsky are as though cast from metal. There is
revolutionary passion in the figure of Lenin addressing the crowd.
The dramatic power of the work is increased by the active
background---the Kremlin towers thrusting upwards as though
in plea for struggle and fortitude are like the very history of
the Russian land looking on the heroes of the present.
The artistic solution of this interesting work contains echoes of monumental murals, with their distinct silhouettes and architectonic severity, and it seems to owe something to the poster, too. But why should this be in any way opposed to easel art, which is constantly seeking means of producing a strong impact on people?
The Dutch genre painters of the 17th century would have been greatly surprised at some of the genre paintings of the 19th century. In place of the calm, comfortable reflective mood of Ostade and Metsu, came the passion of Delacroix or Daumier. In the latter's Revolt there is no faithful detalisation (which had been so valued at one time and even regarded as an essential feature of easel painting): the figures of the running people and even their faces are presented in general colour splashes---which does not, however, prevent them from having great expressive power. But in order to properly appreciate it, one must get away from the norms of easel painting, developed on the basis of the Dutch painters.
Surikov's and Repin's grand canvases, or Vasnetsov's pictures on themes from Russian epics, folk tales and legends, also represented an innovation by Russian realist art, bringing the easel painting closer to monumental composition. The whole point is how and why it is done. In the works of Deyneka and Korin we clearly feel the hand of an artist equally attracted to easel painting and monumental art. Their art is by no means impoverished by this, but on the contrary, the fusion of styles provides the one and only appropriate solution for every artistic task.
But far be it from me to try and make a universal rule from a particular, even superlative, achievement. I have examined certain typical currents in art. But here is something quite different, the works of Y. Kugach, V. Stozharov, and the Tkachev brothers. The existence of such differences can only be applauded, for it speaks of the strength and diversity of our art. I can think of no lyrical subject work of the last few years more successful than Kugach's Saturday Evening, where the 210 life of ordinary, simple folk is transformed into an exceptionally attractive spectacle, lit by the warm lyrical feeling of the artist, by his gentle caressing smile. The figures of the people, every object, all the details are painted carefully and warmly. Yet all of them are woven into a well-integrated compositional whole. And the bright scenes from everyday life, often tinged with sadness, by the Tkachev brothers are also executed with a special, penetrating lyrical intonation.
Here the traditions of the easel painting on an everyday life subject that have become established through the ages live on. But there are also other artists who try to feel out new paths in their works, actively incorporating decorative elements and drawing heavily from the live stream of folk art.
__b_b_b__Our contemporary art provides examples of direct development of folk traditions. This is immediately discernible, for instance, in the beautiful, poetic and refined works of Palekh artists, who have found their own special path in making viable use of the experience of traditional icon painting and decorative folk art. The original works of Ukrainian folk artist M. Primachenko are quite delightful. Her works transport us to a fairytale world, where curly bushes and trees grow gorgeous flowers of an enormous size, where strange beasts with sharp teeth climb through the branches, quite harmless and friendly, where birds of paradise with human faces squat majestically, and a friendly old lion with great sad eyes tries in vain to look fierce ... There is a great deal here of the traditional Ukrainian pisanok, (colourfully decorated Easter eggs), and also from the equally traditional folk embroidery and paper cutting.
But artistic practice today poses a rather different problem--- that of combining the forms of decorative folk art with the tradition of developed easel painting technique.
Very often the easel painter carefully and scrupulously represents the colourful objects of the domestic scene with embroidered table-cloths and towels, painted shelves and stools, dressing his characters in the richly ornamented attire, a particular national folk costume, etc. This involves certain difficulties, and even dangers, though in general there are no great pitfalls. Of course, there are times when the decorative surroundings become too obtrusive and distract the attention from the main point of the picture. There were many examples of this to be observed, for example, at the exhibition of young artists of the RSFSR in 1967. But handled with care, and given due attention to the underlying essence of what is being 211 depicted---which is what makes Kabachek's works so admirable---the decorative clement (even if colourfully and elaborately treated) will attract just the right amount of attention, no more, no less. The Turkmenian artist Klychev, the Azerbaijanian Abdullaycv and the Armenian Zardaryan work in the same spirit, although using the decorative elements of a different national culture. The characteristic motifs of national ornamentation arc organically woven into the fabric of the easel work, in no way distorting its structure, perhaps heightening certain facets, putting out additional roots connecting it with the national soil.
Yet some still venture on dark and steep paths that beckon with the excitement of exploration.
Both young, and indeed not so young, artists have been strongly attracted to the colourful and ornamental motifs of the decorative arts, attempting to enlist their help to organise the composition, colour, and expressive structure of the easel painting. More and more frequently works appear which at first sight look rather like a woven carpet, or applique work, or an imitation of painted wood carving, etc.
The simple, unsophisticated but great art of the people, folk art, embodied the most fundamental features of a poetic view of life. It also included the know-how of artistic treatment of material.
Artistic imagination of the people is extremely rich. Folk art always strikes us for its bold, expressive composition, colouristic inventiveness, and sharp lyrical or ironic tone. It is informed with the indefatigable, boisterous energy of human constructive enterprise.
It is only natural that the special world of traditional folk art and crafts should receive more and more attention in the highly progressive quests of our contemporary art, interested in extending the artist's range of expressive means and strengthening the emotional ``core'' of the artistic image, its multiple effects.
But how is it to be related to the special conditions and devices of easel painting? Does not easel painting lose some of its complicated, developed specifics, by embracing newcomers from the loud, boisterous, ingenuous and capricious world of fantastic golden birds and winged horses, the world of bright festive colours, glowing like precious stones, clear lines which are nevertheless often woven into the most whimsical patterns, where the laws of perspective, light and shade and anatomy do not apply?
It is time to renounce the deeply entrenched view that the
features of a certain style or form of art have become
212
A. and P.~Smolin. Strike
crystallised and are only to be polished and refined within an existing framework but no longer modified, expanded and added to, a view that is extremely obstructive to the real artistic process.Naturally, the specific features of easel art have become firmly established as regards essentials. But the history of art contains such an amazing variety of forms of easel painting that one should be very careful in asserting that this is a ``real'' easel painting, and that is not. One cannot apply a ``rubber 213 stamp'' to everything. It is necessary to consider the artistic purpose of a particular work, whether or not it enriches artistic practice and produces something of aesthetic value. Time was when people seriously insisted that Deyneka's Defence of Petrograd was not a ``true'' easel work, found similar defects in Saryan's landscapes and rejected the subtle, poetic works of Mavrina and a whole host of other artists, simply because they did not conform to certain dull stereotype models where everything was ``as it should be".
In Mavrina's Blue Lake there are several departures from the elementary ``rules'' of easel painting, but they make for the purity and simplicity of the poetic image, and to ``correct'' the form in this case would be to kill the poetry, too.
When a number of new works by I. Svazas were shown at an exhibition of the art of the Soviet Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) in Moscow, the reaction of quite a lot of professional artists and critics was highly unfavourable to his attempts to create more generalised images, clearly drawing on the experience of folk carpet weaving and to some extent stain-glass technique too.
His landscapes were not intended to represent any place in particular. Yet this is what was held against him. ``Why is the landscape devoid of definite features? Where is it meant to be?"---were the kind of questions asked. But even if it loses in one respect, genuine art makes up for it in another. In Evening, Svazas achieved an original, hauntingly poetic atmosphere. The blue shades of twilight, enveloping nature in a mysterious shimmering veil, the bright coloured slumbering horses---everything is presented here in a highly unreal manner, as though the artist had opened a window onto a fairytale world. The painting is decorative alright, but not in a thoughtless, purely visual way, it contains exciting, joyous poetry.
One must appreciate the merits of this kind of approach, although---and this must be stressed---it can never become the chief approach in easel art, which had scaled steep heights by its aesthetic investigation of human psychology, the real human environment and the historical flux of life. The form of easel painting we are discussing is tackling different tasks, which are important in their own way.
In genuine art repetition of what has already been accomplished is not regarded as an achievement, however superlative the original point of departure. The recent works of the Ukrainian artist T. Yablonskaya show that she is engaged in a constant, tireless search. It is easy to see that she is drawing on the traditions of folk arts and crafts more and 214
I. Svazas. In the Port of Klaipeda
more extensively (already discernible in her Festive Evening).
She is fascinated by the wealth of ornamental decoration and
the burning colours of embroidery. But, besides this, she uses
the device of a flat decorative spatial organisation, avoiding
deep perspective and seeking a distant, musical, fluid
arrangement of lines and colour patches. Yet her works are not
deprived of the complex colour and spatial modulations
characteristic of easel art and never become purely decorative
panels. If Svazas rejects a plein air approach, Yablonskaya
attempts to retain this achievement of easel painting that was
attained with such difficulty, creating a clear, decoratively
sonorous and lapidary image. Something may be lost by way
of psychological complexity but how much is gained in terms
of life assertion and decorative power!
215
May expresses the clear, simple idea of the joy of living, the joy of being young and the joy of free, satisfying work. Humanity is shown as one with the earth---the sunny figure of the strong, healthy young woman in a white dress, the white of the freshly limed trunks of the apple trees, and the damp brown earth all striking a bright, major chord. It is perhaps louder than is usual for easel painting. The painting seems cramped when viewed in a small room. There is something of a contradiction in this. But that is no reason to reject out of hand the artist's considerable achievements.
We need different kinds of easel painting. Yet easel painting is clearly emerging more and more onto the walls of large public buildings. There are sometimes miscalculations of the following order: very often one sees artists simply painting large canvases under the impression that they are thus producing a work of decorative-monumental form. Yablonskaya, in my opinion, seems to be adopting the more difficult and fruitful course of a complex structure within certain clearly defined, albeit somewhat restricted, limits.
It is, of course, important to be able to clearly perceive that each form contains a certain substance, a certain angle of vision and view of the world. Another of Yablonskaya's paintings, Visiting the Grandchildren, I find unsatisfactory because the decorative image system does not correspond to the emotional dominant of the subject-matter. In the elderly woman one feels a sense of sadness and grief which does not tally with the decoratively festive quality of the work.
The Betrothed, Life, The Cradle, and Paper Flowers, on the contrary, are distinguished by close harmony between form and content.
Paper Flowers (1967) is remarkable for the sparsity of devices with which the artist has succeeded in conjuring up the atmosphere of a cold winter's day, where a misty aureole forms around objects and figures. This aureole serves to increase the sense of solitude of the chilled old woman, and emphasises the simplicity and severity of her widow's attire---the dark brown scarf, long skirt and padded jacket. Yet she is also a powerful enchantress who has produced, as though by magic, a wealth of bright warm colours on a bleak frosty day. The garlands of paper flowers produce a humorously unsophisticated illusion of splendour, and colour our perception of their vendor with a tinge of surprised admiration.
This work has found an artistic continuation and development in Yablonskaya's finest works of late, such as Nameless Heights (1970) and Youth (1971), where philosophical reflection on life is expressed in images and forms characterised by the 216
T. Yablonskaya. The Betrothed
immediacy and wealth of feeling of the folk tradition. In Youth
we see a tranquil pool that has formed in a bomb crater. But
the pool has suddenly become an ominous blue splash amid
the sunlit steppe, and the sedge bristles by the smooth surface
of the water like bayonet points. A tall slim youth has stopped
to ponder by the pool as though it were a natural monument
to the sufferings and heroism of the people.
Some artists try to employ the form of folk lubok (prints).
The gifted young artist Y. Strulev, who produced an outstanding diploma work when graduating from the Surikov Art Institute---the sets for Shostakovich's opera Katerina Izmailooa ---had a vast composition on show at the Moscow Young Artists' Exhibition in 1967, called The Sun Has Gone Down Behind the Hillock. The work contains many purely decorative elements, bright colours and harmonious rhythms. But the 217 general effect is pseudo. The traditions of lubok played a nasty trick on the artist, for he had failed to reckon with the very special intonation of sly mockery and irony that is essential to this art form. The artist wanted to present a bright, cheerful picture of the present-day collective farm village, and the result was a ``monumental caricature'', and a rather vicious one at that.
This is not to say that the lubok traditions cannot be incorporated at all in easel painting (Strulev himself has shown very convincingly that it can in one of his versions of The Wedding, where the ironic undercurrent was extremely appropriate). But they require very careful arrangement, reinterpretation and modification, and the selection in each particular case of the elements which are appropriate to the solution of the task undertaken.
The colourful, decorative qualities of lubok are extremely valuable, and it would be a shame to ignore them entirely. Indeed, many other of the fine features of folk arts and crafts ---warm sincerity, simplicity, clarity and feeling for the material---can greatly enrich our professional art.
Socialist art creates very special, highly favourable conditions not only lor profound assimilation of the best features of the professional art of the past, but also for careful use of the wealth of experience of folk art. Provided that it is used creatively, critically, without apologia and all the showmanship to which mediocrities pandering to fashion are so inclined and which sometimes prevent a genuinely talented artist from adopting a thoughtful, considered approach to the solution of complicated creative problems.
All the major exhibitions of the last fifteen years have reflected in one way or another the features that have characterised Soviet artistic life during that time: namely, the difficult process of liberating art from a set of rigid dogmatic concepts, devotion to truth, profound concern for the power of artistic means and the expressiveness of the image, and hence, ceaseless extension of traditions being actively studied and assimilated.
The period since the All-Union Exhibition of 1961, however, represents an especially important and interesting stage in our artistic advance, the results of which have yet to be summed up and appreciated.
Let us take a brief look at just some of the most important
features. A question that acquired particular importance in
this period, both in art theory and artistic practice, was that
of purpose art. Vigorous, bold and sometimes naively aggressive
``irruptions'' into life by the ``back door'', so to speak, at a
moment when everything is untidy or great tension swells the
218
T. Salakhov. Portrait of the Composer Kara Karayeo
muscles, the sweat streams down, and the eyes glow with fierce exertion, were coming to an end. People were beginning to get over their initial excitement at being able to produce a brilliant display of colours and speak openly of devotion to Van Gogh and Cezanne, Vrubel and Rerikh, and Russian icons had come to occupy a firm place not only as greatly cherished museum pieces, but as vital national treasures enriching artistic practice.The extension of the aesthetic horizons of socialist realism and the strengthening of its roots in life prepared for increased interest in philosophy of life. Realism must be complex, wise and purposeful, since otherwise there is a real danger of it degenerating into anecdote. The works of Korzhev, Kabachek, Salakhov, Gribov and Malyutin, Prorokov, Tulin, Nikonov, Iltner, Jokubonis, Mosin, and Brussilovsky that appeared during this period expressed dramatic conflicts in social and personal life with great power. The strong publicistic note in many of them, however, often restricted the selection of artistic means and also tended to narrow down the range of human feelings and emotions represented.
219Art was concerned primarily with tragic problems. Indeed, philosophy in art was often regarded as the ability to boldly treat shortcomings and contradictions in life, human trials, pain and privations. This produced tragic emotional overtones, though in the best works it did not detract from the heroic quality or life-assertive element.
But the tendency towards deeper artistic investigation of life, with its real combination of elevated and mundane, tragic and comic, lyrical and epic elements, grew and spread in the stream of Soviet art (including the works of the above-- mentioned artists, of course). At the 1967 Jubilee Exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution this tendency could be seen to have strengthened considerably.
Quite naturally, at such an exhibition, the historical revolutionary theme that has been a central theme throughout the emergence and development of Soviet art, was widely represented. Essentially similar subjects and motifs connected with the same important theme were treated in a great variety of manners and styles in the paintings: 1917 by Dudnik, Zarins's Song, Telzhanov's Choir Leader, Moiseyenko's The Messengers, Sadykh-zade's Baku in 1917, Burya's 1917, Voronov's Byelorussia. For the Power of the Soviets!, Savitsky's Volunteers, Mekvabishvili's 1921, Chekanyuk's For Land, Tokaryev's Commissars and A. and S. Tkachevs' For Land and Freedom.
We tend very often to make sweeping, general statements in our discussions of art, whereas any work of art is most valuable and interesting for its unique features, its subtle individual shades and its special intonation. It is often extremely hard to define all this, and yet to forfeit any amount of aesthetic perception means to greatly impoverish both art and oneself. At the same time, it can be useful to note the points that different works have in common. As regards the above-mentioned paintings, they all have one clear feature in common, and that is an endeavour to poetically embody the historical event, and a striving towards the elevated, romantic, and often even symbolic image. This is not at odds with historical veracity and, moreover, counters any attempt to reduce the noble truth of history to flat, dry commentary.
Naturally, in the works of different artists this progressive tendency is reflected in various ways and is moulded in essentially dissimilar forms.
The paintings by Zarins and Telzhanov each express in its own way the idea of the beauty of selfless struggle for the triumph of the Revolution. Thus, in Zarins's painting, three Latvian riflemen with a red banner lead an attack like the choir leaders in a vast folk choir. The vibrant major chord struck 220
Y. Moiseyenko. The Messengers
by the bright red banner on the deep blue sky and the heavy,
resonant rhythms of the figures all serve to create an
atmosphere of hard but victorious struggle. Telzhanov's canvas is
more lyrical, and the storm of battle does not seem to invade
its bright atmosphere, although it depicts a unit of soldiers on
the march.
Tokarev's Commissars continues the traditions of historical revolutionary paintings of a generalised character, brilliantly initiated by Petrov-Vodkin in his Death of a Commissar and B. loganson in Interrogation of Communists. The expressive truth of an individual character, related to time, opens up a live vista of the first years of the revolution and its great and modest heroes. The artistic means are intended to produce the stern and heroic emotional atmosphere of the time---hence the important role played by strict, clear silhouettes, the simplicity and clarity of the frontal composition, the almost poster-like lapidarity of the powerful colour, with a preponderance of field green, red and black tones. And D. Moore's famous poster Have You Volunteered? in the background seems to organically merge with the fabric of the picture.
I should like to mention, too, Y. Moiseyenko's outstanding work The Messengers, full of elan and exploding with unexpectedly vivid splashes of colour. Chekanyuk's For Land although outwardly very different from it, with its calm, measured composition and static forms, also contains that inner tension and surge of fine human feelings which are so appealing in Moiseyenko's dynamic canvas.
221The artist's gaze is turned to the core of phenomena, he is extremely attentive to human emotions, when the subject provides even the slightest opportunity. Of course, it would be strange to expect an extended psychological characterisation from Moiseyenko's picture representing riders galloping through the sombre shadows of the southern night. But Chekanyuk's revolutionary worker preparing to leave for the front, Sadykh-zade's ominous and powerful workers' demonstration in Baku in 1917, and Burya's two firm, sturdy Red Guards conveying the romance of the first days of the revolution, reveal a keen attention to the inner world of the characters, shown in all their strength, determination and firm conviction.
Life-assertion is naturally strongest in works on contemporary themes.
There was a significant abundance of works at the exhibition showing festive moments in the life of the people. Among them were Klychev's Day of Joy, Paulyuk's May the Sun Always Shine, Mikko's International Friendship and Habibullayev's Bakhor. The remarkable thing about these works was that they bore no resemblance whatsoever to the stereotype representations of ``festivals'', ``processions'', and ``games'' of the past, full of mindless cheerfulness. No, these are true works of purpose art.
Klychev's triptych is colourful and highly decorative, with its subtle colours and rhythmic lines. But the artist is seriously interested in typical national figures, and not only in their external ethnographic features, but in their essence, their character. In the foreground he has placed the image of a wise, keen-sighted man, surrounded by a gallery of merry, skilful musicians, shown in a tone of good-natured irony. This painting invites one to take a long, careful look despite the fact that at first sight it might appear simple, and purely decorative, like a fine carpet.
Habibullayev's small canvas was one of the jewels of the exhibition. The thick, violet blue and dark green shades in the figures of the two collective farmers who sit resting over a cup of tea are quite exquisite. The background is land coming to life in the warm spring sunlight. There is confidence, strength and wisdom in their faces lit with joy. Once again we have not a purely decorative approach to the subject, but a purposeful approach, the happy smile by no means an empty attribute but revealing the complicated inner movements of the human soul.
At one time it became a matter of vital importance to
overcome the sterile stereotypes of schematic optimism in works
portraying labour. And a major role here was played by such
works as Nikonov's Our Everydays, which, for all its
222
I. Klychev. Part of the triptych Day of Joy
[223] contradictions, is nevertheless bold and powerful. But one could not help regretting the numerous works that began to appear in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts, which were pervaded with condensed gloom and in which working people were presented as strong but spiritually impoverished, or not so strong but spiritually one-sided, cheerless, sunk in gloomy thought, creating a sharp conflict that was by no means always justified.The beauty and skill of labour can certainly serve as the nucleus of a truly purpose work, as many of the works at the Jubilee Exhibition clearly demonstrated. Among them are Golembiyevskaya's Harvest, with its radiant sunny colours, and Kormashev's triptych Young Builders, with its severe, subdued tones, finely-chiselled forms, and a restrained, ``virile'' beauty. The highly festive yet completely veracious Grain to the Country by Nechitailo also belongs among these hymns to labour, as does Vieru's poetic, inspired triptych Ion's Happiness, glorifying the life-transforming power of the artist's work.
Latvian art, which has always been noted in the past for its particularly intense dramatic quality and stern, deliberate power, is now attempting to master the palette of joyful colours and bright emotions, as can be seen from such works as Iltner's New Year's Eve, Valnere's New Riga and Berzins's Fishing Harbour. Iltner's composition is like a colourful fantasy with the warm glows from the molten steel curiously mixed with the cold light from luminescent lamps producing a striking effect on the faces of the steelworkers, their bright blue overalls, the clean tiles of the floor and a modest New Year still life. All this affirms the aesthetic beauty of modern industrial labour. Berzins was apparently thinking along the same lines in his Fishing Harbour, but he went a bit too far in his attempt to achieve a ``stain-glass'' luminosity.
Svazas's industrial landscapes Cranes and In a Chemical Plant were among the major attractions at the Lithuanian section of the exhibition. The artist presents the real life motif with extreme sparsity of visual details (which has aroused unjustified suspicions of ``abstractionism'') in a vigorous, extremely beautiful and poetic colour form.
Abdurahmanov's Talyshki and Beloved Patterns are quite irresistible. One wants to return to them again and again to admire the superb skill of the exquisitely delicate brushwork, the artist's free, inspired handling of a complex pictorial form. In the latter painting the traditional work of the embroideress is imbued with remarkable poetry. The three young women dressed in pure white work with amazing grace and lightness, and one feels as though a dance rhythm emerges from the
nHHrfl^^^^HM^^' Jft.'i
I. Vieru. Part of the triptych Ion's Happiness
224N. Abdurakhmanov. Beloved Patterns
characteristic movements and poses of their craft. The light
figures are woven into a complex, picturesque pattern similar
to the one they are producing with their nimble fingers.
A. Grigoryan's large canvas Gathering in the Harvest, with its generously cheerful, vivid colours, indicates the same interest in the beauty of work. Another example is Chariyev's Silk Suzaneh, solved in a sharp and broad key. Shvelidze's Potters captures beautifully the precise, measured rhythm of intense but enjoyable work.
This should not be taken as meaning that only this kind of representation of work is to be approved. I should like to stress once more that we are speaking here of tendencies that have developed perfectly naturally in the complex stream of live artistic creation, and which, moreover, have nothing to do with embellishment of life, with fear or unwillingness to speak 225 sharply and forcefully of hardship where it exists, of difficult and complicated things that cannot be forcefully squeezed into a set pattern.
It would be naive to raise hurdles in art and place petty ``prohibited'' signs in its path. Art which looks life squarely in the face (which certainly applies to socialist realism) derives from it insuperable strength, a principled approach and boldness.
There are quite a few works at the exhibition which contain nothing of the festive quality characteristic of the paintings I have been discussing, or any of that immediately infectious feeling of triumphant endeavour I have referred to. Yet they are certainly party to the process of increasingly extensive and penetrating encompassment of life that is gradually developing in our art, and we note in them (despite the external drama of the motif) the characteristic shift in emphasis from tragic circumstances and even the death of the hero to the affirmation of strength of spirit.
Salakhov is a powerful, virile artist. He works consistently on themes of labour exploits and the romance and heroism of our time. His large canvas Women of Apsheron (1967), restrained both in the poetic tone of the imagery and in form, breathes passionate excitement and serious reflection on life.
V. Ivanov's series of compositions with the collective title Russian Women (1967) is also concerned with life's hardships. But firm conviction in the triumph of the finer elements in life is an intrinsic part of the artist's perception. Work on the land may be hard, but the bright and cheerful notes are woven into the world of people's feelings and sufferings. Hence the decorative colour composition and the harmonious rhythms we find in these paintings.
The fiery path of war left many scars on Byelorussian soil, and it is not surprising that the war theme should occupy such an important place in the works of Byelorussian artists. It is doubtless this lasting impression that accounts for the austere, rugged style and rather sober range of colours characteristic of the Byelorussian school. Even V. Tsvirko, whose palette used to be bright and cheerful, is far more severe in his landscape Byelorussian Motif. Yet the effect is by no means sombre, any more than it is in Kozakevich's Red Cliffs or in Stelmashonok's Portrait of Yakub Kolas. The motif in Dantsig's vast composition Byelorussia, the Partisan Mother is highly dramatic. A long file of people is moving slowly through gutted ruins, all that is left of a village, men and women, old men and children---all partisans. The severe outlines, the sharp rhythms, the ``iron'' forms, the abundance of black patches, unexpectedly 226
V. Ivanov. Lunch. From the series Russian Women
``sprinkled'' with bright colours (the child and the machine-gun
carefully covered with bright blankets)---all indicates extreme
privation but readiness for battle, the courage of unsubdued,
unvanquished Soviet people.
Another picture should be mentioned in this connection, and that is Savitsky's Partisan Madonna (1967). The subject of this picture is a highly unusual one, although it is surely in tune with the seekings of contemporary Soviet art. The artist makes no attempt to soften the severity of the surroundings, a bivouac with a pyramid of rifles. This severity is expressed in the very form, tense and laconic, without any superficial brilliance. The young mother's face is stern. In her eyes we read worry, anxiety and pain. But also---and this is most important---the light of great inner strength and triumphant happiness. Indeed, this light pervades the whole painting. It is no accident that 227 the colours of the madonna's clothes form such a pure harmony (black skirt, white blouse, red shawl and blue headscarf) and that the smooth outlines of her figure and the white body of the child play such an important role in the composition. The artist is saying that even in the grimmest days of trial the people show great concern for a young life and the mother that has given it and is nursing it. Fornmise, this work echoes the powerful and austere muse of Petrov-Vodkiri, and certain motifs from the murals of the Mexican monumental painters. But everything---the borrowed traditions, and especially, observation of life---is fused into an independent image.
It must be said that the artistic experience of Petrov-Vodkin is exerting a big influence on many artists at present. They also draw on the experience of Russian icon painting and early Renaissance art, the ``World of Art'' group, and Guttuso in particular among contemporary artists. There is, of course, no harm in this, provided the borrowing involves creative assimilation and critical reinterpretation of the experience of the great masters of the past and present, in accordance with the artistic tasks tackled. This also applies to the great heritage of the Russian ``Wanderers''.
In speaking of many of the outstanding works from the Jubilee Exhibition, I noted the desire of the artists to go beyond the bounds of the concepts and ideas which the subject of a work, its characters and their material environment suggest. There is an effort to organise an image so that its inner structure and external features arouse extensioe associations.
An inclination for realist symbolics is understandable and valuable. Indeed, it is essential for an artist who longs to make his art respond to the important ideas of the time, and solve essential problems through aesthetic means.
Unfortunately, this effort is not always successful and the result in some works is a loss of vitality, and of the plenitude and variety of concrete things and a rather abstract, schematic quality. ``Faceless'', apathetic characters appear in the same standard poses. Naturally, such works cannot possibly provoke serious emotions and reflections on life, for their philosophical content is scant, although they often contain a lot of pseudophilosophical pretentions. In the pursuit of ``generalisation'', they lose keenness of vision and precise knowledge.
Some such works were to be seen at the Jubilee Exhibition as well. Yet, on the whole, the standard was very high, and provided every ground for satisfaction with the wide range of realist styles.
It was gratifying to note the variety of individual styles, united under the banner of socialist realism. More than any of 228
M. Savitsky. Partisan Madonna
the previous all-Union exhibitions, this one revealed a sharp
growth in the national artistic schools, with their special vision
and perception of the world, and their own particular system
of artistic means and expressive devices. The unity of Soviet
art as a whole presupposes not a levelling but a flowering of
individual talents and separate national schools and styles.
__b_b_b__
Attempts are sometimes made to seek national features in historical subjects, in various stylistic exercises employing traditional motifs of the national culture, etc. But realist art derives the most vital juices from the present day. Careful study of the present-day life of one's people naturally does not 229 mean breaking with what is valuable in the past, with the nation's history. Still less does it mean any kind of isolation from the big, general progressive problems of the time. But it does require a careful, systematic approach and that artistic warmth for life, a heightened version of the normal person's love for life, which has surrounded him from childhood, fertilised by the new perception of free national existence.
Soviet art from the moment of its birth began to develop as multinational art. But today this process is being increasingly accelerated and producing more mature and important results Not only individual works and names are remembered as important on an all-Union scale, but entire national artistic collectives are beginning to play such an active and important role that without them the overall picture of contemporary Soviet art would be greatly impoverished.
This emerged in clear relief also in the series of exhibitions held in 1970, culminating in the All-Union Lenin Centenary Art Exhibition, where Soviet multinational art was shown not only to be continuing the searchings discussed above, but also to have something new to say that merits close attention.
Soviet artists are currently trying to express their thoughts about life in complex works on several levels. The quest for veracity and profound artistic expression of life, combined with vivid and sharp artistic form, sometimes leads to an original creative solution that enriches our view of the potentialities of the subject painting on both modern and historical themes.
If Samokhvalov's Lenin's Speech at the Finland Station Concourse in 1917 tends towards the monumental panel on a grand scale, Savitsky's large canvas Unanimity is rather like a monumental poster, embodying a passionate appeal and sharp characterisation. Naturally, this definition does not exhaust the curious artistic ``fabric'' of the work, which, although not entirely without its weaknesses, cannot leave one indifferent. Tragic and satirical elements, boldly combined by the artist, and the publicistic power of the general conception, with the figure of Lenin occupying the centre of the scene as the truly popular leader and people's tribune---all these stimulate the imagination and provoke ramified historical reflections. I. Klychev's portrait of Lenin is at the same time a vivid narrative of the transformations that have occurred in the life of the Turkmenian and entire Soviet people advancing under Lenin's banner. Also worthy of special mention is the composition in three parts by the Moldavian artist Vieru, Ballad of the Soil, where the powerful influence of live national traditions by no means detracts from the veracity of the historical 230 characterisation. Great sense of proportion is also shown in the treatment of the figure of Lenin, somehow brought closer to the national soil both through his attire and certain stylistic details, without losing for us his unique historical significance and characteristic features. This is especially worth stressing, in view of the fact that there have been many cases when the understandable desire to achieve the simplicity and democratic quality so characteristic of Lenin led to a loss of historicism in his image and brought ``down to earth'' elements to the fore.
A.~Nasedkin concentrates on a single episode, Lenin chatting to a revolutionary soldier. This is rather like a painting version of the well-known scene from the popular film about Lenin but the artist demonstrates considerable skill in the detailed psychological characterisation, thereby justifying his choice of subject, and also the permanent importance of profound psychological characterisation for an easel painting, which some are contesting these days.
Yakupov also paid great attention to the psychology of the characters in his large historical canvas Prologue. In the centre is the figure of Lenin as a young man, during his student days. The painting is interesting for the successful portrayal of Lenin's bold and energetic young comrades and the accurate ``collective portrait'' of the reactionary university staff.
In Y. Moiseyenko's Red Cherries the legendary days of the Civil War provide a popular theme. A group of Red cavalry men are having a short rest, lying in the grass by a machine-gun cart just outside a village. The warm sunshine, the fresh green grass, as though seen for the first time after exhausting fighting, and the juicy berries the men are eating, tired but confident of their strength and full of vigour---this simple but poetic scene is both truthful and beautiful. The picture is remarkable for its subtle composition, the close and distant planes woven skillfully into a single whole, movements and gestures captured with great precision and accuracy, the pure colours shining as though bathed in dew.
Those years are seen as through a veil of legend and historical distance that shroud the relief and colours of events. And one cannot but appreciate the great power of art that resurrects the revolutionary past, which is so dear to us and whose importance for the present and the future is so enormous.
Another important group of paintings shown at the jubilee exhibitions was devoted to the events of the Great Patriotic War, now also shrouded by time. Yet we constantly feel their importance today. The grandeur and glory of the victory won by the Soviet people in the fierce, costly struggle against the 231 fascist invaders are inseparable from the grandeur and glory of Lenin's ideas and the triumph of Leninism.
This idea is clearly expressed in a work by Safronov which presents a moving episode of soldiers taking the oath to the banner of the revolution, Lenin's banner. The artist seems to draw us into the scene. His idiom is precise and severe, and he paints in what might de described as a ``material'' style.
Another canvas by the same artist. The Soldier's Letter, betrays the same serious, inquisitive attitude to life. It presents a severe and tender image of a woman on whose shoulders the war has placed a heavy burden of exhausting toil and constant fear for her dear ones.
I. Ronkin's Hard Years treats the same subject of the tremendous vitality and stamina of the woman and mother in those difficult times, but in a different manner. V. Nee's Farewell. 1941 is a modest canvas that tells of the purity of spirit of Soviet people torn away by war from their peacetime tasks. Here the epic breadth of approach to events and gentle lyricism are merged into an original artistic whole.
The images of strong, courageous people, perhaps a bit slow and ponderous, but unflinching in their convictions and devotions, and in their uncompromising moral attitudes when it comes to combating evil, are depicted in Babitsyn's Two Soldiers. In Partisan Wedding M. Dantsig turns to the great epic subject of the partisan war in the depths of the Byelorussian forests and represents characters of great integrity and a heroic mould in a different tone---that of restrained festivity. Never for a moment did the Soviet people doubt their final victory over the fierce and treacherous foe, the picture asserts.
Many works on contemporary themes were shown at the Lenin jubilee exhibitions. The subjects ranged from heroic labour to fine, noble feelings such as love and friendship. How eloquent, for example, is Yakovlev's Happy Girl, depicting an attractive Yakut girl delighting in the niggardly northern sunshine and the awakening of nature! This is not naive joie de vivre, but a complex set of thoughts and feelings characteristic of the spiritually rich and genuinely intellectual member of socialist society, a representative of a nationality once doomed to a life of privation and ignorance!
Ivanov's A Man Is Born is permeated with the modest and
pure poetry of motherhood. Everything in the picture---the
smooth flowing, rhythmic lines, the warm colours---is directed
towards asserting a sense of festivity and joy at the appearance
of a new, helpless little creature, for whom the heroic struggle
232
Y. Shirokov. Portrait of Astafien
and selfless labour of generations of free Soviet people have guaranteed a happy future.Constructive free socialist labour is a great ennobling force. And Soviet artists return again and again to this life-giving source of poetic inspiration. Tulin's Contest portrays a group of workers of the thirties signing up for a socialist emulation contest. The artist has created extremely expressive characters of old people with the wisdom that comes from long experience, and young people for whom the revolution opened up vast scope for life and creativity and affirmed human dignity. How close to them and yet how different are the contemporary Soviet workers whose collective portrait Nieminen, for example, has painted. It is as though we have before our very eyes the long and tortuous process of removing the gap between manual and non-manual work---one of the most important features of the advance towards communist society.
Socialist labour and its heroes are also celebrated in canvases by P. Ossovsky, I. Simonov, G. Poplavsky and T. Salakhov. The portraits by N. Amangeldiyev, Y. Shirokov and V. Yefanov depict the poetry of creativity. The beauty of their native land is reflected in the landscapes of Saryan, U. Tansikbayev, V. Gromyko, B. Domashnikov and T. Yablonskaya.
One cannot help noticing, however, that our artists have failed, so far, to show in full the real beauty and heroism of the present day. They have a debt to pay to both our working class and collective farm peasantry. Often the people they portray are rather colourless, dull and drab.
Yet one would like to see the radiance, the creative spark that our way of life fans up in people and which is captured in the classic works of socialist realism, the pictures of Deyneka and Plastov, in S.Gerassimov's Harvest Festival on the Collective Farm, in the portraits of Nesterov and Korin and the sculptures of Vera Mukhina, S. Lebedeva, Shadr and Tomsky. One would like to see a perspicacious artistic rendering of reality.
The problems of monumental decorative art, applied art and design, which are very important and necessary in themselves, have received considerable attention recently. Yet the complex phenomena occurring in easel art have not been studied and developed with due care and attention. The tendency towards unwarranted mixing and combination of forms and styles has not been treated critically enough, just as there is often a patent lack of concern for the veracity and psychological power of characters in historical and modern subject paintings, and also in portraiture. The decorative side of art often conflicts with the essence, the idea. On the other hand, a cold illustrative 233 approach, usually a symptom of passive thought, detracts from the vitality of art.
The call to easel painters to step up efforts towards imbuing their works with the live romance of history and the present day that was issued during the preparations for the nation-wide celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet state met with a vigorous response. Many interesting new easel works aesthetically investigating a variety of historical and contemporary subjects and themes were represented at the 1972 jubilee exhibitions that culminated in the All-Union Art Exhibition ``Our Homeland, the USSR''. This investigation is being carried out with growing awareness of the specific nature of aesthetic cognition and the poetic essence of creative work, the artists making use of various means and devices of expression and drawing extensively on the experience of different periods in the history of Soviet and world art, and, most important, avoiding any sensationalism in their treatment of form. One might ask: Why is it that Soviet art criticism at different times posed tasks and creative problems which had once been considered solved? Is this not evidence of confusion, contradictions and illusions with regard to development and progress?
Realist art does not, and cannot, invent any special sensational ``current problems''. This is not to say that aesthetic progress is slow or non-existent within its bounds. Despite their ``traditional'' nature, the problems of realism---truth to life, ideological content, realistic expression, etc.---are characterised by vitality, constant flux, renewal and enrichment. The realist artist is by no means ``condemned'' to forever sing the same old tune and repeat the past, for this art is closely linked to life, and life is in continuous flux and development.
And at every bend in the path of history the ``traditional'' problems of socialist realism are raised and solved in an essentially new way. As each successive generation of artists comes on the scene, these problems require fundamental revising in accordance with new tastes, new intellectual and moral requirements.
It is most important that there should be continuity between the generations. Under socialism the conditions of life, sociopolitical and moral views and values are basically stable, and the same applies to artistic creation. However, this is an extremely complex and delicate matter. The sphere of art is open to all kinds of creative searchings and it is not at all easy to ensure the continuance of great traditions combined with genuine innovation.
The 1972 All-Union Exhibition of Young Artists confirmed that the younger generation of Soviet artists, while making an 234
V. Yerofeyev. Happiness
important contribution of their own, cherish the legacy they
have inherited from their fathers, in particular the tradition
of passionate, active humanism. This is patently evident in
T. Nazarenko's Execution of Members of the People's Will
Organisation, Z. Davitai's Builders, E. Romanova's Self-Portrait,
O. Filatchev's Portrait of V. Yakubovich, V. Yerofeyev's
Happiness, and others.
Happiness treats the age-old theme of mother and child. A peasant mother is nursing her baby in the fields during a brief pause from work. The scene, although everyday, is presented in an exalted, sublime spirit. This is felt in the composition, with the woman's workmates standing round her in a semi-circle, and in the pure, festive colours. The work, while obviously revealing a debt to Petrov-Vodkin, clearly shows the creative maturity of a young artist who has chosen the difficult 235 path of expressing the poetry of life without sacrificing authenticity, of combining genre and symbolics. Even more important, he has chosen the path of extremely accurate embodiment of individual character and a particular time.
Naturally, the actual style of the work in question, the individual ``hand'' of the artist, represents only one of the many stylistic branches of contemporary Soviet art. Having said that, it must also be pointed out that contemporary Soviet easel painting has been evincing a mounting interest in the age-old static image. No doubt, in our dynamic time, the static principle is beginning to be more and more regarded as an organising and educative aesthetic principle. Hence, no doubt, the growing interest in classical and, in particular, Renaissance art, which might be regarded as a fad were it not for the fact that this interest is so pervasive and proving so obviously beneficial in strengthening the artistry and technical skill of artists.
__b_b_b__The present situation in Soviet art warrants reflection on many important artistic problems pertaining to the fusion of content and artistry. They are all united by one general, allimportant problem, that of increasing the power of our art and activising its role in communist construction. We all want to see socialist realist art have a profound influence on the cultural life of our society, promote the aesthetic education of Soviet people, propagate noble social ideals, and affirm beauty in our lives. It is essential for our art to become an ever more effective instrument in the struggle of the forces of progress, that it should win hearts and minds and actively combat the demagogy of imperialist ideologues, who praise all and any attempts by decadent bourgeois art to pass off its ugly grimaces as ``the discovery of new aesthetic shores''. Therefore, our art must penetrate the depths of life, enriching itself with precise knowledge of life, must constantly seek, master all the wealth of expressive means and persistently extend them.
The question of the extent and limits of realism, which is being so much debated in art criticism at the present time, is of vital importance for artistic practice. One must not approach this question abstractly. Every method of artistic creation is crystallised in the practice of hundreds and thousands of individual artists. It acquires special forms depending on the particular artistic aims being pursued in each case, and the form and style of art. Marxist-Leninist aesthetics provides a key to the essential distinction between realism and various varieties of modernism. It is impossible to conceive of realism in isolation from life. Realism studies life and strives to create 236 an image that expresses the sense and meaning of a phenomenon and is full of serious idea concept, an image that would enable people to recognise the new and important features in life, society and man.
Yet for the realist there is not, and cannot be, content ``per se'', equally suitable for any form. Some contemporary theorists who recognise realist content but abandon the sphere of form to the unrestricted whimsy of the artist's imagination (for example, in the search for symbolic imagery) make the big mistake of separating form from content. Form is not a receptacle into which the content is simply ``poured'' regardless. The artistic image is a complex, interwoven unity of definite form and definite content connected by a thousand inner threads, a compound that is the only one possible in each particular case. It is hard to achieve, sometimes impossible. Since the content of the realist work is derived from real life, and is not an abstract invention, the form should also be definite and life-like. Naturally, one must not make a dogma of this general principle, and insist that the realist artist must invariably produce an optically authentic visual picture of life. The veracity of realist form is based on respect for law-governed internal structural links and relationships, and departure from basic external likeness is perfectly permissible where justified and dictated by the logic of the artistic purpose.
The socialist realist method is not a narrow corridor where the artist feels cramped and confined within certain ``normative walls'', beyond which lies a beautiful but ``forbidden'' world. There is nothing more erroneous than such a distorted and superficial view of socialist realism, the great innovatory artistic method which has absorbed the finest traditions of world art and already given the world the immortal works of Gorky and Mayakovsky, Sholokhov and Tvardovsky, Vera Mukhina and Deyneka. Socialist realism trains the artist's eye on reality, on study and artistic cognisance of real life in all its complexity and conflicting tendencies of good and evil, truth and error. Artistic talent is like a ship in the open sea of life, which is beautiful but also stormy and changeable. Which is why all talk of ``realism between banks'' and ``realism without banks'' is quite unwarranted. The aesthetic essence of realism, including socialist realism, does not lie in ``banks''. It consists in the opportunity it offers to keep the boat steady, despite the sandbanks, reefs and storms. The discovery of new aesthetic lands by talent that abandons itself to the naked elements is one of the fallacies that history has repeatedly exposed. Socialist realism places in the artist's hands the necessary ``navigational instruments'' to aid safe sailing across 237 the seas and oceans of life. Socialist realism is essentially a means of approaching reality that permits a sharper and more profound vision and representation of life, in an artistic and truthful manner, in historical flux, revealing the inner logic in the apparent series of coincidences. It in no way restricts the creative interests, inclinations and tastes of the artist with regard to either subject matter or formal solutions, the choice of style or manner. Everything which elevates, educates and spiritually and aesthetically enriches the people who are building communist society is comprised in the artistic practice of socialist realism. It only excludes that which is unaesrhetic and ugly, immoral and inhumane, that which debases man and beauty. That is why bourgeois naturalism and modernism are the ideological and aesthetic opponents of socialist realism, for they assert values that arc ethically and aesthetically inferior.
Socialist realism enables a talented artist to achieve the supreme measure of truth, which is the most valuable accomplishment of art, on which beauty itself depends. Artistic truth is complicated. The artistic truth of socialist realism is a live expression of the truth of life itself, winged by poetic fancy and warmed by aesthetic feeling. It possesses tremendous lifeassertive power, despite the fact that it often deals with negative facts and points to moribund phenomena. It reveals itself to the artist whose spirit is in tune with the time, and whose gaze is directed along the path ahead. That is why it naturally involves expressive artistic generalisation of heroism and romance in life, images that affirm what is growing, young and vigorous, bright and beautiful in life, and passionate condemnation of all that is ugly and vile. This, of course, has nothing to do with false sugar-coating of life and naive rejection of its contradictions and conflicts. Such cheap idealisation, which is incompatible with artistic truth, has no place in socialist realist aesthetics.
Art returns beauty to life in a concentrated, artistically faceted and polished form, shining with a new lustre. The work of the artist, who carries the bright torch of beauty capable of summoning people to action, is eminently humanistic.
[238] __ALPHA_LVL1__ List of Illustrations [239] ~ [240] __RUNNING_HEADER__ List of Illustrations 18 Nike of Samothrace. End of 4th century (or 2nd century) B.C. Marble 27 Icon of Boris and Gleb. Early 14th century 29 ANDREI RUBLYOV. Trinity. Icon. Early 15th century 37 RAPHAEL. The Sistine Madonna. About 1513. Oils 41 THUTMOSIS. Sculptured portrait of Nefertiti. Early 14th century B.C. Sandstone 42 Athena and Alcyoneus. Detail of a frieze of the altar of Zeus at Pergamum. 2nd century B.C. Marble 43 RAPHAEL. School of Athens. Mural at the Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. 1509--1511. Details 46 Tombstone from Agdam District of Azerbaijan. 17th century. Stone 49 L. DAVID. La Maraichere. 1795. Oils 50 D. VELAZQUEZ. The Spinners. 1657. Oils 53 E. DELACROIX. La Liberte guidant le peuple. A detail. 1830. Oils. 55 I. REPIN. The Volga Boatmen. 1870--1873. Oils 57 V. SURIKOV. Boyarina Morozova. A detail. 1881. Oils 58 V. SEROV. Portrait of M. N. Yermolova. 1905. Oils 59 V. SURIKOV. Yermak's Conquest of Siberia. 1895. Oils 60 C. MEUNIER. Ouorier puddleur. 1894. Bronze 61 V. PEROV. Portrait of F. M. Dostoyeosky. 1872. Oils 62 P. CEZANNE. L'homme a la pipe. Oils 63 V. VAN GOGH. Promenade a Aries. Oils 65 G. COURBET. Les Casseurs de pierre. 1849. Oils 67 V. SEROV. The Rape of Europe. 1900. Tempera 71 A. RENOIR. Nude. 1892. Oils 72 H. MATISSE. La Desserte, harmonic rouge. 1908. Oils 73 P. PICASSO. Old Beggar with a Boy 74 K. KOLLWITZ. Widow 1. 1922. Woodcut 75 K. KOLLWITZ. To the Memory of Karl Liebknecht. 1919--1920. Woodcut 76 F. MASEREEL. A Cat. 1955. Woodcut 77 S. DALI. Mae West. Tempera 81 V. VASARELY. Atom. 1966 84 T. SMITH. Without a. Title. 1965 85 C. ANDRE. Clippings 88 R. GUTTUSO. Workers. A drawing 91 N. ANDREYEV. Lenm Writing. 1920. Plaster-cast 93 S. MALYUTIN. Portrait of Dmitry FurmanoD. 1922. Oils 95 B. KUSTODIYEV. Festival in Uritsky Square in Honour of the Second Comintern Congress. 1920. Oils 241 96 K. PETROV-VODKIN. Mother. 1915. Oils 97 K. PETROV-VODKIN. Death of a Commissar. A detail. 1928. Oils 99 B. IOGANSON. Interrogation of Communists. 1933. Oils 100 B. NURALI. Portrait of Khaldji. 1926. Oils 101 A. SAMOKHVALOV. Girl in a Sports Shirt. 1932. Oils 102 S. GERASSIMOV. Siberian Partisans Take the Oath. 1932. Oils 103 A. MATVEYEV. October. 1927. Plaster-cast 105 W. SITTE. Calling Along. 1969. Oils 115 A. DEYNEKA. Before Going Domn the Mine Shaft. 1925. Tempera 119 A. DEYNEKA. Mother. 1932. Oils 121 A. DEYNEKA. A Model. 1951. Drawing 127 A. DEYNEKA. The Defence of Sebastopol. 1942. Oils 129 A. DEYNEKA. The Tractor Driver. 1956. Oils 131 A. DEYNEKA. By the Sea. 1956. Oils 132 A. DEYNEKA. The Dairymaid. 1960--1961. Mosaic 133 A. DEYNEKA. A Fine Morning. 1961. Mosaic 141 A. PLASTOV. Nazi Plane Flew By. 1942. Oils 142 A. PLASTOV. Reaping. A detail. 1946. Oils 143 A. PLASTOV. Haymaking. 1946. Oils 147 A. PLASTOV. Tractor Drivers at Supper. 1952. Oils 149 A. PLASTOV. Spring. At the Bathhouse. 1954. Oils 150 A. PLASTOV. By the Spring. 1952. Oils 151 A. PLASTOV. Noon. 1961. Oils 153 A. PLASTOV. Potato Picking. 1956. Oils 155 A. PLASTOV. Girl mith a Bicycle. 1957. Oils 157 A. PLASTOV. Portrait of Vanyusha Repin. 1961. Oils 165 M. SARYAN. Mules Laden mith Hay. 1910. Tempera 167 M. SARYAN. The Date-Palm. 1911. Tempera 169 M. SARYAN. Lady in a Mask. 1913. Oils 171 M. SARYAN. Portrait of the Poet Alexander Tsaturyan. 1915. Oils 173 M. SARYAN. Armenia. 1923. Oils 175 M. SARYAN. Portrait of Eg/she Charents. 1923. Oils 177 M. SARYAN. Portrait of Ruben Simonov. 1940. Oils 179 M. SARYAN. My Family. 1929. Oils 181 M. SARYAN. My Patio 183 M. SARYAN. Fruit of the Rocky Slopes of Mount Aragats. Oils 189 G. KORZHEV. In the Days of War. 1954. Oils 190 G. KORZHEV. Lovers. 1959. Oils 242 191 G. KORZHEV. Picking Up the Banner. The central part of the triptych Communists. 1957--1960. Oils 193 G. KORZHEV. The Artist. 1961. Oils 195 G. KORZHEV. The Mother. Part of the pentaptych Scorched by the Fire of War. 1964--1967. Oils 196 G. KORZHEV. The Scars of War. Part of the pentaptych Scorched by the Fire of War 197 G. KORZHEV. Cooer. Part of the pentaptych Scorched by the Fire of War 199 G. KORZHEV. The Farewell. Part of the pentaptych Scorched by the Fire of War 207 I. ZARINS. Soldiers of the Revolution. 1965. Oils 209 D. ZHILINSKY. Family. 1961. Tempera 213 A. and P. SMOLIN. Strike. 1965. Oils 215 I. SVAZAS. In the Port of Klaipeda. 1967. Oils 217 T. YABLONSKAYA. The Betrothed. 1966. Oils 219 T. SALAKHOV. Portrait of the Composer Kara Karayev. 1951. Oils 221 Y. MOISEYENKO. The Messengers. 1967. Oils 223 I. KLYCHEV. Part of the triptych Day of Joy. 1967. Oils 224 I. VIERU. Part of the triptych Ion's Happiness. 1967. Oils 225 N. ABDURAKHMANOV. Beloved Patterns. 1967. Oils 227 V. IVANOV. Lunch. From the series Russian Women. 1967. Oils 229 M. SAVITSKY. Partisan Madonna. 1967. Oils 233 Y. SHIROKOV. Portrait of Astafieo. 1970. Oils 235 V. YEROFEYEV. Happiness. 1972. Oils [243] __ALPHA_LVL0__ The End. [END]REQUEST TO READERS
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