2015 Russian Art of the 20th Century and Contemporary Russian Art

Unfortunately, the art of Siberian artists has been often neglected. But it is art of outstanding Siberian masters, such as P. Jakubowski and O. Jankus, which reveals a peculiar artistic worldview, enables us to perceive the national identity of the artists, with a reliable understanding of historical and artistic context of the epoch, thus giving us a chance to comprehend the history of our country.
Drawing on yet unpublished materials, the author will examine artistic, theoretical and epistolary heritage of P. Jakubowski and O. Jankus, which gives an opportunity to trace the development of Siberian avant-garde as a reflection of the artists’ national identity. P. Jakubowski and O. Jankus had no art education, however, the mastery of their artwork is doubtless, such a phenomenon is a unique chance to analyze the development of avant-garde art on the periphery, particularly in Novosibirsk and Tomsk, and especially in the context of the time of crisis in the early 20th century. Besides, within the framework of theoretical and epistolary heritage of Siberian artists, painting fully reflects ideas and views of the artists (“Manifesto of synthetical dynamism”, 1920 by O. Jankus; P. Jakubowski’s letters and diaries of the period from 1914 till 1921, and memoirs of the inner circle of the artist).
As a result of a careful study of works by P.  Jakubowski and O. Jankus, features allowing us to talk about some sort of a synthesis of the periphery national identity and “Siberian eclecticism” are revealed. Being the representatives of ideas of their time, both artists could not avoid the influence of the course of history. Their turn to avant-garde was motivated by severe social conditions, political instability, and the idea that “art advances life” (O. Jankus “Manifesto of synthetical dynamism”, 1920, Tomsk, p. 3).
Thus, having no academic education or opportunity to acquaint themselves with works of European artists, the painters came in their art to leading European painting trends. In the light of the newfound heritage of Siberian masters the conception of “periphery avant-garde” gets a completely new meaning.

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The unique creative method of Evgeny Kibrik (1906–1978) as one of the most prominent classics of the Soviet graphic art of the 20th century allows us to find out how the vivid and moving images of characters by R. Rolland, Ch. De Coster, A. Pushkin, N. Gogol and M. Zoshchenko appeared in the artist’s work.
The illustrator’s keen perception of the place, time, and actual events helped him to create realistic and original images of other peoples and epochs. When creating the images, Kibrik searched for the characters’ prototypes in real life. In their appearance the artist sought to find the necessary component that would tie the past and the present. The key role in his work was to be played by the Stanislavsky system that helped him attain historical credibility and vitality of the composition.
The distinctive character of Evgeny Kibrik’s creative method is considered to be national pride and cultural heritage, which today may play a leading role in forming the ideology of the contemporary artists.
The author of the research attempts to inquire into the evolution of the outstanding master’s style scrutinizing a wide thematic range he worked with.
The analysis of the method of creating a graphical image of a literary character is seen as a fundamental theoretical problem (from collecting historical data and working with the prototypes to creating images themselves) in which theoretical, methodological and philosophical facets of the artist’s work predominate.

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Since the foundation of the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts, its education system has been mainly based on the study of the Renaissance culture. Italy, with its great art heritage, rich collections, and unforgettable nature was an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Russian masters, turned to it as to a center of European culture. In the 20th — early 21th centuries the St.-Petersburg academic school retains strong interest in the Renaissance art, despite all the changes occurring in contemporary art and the global review of traditions. A. A. Mylnikov, the greatest representative of  St. Petersburg painters, turned repeatedly to the interpretation of Renaissance images, deriving from the painting by Giorgione, Titian, El Greco. Today St. Petersburg academic school is connected with art work of the following artists: O. A. Eremeev, A. S. Charkin, V. S. Pesikov, K. Lee, H. V. Savkuev, A. K. Bystrov, N. P. Fomin, S. N. Repin, A. V. Chuvin, B. D. Sveshnikov, V. A. Mylnikova, A. A. Pakhomov and others. These are the masters of the St.-Petersburg school of contemporary academic art in their different styles and art movements. The Renaissance art becomes some kind of a starting point for them. Modern masters interpret the Renaissance ideas in different ways. N. Blokhin, V. Mogilevtsev put an emphasis on strict academic drawing, brought to masterful perfection. L. Kirillova, Y. Behova, N. Ryzhikova are fascinated with quattrocento painting, while sculptors P. Shevchenko, I. Korneev are captivated by plastic discoveries of Donatello and Michelangelo. Renaissance motives are revealed in portraiture by Y. Kaluta, V. Borovik, E. Zubov and in landscape paintings by A. Bliok, N. Tsitsin, M. Atayants, M. Razdoburdin. There is no doubt, that in the works of almost each of the artists landscape images of Italy, painted from nature and memories, can be found. One of the most spectacular recent events was the exhibition “Inspired by Italy” in the Russian Academy Fine Arts Museum, which showed a retrospective of Russian artists’ Italian impressions from the 18th century to the present day. Recently, the I. Repin St. Petersburg State Academy Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture held a great number of exhibitions devoted to contemporary academic art in different Italian cities: Bologna, Venice, Florence.

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In the mid-1960s, young Russian artists from Moscow and the cities of Vladivostok and Ussuriysk in Primorsky Krai formed the Shikotan Group, named after the island where they summered for months at a time and created thousands of landscape paintings. Their activities lasted until 1991, when the group disappeared soon after the demise of the communist regime. The area including Shikotan Island forms the southern Kuril Islands in the Okhotsk Sea. The artists fascinated with the wilderness of Shikotan’s beautiful sea coasts and rolling hills and those, who were acquainted with young women workers at the largest fish factory in Far Eastern Russia, represented Shikotan’s landscape idyllically, with a tranquil bay and a distinctive form of double volcano. A particular composition, comprising a bay in the middle plane and a distant view of the volcanic Mt. Tyatya on Kunashir Island, recalls views of Naples, a preferred stop on the Grand Tours of Europe, especially for nineteenth-century Russian artists eager to work abroad. This paper intends to reconstruct the Shikotan Group’s activities based on field research and interviews with the artists, starting with the group leader, Oleg Loshakov. Further, it aims to describe the characteristics of the style discernible in their paintings, which can be well-illustrated by comparing them with the so-called “Soviet Impressionist Paintings,” a new definition recently preferred especially by American (U. S.) collectors.

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At the turn of the 1960s and the 1970s the new generation of the seventies came to stage. In contrast to the civil pathos of their predecessors young artists declared passeism and stylization. Renaissance art was one of the sources that shaped the “style” of such artists as D. Zhilinskyi, T. Nazarenko, O. Filatchev, etc.
However, the vision of these artists of the Renaissance art was stipulated for Soviet realities and ideology. An attempt to deconstruct this vision is made in the present report. It is based on the author’s conversations with the artists, as well as on the works of the art historian and influential pedagogue M. Alpatov.
Alpatov was certain that the comprehension of classical art depended less on the audience erudition and more on its “spiritual forces that would help it to ascend to the point, from which the most significant and beautiful things in the world could be seen”. In his lectures Alpatov attempted to help young artists to reach those heights by brilliant analysis of artistic forms, emotional perception of every detail and also by a special interpretation of the Renaissance masters’ ideology. Piero della Francesca in Alpatov’s sketches resembles the protagonist of the ideology of the 70s generation artists. He is depicted as a man of active civil stance, but not prone to political declamation, capable to experience strong emotions and ready to join the fight, but indifferent to accidental circumstances of everyday life. In his works Piero purposely idealizes his actual reality to inspire his contemporaries to realize the depicted ideal.
Alpatov’s interpretation of the 15th century artist reflected Soviet men’s image of the positive hero, formulated in the 1930s and actual up to the end of the 1980s. It is this “Soviet Piero” that was embraced and taken as a sample by young artists of the 70s. Partly because of this their art preserved such canonical aspects of socialist realism as idealization and tendentiousness.

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Existentialism after World War II is connected with the appearance of the new art trends, not only in the Western world, but also in East Asia and in the Soviet bloc. Such worldwide influence of existentialism is associated with a similar ontological experience of individuals from different countries in the war, pre-war, and post-war period. Therefore, the study of existentialism and its correlation to art is important for understanding of the value of art of the postwar period as the universal human value of the contemporary world.
However, in the Russian art studies, the problem of the correlation between existentialism and visual arts in the post-war Soviet Union is not explored enough. Underestimated influence of existentialism in the Soviet culture, which was caused by permeated understanding of its ideological isolation from the West, may be the reason of the underinvestigation of the subject. Meanwhile, in the 50–60s, existentialism was quite deeply studied in the field of philosophy and literary criticism, and that is an indirect evidence of its impact on the post-war period Soviet culture. All the more, the duality of Soviet life and the existence of Soviet unofficial culture allow us to conjecture the possibility of the relationship between existentialism and Soviet unofficial art.
Vadim Sidur and Oh Jong Wook were outstanding sculptors of Soviet unofficial art and South Korean modern art. The main theme of their sculpture in the 60s was a man and his suffering in the world, which is frequent in the works of European artists, whose art is considered to be closely linked with existentialism. A devastating war and a sharp social change in the country had a significant impact on the work of sculptors, who were completely isolated from each other, but equally concerned about the meaning of human being.
The research on the relationship between their work and existentialism is crucial for the understanding of the post-war Soviet unofficial art and South Korean modern art in the world art context.

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Art relations between Russia and Germany in the 20th century have a very rich history. Germany was one of the most favorite destinations among the Russian artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. International exhibitions in Berlin, Munich, Dresden and DÜsseldorf attracted the artists. In 1922 in Berlin the first exhibition of the Russian art was presented. The artists in exile are a very important part of German-Russian art relations as well.
Since the late 1980s after a period of long isolation between Russia and Germany a new wave of artistic interaction begins. In 1988 in Moscow the first international auction of paintings by artists of the Russian avant-garde and modern Soviet artists was held. The auction was a huge success among the foreign collectors. From this moment the young Russian artists attract the attention of the European art community. On the show IsKUNSTvo I. (West Berlin, Bahnhof Westend 1988) the artists of Moscow Conceptualism were shown together with the young German artists. It was the beginning of a new stage in the development of artistic connections in Germany and Russia.
Since 1988 the collective exhibitions of contemporary Russian art in various exhibition venues in Germany became regular. In this report the major art exhibitions held in different cities of Germany during the period will be considered, among them “The museum MANI — 40 Moscow Artists” (Frankfurt, exhibition hall Karmelitenkloster, 1991), “Soviet art circa 1990” (DÜsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle DÜsseldorf, 1991), “Fluchtpunkt Moskau” (Aachen, Ludwig Fonim, 1994) “Polet.Uhod.Ischeznovenie — Moscow Conceptual Art” (Berlin, 1995), “Kunst im verborgenen. Russian nonconformists 1957–1995” (Ludwigshafen, Wilhelm-Hack Museum, 1995).
On the basis of the exhibition catalogs, memories of the artists, press mentions the author analyzes the concept of the exhibitions. In conclusion the author analyzes the process of integration of the Russian contemporary art in the context of the German art scene and it’s perception abroad in the early ’90s.

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Recently posters of Moscow students of design schools often won the first places and Grand Prix of the most prestigious international design competitions, such as Golden Bee, the Moscow International Biennial of Graphic Design; the International Poster and Graphic Design Festival Chaumont; the International Lahti Poster Biennial; Istambul Poster Biennial; the International Poster Biennial in Warsaw. What are the author’s methods of teaching leading to such successful results? Who are the teachers (who are practicing designers at the same time) helping their students in professional self-realization? What kind of student projects is now most demanded on the international design scene. This is the range of issues dealt with in the report, submitted to the conference.

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Polikarp Ermolaevich Sudomoykin (b. 1931) is a previously unstudied naive artist from an Old Believers’ village in Buryatia. The main purpose of our report is to present the artistic world of the painter, to highlight the system of his spiritual values and his means of artistic expression. Icon-painting and nude art contrast in his works representing a unique phenomenon. One of the best-known subjects of Sudomoykin are women with children bathing in the river after a hard work. The author regards these bathers as ‘historical figures’ as they are represented through the prism of wartime. The scenes are always set in the period of the Great Patriotic War on the Bilyutayka river bank in artist’s native village. Although Sudomoykin depicts one of the most terrible wars, he succeeds to create an atmosphere of happiness and peace. An “invisible” war is the core motif of his painting. In Su­dumoykin’s art a woman embodies fidelity, beauty and peace. Women are mothers and ancestors, saviors.
Narrative scenes of the artist’s works are one more aspect of his art. The language of Sudomoykin is unique: dialect of the Old Believers, archaic words and expressions, proverbs and sayings.
This report is a result of a field research based on personal acquaitance with Polykarp Sudomoykin and analysis of his works. The author takes into account the tradition of studying the naive art in Russia.

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The report discusses the Renaissance allusions in the painting of the St. Petersburg artist Vyacheslav Mikhailov. His picture “Tondo. Piazza di Spagna” (2002) was chosen as the emblem of the international conference “Actual problems of theory and history of art” in 2015.
In post-modern pluralist art criticism, the leading Russian art historians D. Sarabianov, M. German, V. Turchin are unanimous in opinion about the art of Viacheslav Mikhailov, in which they see rich and strenuous philosophic content in painting, often embodied in an abstract form. Strong classical tradition with an intense emotional charge, characteristic of the artist, lends his works (and “A Tondo” is one of them) utmost concreteness, which generates quickly changing images and gives the impression of an amazing integrity. It is a spectrum of sophisticated deterministic allusions that predestined a choice of this particular painting as an emblem of the conference focused on the idea of Renaissance in art. Explicit and implicit connotations are produced by the very circular shape and color composition. Diversity and elaborateness of texture creates an effect of maximum proximity of perception, so that a monumental work of art is turned into a fragment of a grandiose canvas of the epoch.

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