Daria Bogolyubova-Kuznetsova
Moscow State University of Printing Arts, Russia
The ideas of the association “Makovetz” (1921–1927, Moscow) which were declared in its program, appear to be akin to the philosophy of Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance.
The analysis of graphic works of the members of the association reveals that an image of a human is a very important theme for them and is tackled in different ways: as a generalized overpersonal image, which expresses the unity of humans and as a portrait, which shows a sitter’s individual inner world. Such kinds of a human image coexist in their art, but by the end of the 1920s “psychical portraits” start to dominate.
In the beginning of the 1920s there were two attitudes to the mission of art. While according to the one, art should unveil ideas, embodied in nature, according to the other — art should express ideas, which can be materialized in no other way than by human creative activity. Whereas artists who shared the first point of view tended to construct the space in the system of the perceptive perspective and preferred portrait image of a human, those who shared the latter — used the systems of cubism and rayonism and worked both in a genre of a generalized and individual portrait. The change of a perspective on this question causes the change in artistic means.
The diversity of attitudes to the expression of human image among the members of “Makovetz” can stem from the aspiration to completeness, to the expression of not only temporal but also eternal dimension of a human being. The necessity of this was manifested by P. Florensky.
The paper demonstrates that the changes in the artistic means and ways of expression of a human image in art of “Makovetz” members were changed not because they adopted the reinforcing positivism ideology, but because they kept strong links with the ideas of the Russian religious-philosophical Renaissance.