ЯКУ ХИСАШИ (Университет Хоккайдо, Япония). Грузинский художник и история искусств на Сахалине
HISASHI YAKOU (Hokkaido University, Japan). A Georgian Artist and the Art History in Sakhalin
After the end of WWII, the entire Sakhalin Island in the Far East was overtaken and ruled by the Soviet Union. The Island’s Japanese residents were replaced by Russians and others, who constituted the largest, multiethnic country. Sakhalin became a place where people who left their home settled and constructed a complex society, similar with the other Soviet Virgin Lands. Artists, too, arrived from rather remote places and began to represent Sakhalin and surrounding areas. Givi Mantkava (1930–2003), soon after finishing his study at the Academy of Arts in Tbilisi, Georgia, moved to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, to succeed among the very first artists who temporarily worked on the island, such as Armenian Boris Shakhnazarov (1905–1993) and Russian Pavel Pogodin (1916–1983). Mantkava lived in Sakhalin until his death and deserves to be called the founder of the Sakhalin School of Art. He was a member of the elite Russian Artists’ Union, and left us a large amount of paintings, including typical maritime landscapes of Sakhalin and Kuril Islands, fish and fishery scenes, a series of Sakhalin town views, and portraits of the indigenous Nivkh people. Though he seemed to be assimilated into a new environment in his work, Mantkava did not forget his homeland and also repeated his cherished, familiar subjects. The Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in the old Georgian capital of Mtskheta and a naïve artist of the national pride, Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), remained his favorite motifs. The poems of Vazha-Pshavela (1861–1915) must have fermented his peasant and mountaineer feelings of Georgia. A more curious thing is that Mantkava occasionally changed his creative style, which was basically that of the official Socialist Realism, and reverted to the modernist style he acquired from professors of Tbilisi Academy and other Georgian artists, such as Vasily Shukhaev (1887–1973), David Kakabadze (1889-1952), and Lado Gudiashvili (1896–1980), who all stayed in Paris for a long period to learn much from the post-Impressionists and the École de Paris painters. Once returned to Caucasia, they suffered under the Soviet regime, which oppressed and forced the artists to abandon their non-official ways of expression. This paper focuses on Mantkava and other artists of Sakhalin who left their native towns and continued to work in such a remote region from the artistic centers of Russia. It also examines how these artists tried (or sometimes did not try) to preserve their memories of home, taking into consideration the Soviet art policies as well.
Givi Mantkava, Shikotan, landscape painting, nivkh, socialist realism, modern art, migration
Гиви Манткава, Шикотан, пейзажная живопись, нивх, соцреализм, современное искусство, миграция