As for the artists whose works are presented in the exhibition, the list was unexpected. Here are the authors, whose works are exhibited in the best museums in the world, and the modest models, whose names remained on the drawings sent in the 1960s and 1970s to the Moscow People’s Correspondence University of Arts for creative consultation. Here is a professor of the art and graphics department of a pedagogical university and a naive artist who worked as a plasterer and foreman on a state farm… Actually, such a mixture is justified by the topic: in the state In owned houses You don’t choose your neighbors, they end up being your neighbors. Most importantly for the exhibition, however, the works of all these artists, both amateur and professional, bear witness to their personal experience of living in state houses. Furthermore, most of the drawings were not made from memories, but within the alienated “official” space. In this sense, the drawings turn out to be a “mold” of both the emotional experiences of the moment and the spaces seen from the inside.
Drawing by Konstantin Karamyan from the series “Border Guards”. Photo: Zhanna Vasilyeva/RG
This immediacy and immediacy of response is evident, for example, in the drawings of Viktor Duvidov, made with pen and ink on lined notebook paper. Duvidov, one of the famous artists of children’s books, author of famous illustrations to “Fairy Tales” by Rudyard Kipling, “Doctor Aibolit” and “The Fly Tsokotukha” by Korney Chukovsky, creator of a famous series of drawings dedicated to Him Bolshoi Theater ballet, ended up in a pre-trial detention center twice in his life. The first time was in my youth, in 1963. The second time he “thundered” due to an unfortunate traffic accident in 1971, then the master of caricature Boris Efimov worked for him. Duvidov always remembered this help with gratitude. And the experience of imprisonment remained in drawings, sketches on notebook pages, which in 1994 were translated into engravings and printed in a small edition. An ordinary paper folder for an employee with the imprint of the artist’s portrait on a background of bars and the same imprint of the title “With my own eyes” was the cover of that album of prints based on the drawings by Duvidov. This engraving “With my own eyes” could well claim the role of bookplate, although it does not indicate books from a personal library, but from the library of “Personal Affairs”.
Graphics by Oleg Kudryashov. Photo: Zhanna Vasilyeva/RG
The exhibition in the “Ark”, which brings together drawings from the years 1960-1970 made in barracks, hospitals, pre-trial detention centers and prisons, is interesting precisely because it allows us to evaluate the artist’s personal vision in an impersonal “official” place. Indeed, this silent and concentrated gaze of a prisoner, a patient, a soldier, whether drawing portraits of neighbors, or the ascetic space of a hospital ward or a parade ground with a barracks, or simply drawing with careful precision, like Viktor Duvidov. , the bars of a prison window with a razor carefully attached to them, provided a rare opportunity to separate oneself from one’s surroundings. Transform this oppressive world of narrowness and density into a drawing object. This means distancing yourself from him at least for a moment. And the drawing of an exercise yard, over which there is a checkered sky, does not refer to Van Gogh’s Prisoners’ Walk, but to the experience of a person who draws clouds seen from the “cage” to take them with him. Where the clouds are not visible.
Graphics by Oleg Kudryashov. Photo: Zhanna Vasilyeva/RG
In general, the engravings created from Duvidov’s drawings are harsher, in them the narrow, twisted and overcrowded space acquires a generalized formula, where the lack of privacy is the same characteristic of a “government house” as of a “government house”. It is even more surprising that in the drawings themselves he avoids spectacular expressionist techniques. You can paint disgraced neighbors the same way you would paint a model in the studio or an impeccably constructed sculpture of an ancient athlete. In genre sketches, he captures not only poses, gestures, types, but surprisingly recreates the reduced space: there is almost no “air” on the sheet, just as there is none in the camera. A long chain of dominoes on the table is almost the only construction line in perspective.
Exhibition poster with a drawing by Yuri Makarov. Photo: Zhanna Vasilyeva/RG
Unlike Duvidov, who recorded space, everyday details and types, Yuri Makarov, who sent his drawings, watercolors and gouaches from places not far away to the People’s Correspondence University of Arts in the early 1960s, focused in the portraits. They work very well for you. Most likely, Makarov had an artistic education, at least an art school. But both in the portraits and in the series “At Night” we see well-written figures, scenes that seem to float in the space of a white sheet. The leaf becomes synonymous with limitlessness, with will, and the drawing becomes a faithful companion on this path to freedom. No, Makarov does not consider his neighbors, apparently in the countryside, prisoners. He paints people who, at least in the drawings, appear as individuals, standing out from the black mass of camp prisoners in robes.
The Drawing Man is a self-portrait by Yuri Makarov from the 1960s. Photo: Zhanna Vasilyeva/RG
The army drawings of Oleg Kudryashov, one of the key Russian graphic artists of the 20th century (suffice it to say that the recent exhibition of 20th century graphics at the Tretyakov Gallery was titled “The Century of Graphics. From Kazimir Malevich to Oleg Kudryashov” ), were made from memory. He tried to show drawings made in the 60s, while he served in the army, when he joined the Union of Artists he offered them to publishers, but they advised him in a friendly way: “You know what? It is better not to show. to them.” In 1965, he was forced to burn the entire series in the stove. This was one of the first experiences of saying goodbye to the past and starting from scratch. He then burned his works before emigrating to England in 1974, and less a quarter of a century later; in the same way, before returning to Russia, he will burn works created in Great Britain.
Kudryashov returned to “soldier drawings” in the 1980s, apparently in parallel with his work on the “Soldier and the Devil” series. This series, like the army series, became the basis of an animated film created by the artist and his wife Dina Kudryashova. Today, his drawings remind us, of course, of Mikhail Larionov’s soldier series, the “Donkey’s Tail” exhibitions and the popular caricature prints. However, Kudryashov’s drawings are harsher, more sarcastic and full of plots in the spirit of Hasek’s “The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik.” The absurd style here is as much a part of barracks life as the guardhouse and drill exercises on the parade ground. Kudryashov got to know the guardhouse in depth: the 96 days he spent there were impressive. Unable to tolerate the lack of freedom, Kudryashov went AWOL, after which he found himself back in the guardhouse.
The brutality, humor, visual acuity and drawing of this military series echo the merciless cruelty of the illustrations in the novel “The Idiot.” Kudryashov fuses folk tales about the soldier and the devil, the lubok, the avant-garde experience, Russian classics and his own experience in the army into a personal visual language that led to engraving, zinc sheet carvings and, in ultimately, to sculpture.
In this context, the hospital drawings of Sergei Stepanov, a naive artist from the Orenburg region, whose works are kept in the Chernomyrdin Museum (a large exhibition was recently held there on the occasion of the centenary of the artist’s birth) and in the Orsk and Orenburg art museums impress with a combination of detailed workmanship and calm balance. Stepanov had a difficult childhood. Suffice it to say that his younger brother and sister died of hunger in the 1930s. Sergei himself was rescued in the hospital. After being wounded near Moscow in 1942, he became disabled. This did not prevent him from working as a foreman on a state farm, but hospitals constantly appeared in his life. He paints sleeping roommates, nurses, a patient reading The Young Guard in the hallway near the stairs, people taking hydrogen sulfide baths. The space of a hospital, and especially a sanatorium, appears in his drawings as a world on pause. It’s clean here, you can lie, draw, read. This is a kind of cultural holiday, a world where you are taken care of. And this unexpected, almost idyllic image of a hospital room with a rug in front of the bed seems like a Dantesque limbo where souls rest.
Therefore, in the exhibition, Stepanov’s drawings are located in the central corridor of the gallery, which connects two wings, with drawings and sketches of soldiers in the pre-trial detention center and in the camp. His works seem to return you to a space of silence and respite. Not so little…
