Renowned Soviet avant-garde art collection comes to Moscow
MOSCOW (AP) – Vladimir Lysenko’s painted bull stares with flat black eyes like a double-barrel shotgun, one of his horns festooned in a mosaic of bright rectangles, the tip of his tail stretched toward a glowing orange globe that may be the sun.
Over the years, the painting has become one of the most renowned images of the artistic ferment that bubbled under the strictures of insipid Soviet social realism. But until recently, anyone who wanted to see it had to travel to an isolated, gritty city in Uzbekistan’s desert.
This month, more than 200 paintings from the Savitsky State Art Museum of Karakalpakstan went on display at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, a rare traveling exhibit from the gallery widely regarded as having the world’s second-best collection of Soviet avantgarde art.
“This exhibition opens completely new, and not very well researched, layers of art that are linked to the international avant-garde,” said Pushkin museum director Maria Loshak.
The show also draws attention to the history of the Savitsky museum, which is as remarkable as the works it holds.
In the 1950s, painter Igor Savitsky got work in an archaeological expedition in Uzbekistan. He became fascinated by the intricate weavings and elegant pottery of the local Karakalpak ethnic group and collected their art extensively. Local officials, flattered by his interest, helped him establish a museum in the city of Nukus.
Savitsky also was concerned about the fate of the works of the Soviet Union’s more adventurous artists.
In the early 20th century, Russia had been a hotbed of bold art experimental movements – Suprematism, Luminism, Constructivism – as well as visions too idiosyncratic to fit into any category.
But by the early 1930s, authorities decreed that art must express Soviet ideals and be comprehensible to the average worker. Bold colors, dancing polygons and strange faces disappeared from the public view, replaced by muscular construction workers and children devotedly presenting bouquets to Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
Artists unwilling to conform were denounced as “formalists” who valued aesthetics over ideology, and some suffered severe repression. Lysenko was arrested in 1935 and although he was recorded as showing some paintings in the 1940s, little else is reported of his work. He is believed to have died sometime in the 1950s.
Alexander Nikolaev, whose “Way of Life” is the main emblem of the exhibit’s advertising, also was arrested. The painting shows a young man in a skullcap staring as if in a trance, against a nearly abstract background of trees and a river. Associated Press