Page 48 - Studio International - February 1973

Thursday, June 18th, 1972 martyrology of art than to its simple history. half a dozen kerosene-cookers spluttering away
Brominsky was born in 1886, one of the few in the shared kitchen and somebody's washing
sculptors of his generation. He lived the life of a out to dry. Yankilevsky lived with his wife and
After five years I am returning again to Moscow gifted Bohemian, and in the cruel Moscow child in one room of a flat like this, and worked
It took me a long time to make up my mind: if winter of 1920 he was found by his friends dying there as well : the room was organized with such
my Moscow friends had not kept urging me to in an unheated hovel. None of his works have marvellous ingenuity that Yankilevsky contrived
come, I would not have set out. In the past I had survived: only a few reproductions can be found to fit into it a considerable number of his very
always been there as a delegate of the official in magazines from that period. Chekrygin's large paintings. But since my last visit he has
Czechoslovak Artists' Union, welcomed by the drawings were saved, however, and in 1969 they obtained his own flat, and constructed a low but
corresponding Soviet organization with all the were exhibited at the Pushkin Museum in roomy studio out of his old place. I come across
traditional Russian ceremony and hospitality. Moscow, though his futurist period was not many works here that I already know: most often
But now, fortunately, I am once again an represented there. triptychs, half painting and half relief, long and
ordinary citizen, and no one can send me A passionate quest for the whole past of narrow, with an abstract composition in the
anywhere. At the airport my friends are waiting modern Russian art, in all its great diversity, the centre panel and the figures of a man and a
for me, and for a few days I am going to share attempt — almost in the spirit of archaeologists — woman in the wings. At one time Yankilevsky
their simple private life. We drive right across to bring to light the neglected works and borrowed from Picasso — especially his Dinard
Moscow. The sprawling white modern suburbs, forgotten fates of individuals, is a common paintings — and from Miro, with his neolithic
which have sprung up in the last few years and phenomenon among contemporary Russian signs : this helped him to purify his forms. But
keep on spreading, are alive with the greenery of artists Aygi recalls his generation's early years the chief impulse behind these paintings of his
spring and the blossoming trees, and in the latter half of the fifties. At that time the is the experience of the modern world of
immediately I feel at ease here. French impressionists were being released from sexuality and the machine, a theme shared with
Right away the poet Gennady Aygi begins the limbo of the Pushkin Museum's reserve Jarry, Duchamp and Picabia. 'The machine has
speaking about one aspect of the past history of collection, and at the end of the fifties the Paris become more than a mere adjunct of life. It is
Russian modern art which has not been (but not yet the Russian) cubists. In 1956 there really a part of human life . . . perhaps the very
mentioned so far in any of the works devoted to was first a Picasso and then a Léger exhibition, soul', wrote Picabia in 1915. But Yankilevsky's
the subject — the Makovec (Onion Dome) group. and in 1957 abstract paintings by French artists `mechanical symbolism' was not relieved by
It could be described roughly as pro-futurist. were on show for the first time at an international humour or even irony, and pressed on the artist
The group appeared on the scene with its exhibition held in connection with the Youth with all its tragic force. Yankilevsky evidently
manifesto of 1922, began publishing a magazine Festival. For a long time the names of Malevich needed all his intellectual ability and tenacity in
that went by the same name, and simultaneously and Tatlin were quite meaningless to young order to subject it to a great artistic order and
organized an exhibition in Moscow. It consisted artists, and they did not even realize that force it finally into the definitive, ceremonial,
of about twenty artists : today we know little or Kandinsky was a Russian. Only gradually, from hieratic form of his cruel-robot-idols.
nothing about them. Undoubtedly the most scraps of information, from reproductions come But since then important changes have taken
significant of them was Vasily Chekrygin. He across by chance, and from forgotten books, did place in Yankilevsky's work. His paintings have
was a child prodigy: at the age of ten he started they build up a picture of what should be their become darker, the composition has broken up,
studying ikon-painting in a monastery, and at own tradition. Of course young Soviet painters the human figures have changed into repulsive
thirteen he entered the Moscow Art School, are very interested in the new art trends in the monsters, an atmosphere reminiscent of
where he met the Burlyuks and Mayakovsky rest of the world. But at the same time they feel Franz Kafka's world has engulfed the paintings
(who was originally a painter). In 1913, aged they cannot be a part of them. Similarly, it was and drawings. (One of Yankilevsky's cycles is in
sixteen, he illustrated Mayakovsky's first book, not mere chance that made Russian avant-garde fact entitled The Atmosphere of Franz Kafka.)
1 !, and the following year he exhibited with the art in the first quarter of the present century so From both the human and the artistic points of
futurists and the rayonnists. After the war he distinct from that of Western Europe — and view, it is as though he had started all over again
developed a new style, a kind of narrative hence so significant. Whoever comes to Moscow from the very beginning. The large painting
symbolism, which resulted in several hundred must realize that Russia is not Europe. But entitled Twilight symbolizes Yankilevsky's latest
brilliant drawings. Chekrygin was planning neither is it Asia. It is a vast and complex period: the painting is almost completely black,
some monumental work, but his obituary country, really a sub-continent rather than a the dim figure of a pedestrian collapsing in the
appeared in only the second issue of Makovec: mere state, and it must create its own art itself, street looms out, and bright colours only break
he died in a tragic accident in 1922 at the age of out of its own great tradition and its own through the surface in one small spot.
twenty-five. Khlebnikov's obituary was there present situation. Perhaps Yankilevsky himself regrets that he
along with Chekrygin's, and in fact Makovec can no longer continue with his former
itself died with this issue. The main driving monumental compositions. But those paintings
force behind the group was Pavel Florensky — Friday, June 19th. still clung too closely to the old artistic
priest, theologian, mathematician, physicist, certainties : their solid form followed in the
chemist, philosopher and aesthetician. In the First thing in the morning I head for the tradition of modern art, but in the end was not
twenties Florensky disappeared into a work studios. Moscow nowadays is 5o kilometres able to embrace new themes, and so
camp, and many years later — perhaps in 1943 — wide, and visiting the studios means disintegrated. From the very beginning
died there. He had left behind him at home the criss-crossing the city. But several of them are Yankilevsky has been interested in something
uncompleted manuscript of an extensive work, clustered together in the centre of Moscow more than painting: for him a painting serves
U vodorozdyelov mysli (At the Watershed of around Sretensky Boulevard, and so I begin as an instrument for analysing the modern world
Thought), one chapter of which, dealing with the there, with Yankilevsky and Pivovarov. and man's fate in it. Yankilevsky makes no
connections between the biological and technical Last time I was at Yankilevsky's was in one of secret of the fact that he feels he is going through
worlds, was published three years ago in the those notorious, large, sub-divided flats. On the a difficult crisis. But it was not by chance that
magazine Dyekorativnoye iskusstvo (Decorative door a name-plate with the instructions to ring Kupka entitled the painting that represented his
Art). In the same issue there were also some once, twice, three times . . . and so on, a different artistic break-through L'Amorphe, and that
remarks on another forgotten figure, Petr family in each room, perhaps two or three Picabia later wrote about 'amorphism' : modern
Brominsky. As so often happens in Russia, the generations on top of each other, coat-racks in art has no alternative but to destroy its own rules
story of Brominsky belongs more to the the corridor piled with high heaps of clothing, and forms and descend into chaos and