Nonconformism in art. Soviet Nonconformist Artists Become Classics

On February 11, the Victoria Gallery opens the exhibition "Nonconformism as a Reference Point", which will include works of unofficial Russian art of the second half of the 20th century from the collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The exposition of an unprecedented scale for Samara will include more than 30 authors who will present the entire spectrum of Russian unofficial art from the 1950s to the present day. The curator of the gallery, Sergei Balandin, at the request of the "Big Village" compiled an educational program on the new exposition.

What were the nonconformists talking about?

The earliest work at the exhibition was the painting "Spring" in 1950 Boris Sveshnikov. He wrote it at the age of 23, when he was doing time in the camp. For Sveshnikov, as for most non-formists, it is important to appeal to the spiritual essence of man. In the conditions of Soviet atheism, they invented their own images, which endowed with a sacred meaning: painting was akin to a mystical vow for them. Nonconformists are the circle of artists representing the unofficial art of the USSR: self-taught, dissidents, philosophers - they came to art in a variety of ways, but their desire unites find your own, non-formal artistic language.

Boris Sveshnikov

Representatives of nonconformism also include Mikhail Shvartsman, Marlene Spindler, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Vladimir Yakovlev

Many "unofficial" artists were influenced by Kazemir Malevich, such as Vladmir Sterligov, who was his direct student. It is not difficult to see Suprematist compositions in the work of Eduard Steinberg, in the "Family" Oleg Tselkov Malevich's "peasants" need to be seen: flat faces, figures that seem to be curved like a sheet of metal or foil, bright aniline colors, small eyes - the artist did everything to make a painfully monotonous dull hell out of the Soviet constructivist utopia. In 1977, the artist left the country and lived stateless for 38 years.

Oleg Tselkov. A family. 1985

The exhibition also features works by Grisha Bruskin, Pyotr Belenok and Evgeny Rukhin

Alexander Roginsky some consider him the only representative of pop art in Russia. Long before Sots Art, he began to depict the communal life of a Soviet person: “Red Door” hanging on the wall, “Red Wall” with a rosette, “Floor” tiled - his most famous works. He doesn't laugh, he doesn't sneer like socialist artists, he sees in the poverty of Soviet cuisine a special philosophy and mystery of Russian life.

Alexander Roginsky. Mosgaz. 1964

Lianozians and their "little man"

The exhibition features works by Vladimir Nemukhin, who also belongs to Lianozovo

This was the name of poets and artists, friends of the Kropivnitsky family, who gathered in their apartment in a barrack-type house No. 2 at Lianozovo station on the outskirts of Moscow. They are distinguished by their attention to everyday reality, from which they construct with direct quotations the scanty and absurd world of the new “little man”. The most active of them and the most famous later became Oscar Rabin. It was he who organized the infamous "Bulldozer Exhibition", destroyed by the authorities, and then forced them to agree on an exhibition in Izmailovsky Park. The unbending, strong-willed nature of the artist, which he showed as an ambassador of independent artists, does not seem to be reflected in his works at all: bleak, black, as if charred landscapes with views of the outskirts.

Oscar Rabin

Fictional world of Moscow conceptualists

Conceptualists also include the work of Viktor Pivovarov, Igor Makarevich, Andrey Monastyrsky

The well-known critic Boris Groys called conceptualism in Russia "romantic", since its representatives were only engaged in fantasizing. They fled from Soviet reality into a kind of speculative world, which they inhabited with completely unusual characters.

The most significant dreamer in the history of art was Ilya Kabakov. He came up with “Primakov sitting in a closet”, “Malygin the decorator”, who painted only in the margins, even if the sheet was blank, “a man who flew into space from his apartment” and many more stories and puzzles for the audience. He eventually entered the history of world art as the inventor of the "total installation", that is, such an installation in which a person is completely surrounded, so that he can even forget exactly where he is. And all the heroes of Kabakov, like himself, are people who want to escape from reality.

Ilya Kabakov. Valya is coming. 1972

Another conceptualist - Dmitry Prigov- a real Renaissance man: an artist, a poet, a thinker, as a film actor he played episodic roles with Lungin and German. His famous cycle of poems about the “militaner” was cult in dissident circles, and in the graphics he drew with a ballpoint pen, and in large-scale installation projects, one of the most important images was the “all-seeing eye”. Big Brother here is woven into a mystical knot woven from archetypal monsters and symbols, which, like Bosch, is simply impossible to break.

Dmitry Prigov

Rethinking the life of the Sretenites

Other artists of the direction: Oleg Vasilyev, Sergey Shablavin, Eduard Steinberg

The Sretensky Boulevard group brought together artists whose workshops were located nearby. Often meeting and discussing art, they influenced each other, tested the same techniques, getting different results. First of all, the focus of this group was work with space: both with the space of the house and with the space of the landscape. Started out as a Jungian type surrealist Vladimir Yankilevsky in her works she combines fragments of everyday life: a subway car, an elevator, an entrance hall, a toilet, etc. - with archetypal or abstract symbols, so that if his characters move somewhere, it turns out that this movement takes place in the wheel of samsara.

Vladimir Yankilevsky. Dedicated to my parents' parents. 1972

Ivan Chuikov plays with elements of the home environment: windows, doors, sockets, cabinets - turning them into works of classical genres: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, combining everyday objects with images of artistic reality.

Ivan Chuikov. Window LXIV. 2002

The fun of the "new wave" artists

Another representative of the direction - Vadim Zakharov

The "new wave", which replaced the older generation of conceptualists, is usually called "dreamers", whose images from philosophical and dreamy became frankly hedonistic, absurd and cheerful. Instead of "stories", they offer viewers "hallucianations". Another characteristic feature was collective creativity. One of the most famous such art groups was the Fly Agaric, from which the artist later emerged Konstantin Zvezdochetov. In his vivid paintings, the characters of the humorous magazine "Crocodile" and the images of Russian classical painting, the heroes of Repin and Serov, are freely combined. The laughter of the artist must expose and undermine the seriousness reigning in the world.

Konstantin Zvezdochetov. Cossacks write a letter. 2005

Satire on the world of consumption by social artists

Other representatives of the direction - Boris Orlov and Alexander Kosolapov

Artists who decided to shift American pop art to Soviet reality became the founders of a new direction "Sots Art", which was engaged not so much in the philosophical understanding of consumerism as in a satire on the aesthetic squalor of mass culture and the supply of ideological material to the USSR. In the works of social artists, images of famous people are often used, especially images of leaders. Sculptor Leonid Sokov reproduces the principle of a Russian folk toy with a peasant and a bear sawing a log, putting in place the fairy-tale characters of Stalin and Hitler - tyrants beat the world. Sokov is distinguished by the clarity and directness of the message, ironic didacticism and a well-aimed choice of artistic form.

Leonid Sokov. Hitler and Stalin. 2006

National ready-made of the Leningrad "New Artists"

"New Artists" - a galaxy of self-taught artists, led by Timur Novikov, and who worked deliberately dirty and expressive. Meanwhile, the work of Novikov himself strove for moderation, conciseness, and pure colors. The artist worked especially hard with fabric, which in his interpretation became either a curtain, or a tapestry, or a banner. At the same time, he uses a factory pattern or texture of fabrics, compiles images from magazines and albums, becoming a Russian Duchamp, and inventing a national ready-made.

Timur Novikov. From the Forgotten Ideals of a Happy Childhood series. 2000

Landscape work for land artists

The attitude of the Soviet authorities towards contemporary art was not always negative. Suffice it to recall that in the first years after the revolution, the art of the avant-garde was almost a state officialdom. Its representatives, such as the artist Malevich or the architect Melnikov, became famous all over the world and at the same time were welcomed at home. However, in the country of victorious socialism, advanced art soon ceased to fit into the party ideology. The famous “bulldozer exhibition” of 1974 became a symbol of confrontation between the authorities and artists in the USSR.

Underground nonconformists

Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, visiting an exhibition of avant-garde artists in the Manezh in 1962, not only criticized their work, but also demanded to “stop this disgrace”, calling the paintings “daub” and other, even more indecent words.

After the defeat by Khrushchev, unofficial art spun off from official art, which is also non-conformist, alternative, underground. The Iron Curtain did not prevent artists from making themselves known abroad, and their paintings were bought by foreign collectors and gallery owners. But at home it was not easy to organize even a modest exhibition in some house of culture or institute.

When the Moscow artist Oscar Rabin and his friend, poet and collector Alexander Glezer opened an exhibition of 12 artists in the Friendship Club on the Enthusiasts Highway in Moscow, it was closed by the KGB and party workers two hours later. Rabin and Glezer were fired from their jobs. A couple of years later, the Moscow City Party Committee sent an instruction to the capital's recreation centers prohibiting the independent organization of art exhibitions.

Under these conditions, Rabin came up with the idea to exhibit the paintings on the street. The authorities could not give a formal ban - the free space, and even somewhere in the wasteland, did not belong to anyone, and the artists could not break the law. However, they also did not want to quietly show their work to each other - they needed the attention of the public and journalists. Therefore, in addition to the invitations printed on a typewriter to friends and acquaintances, the organizers of the “First Autumn Viewing of Pictures in the Open Air” warned the Moscow City Council about the action.

Exhibition vs Subbotnik

On September 15, 1974, not only 13 declared artists arrived at the wasteland in the Belyaevo district (in those years, in fact, the outskirts of Moscow). The exhibition was awaited by the foreign journalists and diplomats convened by them, as well as the expected policemen, bulldozers, firefighters and a large team of workers. The authorities decided to interfere with the exhibition by arranging a subbotnik on that day in order to improve the territory.

Naturally, no display of pictures took place. Some who came did not even have time to unpack them. Heavy equipment and people with shovels, pitchforks and rakes began to drive the artists from the field. Some resisted: when a participant in an organized subbotnik pierced a canvas by Valentin Vorobyov with a shovel, the artist hit him on the nose, after which a fight ensued. A correspondent for The New York Times got his tooth knocked out in a scuffle with his own camera.

Bad weather made matters worse. Due to the rain that had passed at night, the wasteland was full of mud, in which the brought pictures were trampled. Rabin and two other artists tried to throw themselves at the bulldozer, but could not stop it. Soon, most of the participants in the exhibition were taken to the police station, and Vorobyov, for example, took refuge in a car with a German friend.

The very next day, the scandalous popularity began to grow into mythology. For “bulldozers”, as the paintings from the “bulldozer exhibition” began to be called, other works began to be issued, and foreigners were ready to pay a considerable amount for them. There were rumors that not 13 people, but 24 participated in the exhibition. Sometimes the number of artists in such conversations rose to three hundred!

"Prague Spring" for art

The artistic value of the exhibition is difficult to assess - in fact, it lasted no more than a minute. But its social and political significance exceeded the value of the destroyed paintings. The coverage of the event in the Western press and the artists' collective letters confronted the Soviet authorities with the fact that art would exist even without their permission.

Two weeks later, an officially authorized street exhibition was held in Izmailovsky Park in Moscow. In subsequent years, non-conformist art gradually seeped into the pavilion "Beekeeping" at VDNH, into the "salon" on Malaya Gruzinskaya and other sites. The retreat of power was forced and extremely limited. Bulldozers have become as much a symbol of suppression and repression as tanks in Prague during the Prague Spring. Most of the exhibitors had to emigrate within a few years.

They eventually received their recognition: for example, Yevgeny Rukhin's painting Pliers was sold at Sotheby's, Vladimir Nemukhin's works ended up in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid became the world's most famous representatives of social -art - a direction that parodies Soviet officialdom.

Reproductions of some of the works of "bulldozer" artists are presented below. Perhaps some of them could have ended up on a September morning in 1974 in the Belyaevsky wasteland.

Nonconformism- this is unofficial Soviet art. Entitled Soviet nonconformism unite representatives of various artistic movements of the 1950s-1980s, which, for reasons of political and ideological censorship, were forced out of public artistic life. At this time, the fine arts of the USSR were divided into conformism and non-conformism. The concepts of conformism and nonconformism was borrowed in psychology to denote the passive and protest acceptance of the existing order of things. Nonconformism in Soviet art reflected the current psychological and social situation. The example of non-conformism in the life of the Soviet people showed that prolonged pressure of totalitarian oppression is impossible. In search of a new reality, fine arts boldly overcame the barriers of the canons of the past. In the sphere of unofficial art of the Soviet Union, the laws of state regulation of the artistic process did not apply. The development of art was left to its own laws. Non-conformism in general is seen by many as "an insane mixture of Russophiles and Westerners, salon and thoughtfulness of artists working in a wide variety of manners, united by being on the same side of the barricades."

Nonconformism is recognized as a unique phenomenon in the history of fine arts, many examples of "unofficial art" are included in the fund and exposition of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and many others.

Buy paintings of nonconformism. Paintings of non-conformism to sell. These are very popular requests that we often receive on our site. Our gallery buys significant works by nonconformist artists for its collection of paintings and drawings of the 20th century. About 300 outstanding works of various authors are presented in the funds of our gallery; they are united in the collection of Nonconformist Artists.
Soviet nonconformism includes several informal associations, including the Lianozovo Group (Oscar Rabin, Nikolai Vechtomov, Lydia Masterkova, Vladimir Nemukhin, Lev Kropivnitsky), Moscow Conceptualism (Ilya Kabakov, Andrey Monastyrsky and the art group Collective Actions, Eric Bulatov, Dmitry Prigov, Viktor Pivovarov, Pavel Pepperstein, Nikita Alekseev and others, the Gnezdo group, Sots Art (Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid), Mitki.
Buy works of nonconformists. In our gallery you can purchase works by these and other unofficial Soviet artists.

On September 1, 2012, an outstanding nonconformist artist, one of the most famous representatives of Soviet unofficial art, Dmitry Plavinsky, passed away at the age of 75. In memory of him, "Voice of Russia" presents a new chapter "History of Russian Art in 15 Pictures"
Nonconformism. Under this name, it is customary to unite representatives of various artistic movements in the visual arts of the Soviet Union of the 1950-1980s, which did not fit into the framework of socialist realism - the only officially permitted direction in art.

Nonconformist artists were actually ousted from the country's public artistic life: the state pretended that they simply did not exist. The Union of Artists did not recognize their art, they were deprived of the opportunity to show their works in exhibition halls, critics did not write about them, museum workers did not visit their workshops.

"The creation of human thought and hands is sooner or later absorbed by the eternal elements of nature: Atlantis - by the ocean, the temples of Egypt - by the sand of the desert, the Palace of Knossos and the labyrinth - by volcanic lava, the pyramids of the Aztecs - by the creepers of the jungle. For me, the greatest interest is not the flowering of a particular civilization, and her death and the moment of the birth of the next ... "

Dmitry Plavinsky, artist

“The further, the more acutely I felt that I could not do without painting, for me there was nothing more beautiful than the fate of the artist. However, looking at the paintings of official Soviet artists, I completely unconsciously felt that I could never write like that. And not at all because that I did not like them - I admired the skill, sometimes I was frankly jealous - but on the whole they did not touch, left me indifferent. Something important for me was missing in them. "

“I didn’t experience influences on myself, I didn’t change my style, my creative credo also remained unchanged. I could convey the diversity of Russian life through a symbol - a herring on the Pravda newspaper, a bottle of vodka, a passport - everyone understands this. Or I wrote the Lianozovsky cemetery and called painting "Leonardo da Vinci Cemetery". In my art, in my opinion, nothing new has appeared, newfangled, superficial. What I was - I remained the same, as the song sings. I do not have my own gallery that feeds and guides me my creativity. I wouldn't want to be a house rabbit. I like to be a free rabbit. I run where I want!"

Oscar Rabin, artist

"Abstract painting makes it possible to get as close as possible to reality, to penetrate into the essence of things, to comprehend everything important that is not perceived by our five senses. I felt modernity as a set of dramatic accomplishments, psychological tensions, intellectual oversaturations. I tried and try, based on the experience and re-felt, to create a pictorial form that corresponds to the spirit of the time and the psychology of the century.

Lev Kropivnitsky, artist.

“A picture is also an autograph, only more complex, spatial, multi-layered. And if the character, condition and almost illness of the writer are determined (and not unsuccessfully) by the autograph, by handwriting, if even criminologists do not neglect this decoding, then the picture gives incomparably more material for conjectures and conclusions about the personality of the author.It has long been noticed that a portrait painted by an artist is at the same time his self-portrait - this extends further - to any compositions, landscapes, still lifes, to any genres, as well as to non-objective abstract art - to whatever the artist depicts, and whatever his objectivity, dispassion, if he wants to get away from himself, become impersonal, he will not be able to hide, his creation, his handwriting will betray his soul, his mind, heart, his face.

Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, artist.

"The inventory of visual language elements consists primarily of objects. They were there before - trees, banks, boxes, pvc windows, newspapers, i.e., as it were, simple, recognizable objects. At the end of the 50s, all this turned into abstraction ", and soon this abstract form itself began to tire me. This is the state that renews interest in the subject, and he, in turn, reciprocates. I believe that the subject is very important for vision, because through it the vision itself is seen. "

"In 1958, I began to make my first abstract works. What is abstract art? It made it possible to immediately break with all this Soviet reality. You became a different person. Abstraction is, on the one hand, like the art of the subconscious, and on the other - a new vision. Art must be a vision, not a reasoning."

Vladimir Nemukhin, artist.

"My life is the creation of my own artistic space, which I always tried to enrich and tried a lot for this. I realized that each of us is always alone with the cataclysms of the twentieth century."

“We live in darkness and have already become accustomed to it, we completely distinguish objects. And yet we draw light from there, from the radiance of the sunset Cosmos, it is it that gives us the energy of vision. Therefore, it is not objects that are important for me, but their reflections, because in they harbor the breath of an alien element."

Nikolay Vechtomov, artist.

"Anatoly Zverev is one of the most outstanding Russian portrait painters born on this earth, who managed to express the trembling dynamism of the moment and the mystical inner energy of the people whose portraits he painted. Zverev is one of the most expressive and spontaneous artists of our time. His manner is so individual, that in each of his paintings one can immediately recognize the handwriting of the author. With a few strokes, he achieves a huge dramatic effect, spontaneity and instantaneity. The artist manages to convey a sense of direct connection between him and his model. "

Vladimir Dlugy, artist.

"Zverev is the first Russian expressionist of the 20th century and an intermediary between the early and late avant-garde in Russian art. I consider this wonderful artist one of the most talented in Soviet Russia."

Grigory Kostaki, collector.

"Nonconformism" is a constitutive feature of true art, as it opposes the banality and the stamp of conformism, giving new information and creating a new vision of the world. The fate of a true artist is often tragic, no matter what society he lives in. This is normal, since the fate of the artist is the fate of his insight, his statements about the world, which breaks the established stereotypes of perception and thinking created by "mass culture" and intellectual snobbery. To be a creator and to be "in due time" a canonized "hero" of society, a superstar, is an almost insurmountable paradox. Attempts to overcome it are the path to a conformist career."

Vladimir Yankilevsky, artist.

"All the time, with undiminished strength in her abstract compositions, magical colors either burn, or sparkle, or flicker with a fading fire. It seems that she comes all the time from different sides to the magical surface of the canvas. Sometimes the cheerful brightness of flaming sounds, strange outlines wriggling and rushing upward makes remember Bach's organ chords, and sometimes greenish-gray, interwoven planes associated with biological forms, are associated with Milhaud's Creation of the World. Masterkov's drawing says a lot. It organizes spots on the plane and the character of colorful accents. It is original and expresses the author very much."

Lev Kropivnitsky, artist.

"Art is a means of overcoming death."

Vladimir Yakovlev, artist.

"The paintings of Vladimir Yakovlev are like a night sky full of stars. There is no light at night, light is a star. This is especially evident when Yakovlev depicts flowers. His flower is always a star. Hence some special sadness of joy when we contemplate it paintings".

Ilya Kabakov, artist.

"I divide artistic activity (both writing, and musical, and visual) into two types: the desire for a masterpiece and the desire for flow. The desire for a masterpiece is when an artist faces a certain concept of beauty that he wants to embody, create a complete, capacious a masterpiece. The desire for flow is an existential need for creativity, when it becomes analogous to breathing, the beating of the heart, the work of the whole person. For artists of the flow, art is a reified existence, moving, arising and dying every second. And when I want to build my "Tree life", I am fully aware of the almost clinical, pathological impossibility of this idea. But I need it in order to work. combine the eternal foundations of art and its temporary content. Xia constantly and forever in faith, to become noble, majestic, meaningful.

Ernst Neizvestny, artist.

“I can’t say that I’m on some right path. But what is truth? This is a word, an image. Camus has a wonderful “Myth of Sisyphus”, when the artist drags a stone up the mountain, and then he falls down, he again picks it up, drags it again - this is approximately the pendulum of my life.

"I discovered practically nothing new, I just gave the Russian avant-garde a different perspective. What? Rather religious. I base my spatial geometric structures on the old catacomb wall painting and, of course, on icon painting."

Eduard Steinberg, artist.

"I forced myself to recreate reality, based on my idea of ​​​​it. This is what I still do."

Mikhail Roginsky, artist.

The Red Door is an outstanding work that played a pivotal role in the history of Russian art of the 20th century. Together with the subsequent cycle of interior fragments and details (walls with sockets, switches, photographs, chests of drawers, tiled floors), this work marked the beginning of a new subject realism. "Documentalism" (that's how Roginsky preferred to call his direction) predetermined the emergence of not only pop art, but also a new avant-garde in general in Soviet "underground" art, oriented towards the world artistic process. The "Red Door" sobered up and brought back to earth many of the Soviet artists who were carried away by utopian and metaphysical quests surrounded by communal life. This work prompted artists to carefully analyze and describe the aesthetic aspects of everyday Soviet life. This is the limit of pictorial illusion, the bridge from the picture to the object.

Andrey Erofeev, curator, art historian

"I absolutely do not need to exhibit now. In half a century it will be extremely interesting for me to show my works. Today I am surrounded by fools like myself. They understand no more than me. People write to comprehend something. The artist's hand is not driven by desire to exhibit, but the desire to tell about the experience. Once the picture is painted, I no longer have power over it. It can remain alive or die. My paintings are my letter in a bottle thrown into the sea. Maybe no one will ever catch this bottle, and she will break on the rock."

Oleg Tselkov, artist.

"In his view of nature there is neither spontaneity, nor surprise, nor admiration. It is rather the view of a scientist who seeks to penetrate the secret of things. The artist, as it were, is looking for some ideal formula of nature, its centricity, a formula as complete and as complex as the form eggs".

On December 20, the Yeltsin Center hosted a meeting-lecture with the famous Russian conceptual artist Georgy Kizevalter, author of art objects and installations, writer, one of the founders of the Collective Actions creative group, a member of the Apt-art movement. The lecture was organized as part of an educational program dedicated to the exhibition presented by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, which brought together the works of artists belonging to the unofficial wave.

Kizewalter gave a detailed account of how unofficial art has developed since the 1950s. A noteworthy nuance: from 1996 to 2006, Kizewalter lived in Canada, but returned. According to him, he lived several lives: in Soviet Russia, full of artistic trends, but limited by the Iron Curtain, then in prosperous, but boring Canada, and his third life began in a new Russia. So it is doubly valuable and interesting to assess the development of Russian conceptualism through the eyes of an artist with such a difficult and multifaceted fate. Kizevalter summarized his impressions of the “first life” in books, among which are “These Strange Seventies, or the Loss of Innocence” and “The Turning Point of the Eighties in the Unofficial Art of the USSR”.

Photo by Lyubov Kabalinova

01 /07

Lecture by Georgy Kizevalter

- One of the "pioneers" of the unofficial movement in art was the Lianozovo group (late 1950s - mid-1970s), - says Kizevalter. – The name is due to the fact that many of the artists-members of the group lived in Lianozovo. The core of the group was the poet and artist Lev Kropivnitsky. It included Genrikh Sapgir, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Igor Kholin, Yan Satunovsky, Oscar Rabin, Lydia Masterkova and others. In parallel, there was a large group of single artists who were friends with Lianozovo. There was also a group of unofficial outcasts, original artists who did not fit into any group, were unofficial, but did not belong to Lianozovo. It was also possible to single out groups of Left official and Book artists. They eventually formed the movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

The works of artists in the 1960s were distinguished by the quality of the painted, but at the same time it was a kind of timeless art, emerging away from the processes that took place in the West.

In the 1970s, conceptualism and social art appeared. Once the artist Ivan Chuikov came to the exhibition of Ilya Kabakov. Didn't understand and left. However, the fact that he did not understand anything, he remembered, and this "hooked" him. By the way, when the archiving campaign began, Kabakov wanted to transfer his works abroad for free, but ... no one took them.

Even the 1970s were distinguished by the theme of emigration. If the artist did not emigrate, then he constantly thought about it. There were also internal emigrants and "here-sidents" who never left. In the first half of this decade, nothing remarkable happened: artists painted, those who had connections sold their paintings. In 1975, the City Committee appeared - an independent trade union of artists, graphic artists and photographers. It consisted of artists for whom it was important to be listed somewhere so that they would not be accused of parasitism.

In 1974, the famous "Bulldozer Exhibition" took place: avant-garde artists exhibited their work in the open air, but the paintings were crushed by supposedly angry workers with the help of bulldozers. This caused a wide resonance, so that soon the artists were allowed to hold an exhibition in Izmailovo, where many people came. Then a large-scale exhibition took place in the "Beekeeping" pavilion.

At the same time there was a group of Book Artists, they are characterized by the fact that they actively discussed the language of art, which was not the case before. Together with Alexander Monastyrsky and Lev Rubinshtein, we arranged mini-happenings, were fond of Zen Buddhism. Surrealism was also popular in the artistic environment. Kitchen gatherings were popular, and the dream of syncretic art was finally realized. Popular were not only artists, but also writers - Lev Sorokin, Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, who were friends with artists (January 7, the Yeltsin Center will host a creative evening of poets Lev Rubinstein, Mikhail Aizenberg, Sergei Gandlevsky, Yuli Gugolev, Viktor Koval - Ed.)

In the autumn of 1975, an exhibition of works by 150 artists was held at VDNKh, where queues lined up. Groups of new artists appeared, such as "The Nest". Actionism emerged. For example, there was a "Selling the Soul" campaign, during which they contacted New York, and some people had to "buy" the souls of others. Also, for example, there was an action during which its participants burned the flags of enemies, and the flags of the winners were placed in a snowdrift.

I was a member of the "Collective Actions" group, which often held actions in nature. These were attempts to break out of the monotonous existence and aestheticize reality. Thus, a simple insignificant event became a work of art. For example, we carried out the action "Ball": we filled a ball of calico, placed a bell in it and let it go down the river. Or another action - “Slogan”: in the forest we stretched a banner between the trees with the slogan “I DO NOT COMPLAINT ABOUT ANYTHING, AND I LIKE EVERYTHING, DESPITE THE THAT I HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE AND I DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THESE PLACES.” I remember that the slogan was hung with a rag, and I tore out the fishing lines that fastened the cloth.

Then there was a transition from the serene 1960s and 1970s to postmodernism. One of the brightest actions - in the "Nest" group, they handed over a gilded bust of Socrates.

In the 1970s, the Mukhomor group burst into art. The members of the group quickly moved on to "acute" topics, opposed the neutron bomb. As a result, Mukhomor was banned from concert activities, which, however, the group did not engage in. "Nest" and "Amanita" became the basis of the gallery "Apt-art". At the same time, artists from Odessa, Kharkov and other cities came to Moscow.

Installations became an important phenomenon in the 1980s. The rooms in the apartments were covered with paper, it was painted in a special way, for example, from black to white. I photographed the authors with umbrellas, one of them was Vladimir Sorokin.

There is a trend towards archiving everything. We began to collect encyclopedias of new art. And then the artists began to settle in houses and institutions, organize exhibitions there, for example, the Kindergarten association arose.

In the 1980s, a number of exhibitions were held, in December 1986 the 17th youth exhibition was held on Kuznetsky Most, where artists of the left liberal wing were invited, and musical evenings were held. In general, everything happened a lot, and it's impossible to list everything.

Lecture by the artist Georgy Kizevalter. "Informal artistic life of Moscow in the 70-80s"

Video: Alexander Polyakov

After the lecture Georgy Kizevalter answered a number of questions.

- How did members of creative associations find a friend? Was your relationship positive, or were there fights?

– Artists most often united by age principle. If you are 20 years old, then you naturally strive to be friends with those who are also 20-30. Exhibitions of people of the older generation caused, of course, reverence, but the feeling that this is in a sense yesterday. But in the 1980s, I became friends with artists of the older generation. And sometimes there was a feeling that you were “under the hood”. Everyone was afraid of something, but together, in the group, it was not scary.

– How did you find “your own”, congenial artists?

- In those days, for some reason, everyone met in Estonia. I remember the 1970s, Lev Rubinstein was standing in a group of young people, I walked past him, and I didn’t care, but then we met and began to communicate. And he, in turn, said that he was walking down the street and accidentally met the Gerlovins. Then they said that if two teapots were released at the fair from two sides, they would definitely meet and find each other. Back in those years, the samizdat system was actively working, books were passed on to friends to read, most often at night. So we read both The Glass Bead Game and 100 Years of Solitude.

- And why today, in the era of freedom, when books of any kind are published, including those that were once banned, when you can watch any movie and visit any exhibition, works of art have devalued? And surely no one will take a book at night to read?

– The special value of art arises where it exists “in spite of”. And when permissiveness arises, the criteria for evaluating art are erased. There was a period when the line was completely erased. Foreigners simply said: “A painting from Russia? Yes? Ok, I'll take it." The quality has not been evaluated. In general, a kind of unity of artists lasted until 1988, then money began to be paid for art, and friends became rivals. The collapse was predicted in 1974 by one of Ernest Hemingway's wives. This is described by Shklovskaya: in the kitchen of Nadezhda Mandelstam, they discussed the purchase of galoshes and meat. And the lady who was present at the conversation said: "Now you have love and warmth, but it will end when you have everything."

- So the artist must be hungry?

He shouldn't be hungry, but he shouldn't be full either. The artist in the 1970s and 1980s painted what was radically new. When they began to demand from him abroad 2-3 works per month, and he found himself in conditions where everything was put on stream, it turned out that our artists were simply not ready for the market and broke away from the soil. So, one of the founders of Lianozovo, Oscar Rabin, used to draw the barracks of Lianozovo. And so he receives permission to work in Europe, but continues to paint ... all the same gloomy houses - only in Paris.