Events | Pushkin`s images created by the Naive Artists in Russia
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Olga Baldina
IMAGES CHERISHED IN THEIR HEARTS

The "Pushkin's images created by the Naive Artists in Russia" exhibition is bound to incite vivid interest. For its themes are Pushkin, his wife Natalie Nikolayevna Goncharova, poet's work, and the epoch which grows more attractive to us over time. Indeed, the more it recedes into the past, the more splendid the poet's works seem to us, the more intriguing his actions, the more moving his fate and the more interesting the people around him. Until recently, nearly all works of art devoted to Pushkin were ones of professionals. Now, this exhibition is the first collection of naive art, which shows how the folk painters and sculptors treat the poet's themes and images and how they feel about his genius. Over the past two centuries, great many profound words have been said and written about Pushkin the poet and the man and a great many works of art and music have been created on his themes. Pushkin's works seem unfathomable and capable of generating new insights with every new reader. He belongs to the race of titans who can overwhelm both time and space.
Pushkin is the first Russian national poet. He is an author of worldwide significance. He is a factor in the national and world cultural process. His status as such has been recognized in its right.
On the other hand, Pushkin is a folk phenomenon. He drew on the folk's untapped resources and lived like one of the folk. Pushkin and folk is indeed a theme unto itself. The poet is in fact the first to have reflected fully the folk's mind and moral in literature. Anyone visiting this exhibition can see how sensitively and devotedly folk artists comprehend the poet's works and respond to his ingenious gift to get an insight into the Russian spirit. Each of their works appears to be a sort of gift in return, keeping up a sort of feedback tradition.
Folk artists are simple, unaffected, and innocent in their vision and manner. Anyone who eyes had been nurtured on Renaissance-like images would become baffled when looking at unfamiliar paintings full of uncanny effects and bright colors. Their proportions are strange, their drawing is childlike, and their perspective is distorted, if any. But once the spectators have overcome their own preconceptions, they will be able to gain access to unknown vistas hidden well below the surface of the other cultural strata and the more remote times. For naive artists there are neither art canons nor usual restraints. Their works are products of imagination and intuition born out of an unspoiled insight. Hence simple and unaffected their originality in everything - in their choice of themes, in their compositional layout of figures, in their arrangement of plot situations, in their attitudes to perspective and color brightness.
Their motivation to paint varies. Some want to respond to an ongoing event (their naive ubiquity is one of the remarkable features of their works); others want to assert themselves and render their own world-view. Many of them take to painting because this helps them feel relieved of distress and hardship or, as Boris Pasternak put it, "hover above a miserable existence".
When naive artists turn to forgotten values like innocent expression of feelings, unity of art and moral and the Bible's "not by bread alone", they seem to discover for themselves the simple formula that living the life of an ordinary human being open to all sensations is beautiful in itself. It is the creative work of ordinary people that forms the pristine basis of all poetry in the world in which naturalness itself creates beauty.
View from this angle, the "Pushkin's images created by the Naive Artists in Russia" exhibition is in some ways akin to Pushkin's simplicity and diversity. It is a response - not on commission but by the will of the heart - to the jubilee of Russia's most admired and venerated poet.
Its contributors vary in age and level of talent, as well as in responsiveness and public acclaim. Some of them, such as Ye. Panova, I. Nikiforov, N. Komolov and A. Dikarskaya, are recognized "classics" of domestic naive art, others, such as P. Leonov and V. Romanenkov, are winners of prizes and diplomas, still others, such as Ye. Medvedeva, G. Kusochkin, T. Yelenok, B. Zhivotov, V. Sivtsov, V. Makarov, A. Kondratenko, V. Mizinov, L. Belova and many others are established masters well known both at home and abroad. Remarkably, out of the 70-odd artists presented nearly half of them have never been seen at any large-scale exhibitions in Moscow. This means that new names have gained due recognition.
It will be easy to split the exhibition into two large sections:
1. Works devoted to Pushkin's life (the poet himself, his wife, his house, the people around him, stories of his life).
2. Works devoted to Pushkin's works (illustrations to his poems, dramas and fairy-tales).
The portrait - domestic, literary and historical (though not in the usual sense of the term) is the predominant genre of the exhibition. The landscape (the most preferable genre of naive artists) comes second, but invariably it forms the background for the figures, either as "the retreat of thoughtful triads" or as an accompaniment to their mental state.
The portrait is admittedly one of the most difficult genres of art. The 19th-century painters have left quite a few portraits of the poet in life. Pushkin, who never liked to sit for a painter, assessed the famous portrait of him by O. Kiprensky in a revealing poem:


Favored by fashion light,
Though no Britt or Gaul,
You drew, to my Muses' delight,
A portrait true and whole;
And now to my mortal plight
Farewell I cheerfully call.

Like in a mirror I behold
Yet scarcely overcome
Its vanity as I am told -
For hesitations there's no room -
My image shall not grow old
In Paris, Dresden, Rome.
(1827ã.)

(Translated by Igor Gavrilov)

There is a gallery of the poet's portraits on display. Some show him as a boy, some as a Lyceum student, some as a youth, some as renowned poet. Others depict him scribbling some verse, strolling in Tsarskoye Selo, along Neva embankment, riding horseback in Mikhailovskoye, composing a poem in his estate of Boldino, reading Shakespeare. One can see Pushkin travelling in the Caucasus and in the Crimea, Pushkin in Gurzuf, in Bakhchisarai, elsewhere at the brink of some unknown land. The painters did not strive to render his true identity, nor did they make use of the findings of formal an. They relied on their own imagination, giving vent to their hidden impulses and pure emotions.
Indeed, Pushkin's images as they stand on the naive paintings are far from the familiar ones. In one of the canvases he is shown raising his hand, reading a poem, as though he is aspiring to fly, in another he is shown swimming naked in a calm stream, in still another he is standing with back to the spectators. But in each painting one can find the author's sympathetic attitude to the poet as an ordinary man with neither time nor space between them.
Soundings like a hymn to the poet are the works by Maskova ("All flowers in the world for A. Pushkin", "Pushkin, the son of Russia"), by Zhivotov ("Messiah") and by Kondratenko ("The god of poetry"). In Zhivotov's painting, Pushkin is staring in earnest, as though asking: "Who are you? What are you feeling?" In Kondratenko's painting, the poet appears either as a Lord Sabaoth or as a martyr with a radiant halo about his head. What a recognition, what an admiration, what a homage to the poet's greatness and humanity!
Natalie Goncharova, as the bride, the wife and the mother of the poet's children, has deserved a special place in naive art. Folk artists have accepted her and depicted her through the poet's admiring eyes, like "the purest model of the purest grace". The painters seem to admire her eyes, her smile, and her enchanting youth, like Pushkin himself. They paint her locks, pretty face, and bare shoulders and ballroom dress in devotional detail. Some of them betray something of a doll-like manner, which makes their pictures look like 19th-century album drawings on which young ladies were keen.
There were other beauties Pushkin was in love with before his marriage. Only one of them, Anna Kern, "a consoling angle", as the poet called her, has deserved the naive painters' attention. Her portrait by V. Makarov is not merely the image of a beauty but a symbol or a dream immortalized in the poet's great poet "I remember that marvelous moment".
In general, the theme of the family, home and love is one of the most prominent themes in the exhibition. With their keen intuition the painters seem to have understood how important and sacred these notions sounded for the poet. This key theme also bulk large in genre paintings, in which Pushkin is shown meeting the young beauty at a ball, taking walks with her, sharing their family pleasures. Peace and happiness permeate Platunov's paintings "Good morning" and "A happy couple" which abound in lovely details of a family environment. Selivanova's paintings "The Pushkin family in the garden" and "Quite evening in Boldino" are radiant with festivity and merriment of being, thanks to their resonantly combined colors and decorative and ornament forms. Medvedeva's painting "Pushkin's wedding" conveys a great emotional message: he and she find themselves in a mysterious space shrouded with fleecy clouds which is swirling them away with force of love, riddle of desire and foreboding of fate. Indeed, Pushkin's marriage was "as much an act of genius as his life and death".
N. Komolov's works are marked with exceptional talent. The painter, as he put it himself, composed them "out of his head", relying solely on the impressions of his childhood. Suggested by his memory, his painting "Pushkin at a fair" has a simplified, even rustic plot, but its drawing is precise and full of detail: all sorts of people, animals, plants and what not. Its color arrangement is bold and daring, with light "flashes", as in old-time icons. Thanks to its spontaneousness, unbridled impulsiveness combined with color temperament the work has a strong emotional impact.
The subjects so numerous in the exhibition are unlikely to be encountered in formal art. They include "Pushkin is invited to a circus" and "Pushkin is invited for a dance" (Leonov), "Pushkin and Onegin" (Selivanova), "On a swing" (Lobanova), "The matchmaker Ivan" (Zhivotov), "Pushkin helping a friend to hand a shepherdess off the tree" (Kusochkin). Each reveals an ingenious vision sparkled with folk humor and an exceptional individual "handwriting". Form and color give access to the author's world of thinking, sometime seemingly archaic, sometimes half-present. Kusochkin's world is one of hyperbolic and humorous details of folklore; Leonov's world is constructed ideally, like the frieze painting of ancient Egypt, and enframed with fantastic ornaments.
Another remarkable feature of the exhibition is its memorial series with its unexpected themes (such as "A memorial to Pushkin's meeting Griboyedov's coffin at the Sevan Pass" by Tkachenko, and "An ice town" by Medvedeva, in which Pushkin-monument is shown to have stepped off its pedestal) and memorial themes proper full of grief and bereavement. Romanenkov's "Paying homage to Pushkin", in pencil and felt-tip pen, opens a mysterious fairy-tale glimmering, flickering world. Zhivotov's "Lamenting for the poet" is laconic and vivid, like a condensed metaphor. Kondratenko's "Pushkin" leaves the emotional impression of encountering a great shadow returning from the past. The poet's figure is drawn conventionally. Surrounded with dense bluish-rose haze, his body is restrained and static, his eyes, sorrowful and attentive, staring directly at the viewers.
Naive art is sometimes referred to as childhood gift saved into adulthood. One's childhood world is a world of legends, myths and fairy-tales with their various mysterious inhabitants, like beasts speaking with a human voice, magicians, monsters and other strange creatures. So it is up to naive artists to illustrate Pushkin's fairy-tales. Their childlike imagination is boundless in this. The exhibition displays virtually the whole range of Pushkin's fairy-tales. When naive painters cover the surface of a canvas or a sheet of paper with thick color texture and draw fanciful weird figures of beasts and humans on it, it looks as though they create the primeval stuff which gives rise to fairy-tale characters, uncanny, cheerful, sly, quizzical and good-humored - and always radiant with love and vitality.
There are also many illustrations to Pushkin's poems everyone knows from childhood (the works by Deryabin, Kardash, Arefieva and Usatova) as well as to his stories and drama plays (the works by Kholodov, Shvetsova, Vorozhbet and Kulyabko). Gusarov's large canvas "Peasant revolt" is devoted to the revolt led by Pugachov, which Pushkin studied as a historian.
The works of applied art (Panova's woven pictures, Timoshina's and Sharkova's patchwork mosaics and Morozova's painted chests) are akin to the mood of the fairy-tale illustrations, even though some of them depict the figures of Pushkin himself and his wife. The master of applied an make the figures of Pushkin and N. N. Goncharova part of the texture of their works, but, in spite of gravitating towards plot-based treatment (the characters of their works are shown walking, relaxing, riding horseback, etc.), they create a single decoratively arranged plane-orientated space. Unified in tone and color, this space conveys a feeling of unity and poetry. The sculptures displayed at the exhibition ("The old man and the old woman" by Zaznobin and "Ruslan and Lyudmila" by Korolev) will make anyone smile cheerfully, provided one is still a child and a poet in his or her heart. True to their childhood views, the authors are dexterous enough to cut and carve fascinating, wonderful wooden shapes suggesting the harmony and resonance of ancient primitives.
The genius of Pushkin is comprehensive and universal. It is still one of the few life-bearing formations of Russian culture which, once touched on, can once again wind up the clock of Russian spiritual history. His is the Russian intuitive capacity to accept and understand any culture, which F.M. Dostoyevsky called "global responsiveness". This capacity can manifest itself on both universal and individual level. Since the 19th century there have arisen a great many literary and historical senses to the notion of "my Pushkin". Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Soloviev, Blok, Yesenin, Akhmatova, Platonov, Tsvetayeva, Lotman and Nepomnyashchy have all produced splendid models of how this "extraordinary phenomenon" called Pushkin can be read and understood.
Now, the naive artists at this exhibition offer their own individual understanding of the poet, his life and his work. For them he is simply Pushkin. He is their Pushkin. They speak about him in inconceivably simple terms, with sweet tension and warm awe. Their works are sincere and innocent and talk with the spectators, as heart talks to heart. Their language is one of fantasy, imagination, invention and metaphor. The rare poetic spirit gifted to Pushkin may be inherent to naive artists: "where is life, there is poetry".
The "Pushkin's images created by the Naive Artists in Russia" exhibition is a big contribution to the works of art devoted to Pushkin. Here artist meets artist. One artist resides "high in the heavens"; the others, simple and innocent, sometimes unrecognized, belong to our times. Through the poetry and prose of words and the poetry and imaginative vision of painting all of them are fused into a single whole, which may be referred to as a poem about the life of man on Earth and the poet of genius.