Arts : Sculpture : Leonid Berlin
Biography Exposition Exhibitions Criticism Replies


Sergei Khachaturov
EXHIBITION OF THE GREATEST RUSSIAN SCULPTOR, LEONID BERLIN, OPENS IN MOSCOW MUSEUM OF VADIM SIDUR

The wise art of Leonid Berlin is like a chalice, filled with bitter irony. Theorists of romanticism considered irony "nostalgia on infinity". Its perspective is always absent in the officious, justified one-dimensionality and fragmentation of our world outlook, rescued from platitude, given hope for eternity.
It's paradoxical, knowing the tragic fate of the master - his father repressed and shot in 1938 Iranian communist, I never perceived the creativity of Berlin only as "pouring over bitterness and rage," a political pamphlet. Quickly, - in any epic, Old Testament dimension, his irony wakens an instinct of genuinely mystical depth. Berlin, extraordinary, organically enters into the context of modern postmodernist culture. Take the graphic images of Berlin - his kinetic sculpture - injured, bleeding and medieval: the tradition of solar Renaissance harmony does not touch it.
The artist speaks: "I reject understanding of art of sculpture as art of halftones, hardly noticeable movements, delicate modulations of surface. I am always involved in the dramatic events of life..." If one was to take analogies from the history of art, the plastic of Italian expressionism and Gothic cenotaphs of XII century come to mind. The idea of "transience", frailty of life, is expressed with equal categorical, sincerity and honour: the crucified Artist (auto portrait of Berlin?), specked with cockroaches, - a direct offspring of the marble knights, whose figures on cenotaphs and sarcophaguses were represented doubly: in the guise of strong valorous warriors and as half-decayed corpses, eaten by grave worms. "I was such as you, you will be such as me". This is also the allegory of post-modern cultural consciousness, which even in harmonic chords manages to hear the cacophony of chaos. Not links, but cracks; not whole, but splinters. And also scream, spasm, crumpling all forms of the world. Painful shock and dangerous inclination to anomaly. This is our culture. The artist speaks its language.
Berlin recollects the ancient forms of dialogue with the audience. The spectator is a participant in the common side-show of life. He is not so much a spiritual, pensive intellectual in glasses with a notebook in a hand, meditating before canvases of Poussin, but more a character in the fairground crowd, participating in a rough, emotionally revealing carnival. Feelings and cruelty are mixed up together, the ability to sob at puppet tragedies and look with barbarous curiosity on the public execution of living people. Corded cords, jut out pedals and crandles creep from sculptures of Berlin. The master provokes us: "Pull, pull, don't be afraid"... The spectator pulls for the cord, and the love pair is split by a wedge. The former harmony is, upon the will (or fault) of the spectator turned into a bloody drama. And here is another theme: crucified Artist and electrical wire connected to the frame. The natural curiosity of the spectator forces him to thrust the plug in the socket and to observe life slowly agonising in this exhausted, dislocated body. The kind, frightened and simultaneously surprised face of the Artist reminds of the face of a mournful angel, before whom a chalice with iron teeth stands. People remove teeth. Angel humbly bends its head. In this moment it seems that tears flow from eyes of the Angel. Direct, medieval under the essence the contact to an image becomes aggravated because there is no any aesthetic distance between the spectator and the "mobiles" of Berlin. All sculptures are made by a method of welding fragments of cranes, batteries that have been thrown out on a dump, iron pieces, rough shamotte. They are rough, clumsy and very trustful, open, defenceless. Look for compassion. And find curiosity...
Yes, Leonid Berlin is a ruthless, honourable artist. At the same time his art cannot be called terrible or deprived of hope. This paradox is characteristic for the artist: he has created the lightest images in the darkest place of Moscow: in the underground of the Moscow metro.
In all Leonid Berlin has decorated four stations. In 1984 he has placed the multicurly composition in the lobby of "Orekhovo" metro-station; in 1985 - two heraldic reliefs on the station "Krasnogvardeyskaya"; in 1989 - composition "Noah's ark" on the roof of pavilion of "Bitsevskyi Park"; at last, in 1994-1996 - sculptural compositions on the platform and pedestrian subway of the station "Rimskaya".
As is well-known, the Moscow underground is a genuine model of the universe.
Underground layers of culture, interlacing of many historical epochs, archetypes of collective unconscious, simultaneous travel in space of thousands individual fates - all this creates representation of some parallel world living by its own laws.
According to Berlin, the passengers on the underground should realise the exclusiveness and become co-creators of the underground myth, without losing their of sense of humour. The multicurly composition "Protection of nature" on "Orekhovo" station unexpectedly gets its significance from biblical symbols. Going up on the escalator one feels giddy from such a wonderful vision. Amid iron leaves, and melodious ringing of metal bells (which were stolen soon after opening of the station), sit birds, animals, a mother with child, a wild person with dog, cat, deer. The hard constructive interior emphasises the moving vibration of this plastic pantomime creating an impression of some bio-morphal, visually transforming mass. A biblical World Tree, Tree of Life, under branches of which all beings of God find a shelter: both little birds and small insects, a girl swinging between the Kremlin towers, and wise Robinson...
Returning to the tribute of theatrical pathos of the first years of October, the concrete heraldic reliefs on the "Krasnogvardeyskaya" station (with stretched headers of N. Altman, V. Lebedev, D. Shtehrenberg) remind one of the decoration for street holidays; its aggressive plastic shades the elegant simplicity of the architectural graphics of the interior.
In the interior of the underground station "Bitsevskyi Park" Leonid Berlin addresses another arch-important biblical image - Noah's Ark. A kinetic composition of this name decorates the ground pavilion. Here for the first time there is the travesty theme of puppet theatre, show-booth, den. Really, when one looks on, rotating from wind, floating by air, the ship occupied earth, sea and heavenly beings, it's hard to avoid comparisons to cartoons. Touching and kind "the children's world" protects us from false pathos, platitude and falseness. If the underground is the Utopia of the ideal world, heroes will become children. It is necessary to part smiling with Imperial ambitions, with collective psyches of the recent past. So Leonid Berlin considers. We should agree with this.
In 1997 the decoration of the "Rimskaya" metro station won the Moscow prize. A post-modern interpretation of mythologem "Moscow - Third Rome" is embodied in it most successfully. It is known that the consciousness of the "Soviet Person" was defined by the overturned Christian values. The underground ("inner side" by definition) world of Stalin's metro demonstrates the completed model of ideal soviet socium. Sustained in classical taste with faultless attention to the order halls of the first stations - antiquity (First Rome). The pseudo-medieval mosaics and frescos representing labour feats of the soviet people ("Komsomolskaya, "Kievskaya" stations...) supplement its "noble simplicity and quiet greatness". The mosaics, fresco, marble incrustation; heavy, reach blinking - this is already Second Rome, Constantinople. As the metro is the underground transport, so all of Moscow in direct sense grew from the bases of "antiquity" and "middle ages", and in concrete makes real the metaphor of the "Third Rome." Party ideologists reconstructed a new Imperial mythology of the totalitarian state.
How to undermine the authority of this apparently firm paradigm? Berlin finds an ingenious solution. He simply laughs at it. Ostensibly he colludes with this Imperial vanity, and by doing so, actually exposes the deceit. The antique columns are necessary to you? Please. But not only as a rank of formidable sentries, - as picturesque ruins, combined in the end face of the hall. Sanctimonious following to order canon is replaced on almost epatage untidiness of drawing, deliberate roughness of the ceramic surface, clumsy colour. Little flowers grow from capital (Zholtovsky would fall in a faint), nice creeping vines on the trunk. Berlin names them "oversuckers". Turning back you also see a medallion with a plump Madonna. Going on subway you come across the mask "Mouth of Truth", reminding one not of an ominous urn for denunciations (here's to you, your antique empire!), but more a carnivalesque fairy grandfather. Pudgy putti with wings flit above a coyly triumphal arch. Babies Romulus and Remus selfishly sucking milk from the good-natured she-wolf, looking more like a tender pet dog... The scenario is like a puppet theatre. Following his principle, Leonid Berlin again provokes casual public (passengers) to participation in the common carnival of life, impromptu fair representation about "cumeric gods", "terrible robbers", "mysterious beasts", children's toys. Only so, ingenuously and cheerfully Leonid Berlin bid adieu to former hypnoses, myths and illusions. He transforms his fair "confused articulation" into the act of high art. Look, for example, what precious chord ceramic medallions sound on the background of marble walls. The same music for an eye, as reliefs of workshop della Robbia, antique cameo! Without following the classics literally, Berlin transfers the living alive, spiritual image. And this is the secret of his creativity.
From the newspaper "Modus", ¹ 4, 1999.


M. Chegodaeva
"ETERNAL FIGHT" OF LEONID BERLIN

"Hello, dear compatriots!
I am Russian. Until recently I was rather indifferent to the Jews. But recently I have been confronted with the unprecedented meanness and mockery of the relic for anyone Russian and Christian - Jesus Christ. Jewish "sculptor" Berlin has represented Christ as some monster with a long phallus, from which sperm flows. Christ is executed by some moving hardware, from what he, as it should consider, takes pleasure. Jews crucified Christ, and now this Jude frankly scoffs at his sacred image. This vile "sculpture" is exposed on the third floor of the House of the Artists on the Krimskiy Val. Is it characteristic, that those responsible for the realisation of the exhibitions in the House of Artists are Jews - Zeitler Vladimir Pavlovich and Gluhovskaya Rufina Abramovna. Just a Jewish centre. These bastards afford to scoff at our God…"


"It happens - to the butchers become terribly too..." - as Alexander Galich asserted in his famous "Plyasovaya".
It's sickening to give publicity to this denunciation for the heads of the "dear compatriot", yes but it is too dangerous to not đày attention to it. It's hard, sometimes it is fatal, to get such poisoned bullets. I shall not assume that the untimely and sudden death of Vladimir Pavlovich Zeitler was connected to this message, though... Who knows? Certainly, it was a cruel strike for his sick heart. A duty of memory about the good person Vladimir Zeitler; a duty of decency demands to protect his friends, - and Leonid Berlin my old friend - do not give me reason to mellow quietly on creativity of this perfect sculptor, as it is necessary for a scientist of art, as I would like to write about him. What here calmness - "eternal fight". Eternal rack, on which again and again the Artist is crucified, with indifferent connivance of the plaster dough-trough-old-woman stupidly looking on the execution. "Artist" - just so is named the sculptural group, which has roused the animal fury of our "compatriot".
Such cruelty and rage has hung above Leonid since the first days of his life. A photo of beginning of the 20-th century: Lenin with group of foreign communists. Among them the Iranian journalist Sultan-Zade, starry-eyed enthusiast who arrived in soviet Russia to manage the world revolution. Only this photo has been left to Leonid Berlin of the father executed by the order of Stalin - and also his appearance, that of a Persian sheikh. The surname was given to him by his stepfather, and together with it all those humiliations, which were rendered - and as we see, to this day are still rendered - to Jews in our international country. The apocalyptic tragedies of the the 20th century became his family biography, giving to Berlin's creativity a heart-rending voice, a shout, even to a physical pain sounding, which touches each spectator, raising an emotional response.
Not for the first time someone passionately would like to prohibit the work of Berlin, to force him to break off his "kinetic sculpture". I remember well the history of one of the first of Berlin's sculptures, exposed in the halls of MOUA (Moscow Union of Artists) on Begovaya street in 1976 - in those "happy" times, when it seemed, in the Soviet Union that in at least 100 years nothing will changed, and "the assistant to the chairman" of the Moscow Union was a colonel of the KGB, Comrade Grushin. The sculpture of Berlin of the so-called "Experimental" exhibition was in those years unusual in everything, beginning from obviously "unsoviet" name: "Tragedy". Iron hands painfully compressed a head, breaking up from a headache, - and suddenly explosions began, flare of light lighted from inside and as if exploding in parts a huge iron egg... The militia was called; the strict warning has followed: any shooting in official buildings is prohibited... And before this, in February, 1974 the recital of Berlin in the House of Artists on Kuznetskiy Most was prohibited by party authorities prior two hours before the beginning. The sculptures were hastily shipped onto the lorry and in the absence of the author, were taken to his workshop, fallen down, beaten, bent out. It wouldn't even be recollected, if not for those "spirals of history", the unambiguous threats of those, who dream to return to their lost "right" to prohibit and to destroy. The creativity of Berlin was and remains hostile to the "dear compatriots" - there is something touching in their calmness, interfering with their soul complacency.
And you see not as an example of many artists-"shestidesjatniki", Berlin never looks for the political dividends, does not aspire to the glory of the opposition, but with ruthless self-denial gives himself to creativity and only to creativity - and it is a battlefield. In contrast to modern "installations" and "concepts" causing, as a rule, quite quiet rational interest, the work of Berlin cannot be quiet: it gives rise in the soul of the spectator to alarm and pity, sympathy and fear. They are inconvenient, these strange, unusual, incomparable iron essences. Approaching horror alive, they start, sound, move and shine, flash and die away, painfully scream and become transfixed in heavy torpor. Berlin creates the world from those "scraps of production" that people leave after themselves. Dead dumps of iron come to life; rusty dross of human engineering grows from ground, as unexploded bombs. People are defencelessly open before the spoiled metal, which accepts the human forms, suffers, groans.
"Angel" - a ridiculous and touching figure made from fragments of pipe and scraps of iron. On a plate suspended at the breast, teeth as on a shelf and if one was to remove it, the angel-beggar sadly will rock by the head. Frightened mournful face, plane foot-ski, helplessly stretched shivering palms: neither robot nor person - iron spirit of an iron century.
Human bodies are chained in hard metal cages, naturalism, - Berlin is not afraid of reproaches in heavy naked psychologism. Lovers passionately fold each other in their arms and for them there is no matter to the rough rusty frame surrounding them, as a prison cell, and suddenly the heavy wedge falls from above with a roar, terminating their kiss.
And again the sacramental "Artist" perceived by the author of the letter and, possibly, not by him only, as crucified Jesus. But the hero of Berlin is not Christ. Just a man, artist even with some auto portrait features, and in general a master, close to the Master of M. Bulgakov, defenceless, suffering as people suffer under torments, in all the unattractiveness of physiological pain. His naked, natural body is stretched out by chains on a metal arch, braided with a prickly wire; hung up hands clutched in a vice. And nevertheless the hands of the creator with any despair break through metal and direct to the sky: the lifeless dead construction breathes, trembles together with the body of the Master. And on the floor in front of the artist crucified on rack with indifferent curiosity old woman sits in a once and forever broken washtub and observes his sufferings.
And on contrast the ceramic bust of painter Vera Zaitseva - deceased wife of Leonid - looks especially simple, quietly, classically clear, up to illusion alive. Ruthless technicism of the 20thcentury has not any ratio to it. It's not from people. It's from God. As well as "from God" - mother. Madonna - coloured ceramic relief on the "Rimskaya" metro station of the Moscow underground. "Santa Maria, Mater Dei" written on the thin oval frame, in which the traditional in simplicity group is placed on ultramarine-darkblue background: young Mother holds Infant on hands. Golden coverlet, cover both, repeats the rhythm of the oval and perceived rather abstractly - as not soft matter, but as something like nimbus; the figures - Maria gentle fragile and at the same time womanly strong by her maternity and Baby on her hands touching by little hand to the teat of naked bust, - are indefinitely real, classical, as classically vital Italian madonnas. Embodying tenderness, happiness and anxiety of motherhood - are in the figure of Mother, in her eyes, covered with heavy eyelids; in innocent charm of plump lips and cheeks, in the head of baby in arms extended as an egg and distinguished from other six-month babies only by sharp unchildish sight. The sculptor has transferred all this with amazing reliability. And the stronger is striking the sharp mismatch, tragic contrast: the figures are covered with cracks, are broken as old ceramics. It is not stylisation in the spirit of olden time, not an attempt to achieve similarity to antique Roman statues, victims of relentless all destroying time. Cracks transmit on living bodies of mother and child, and not by fault of time. They are pierced with holes - seem, they become riddled, and the cracks are the result of this blasphemous execution shot. Something black, malicious threatens the Mother and Child, tends to ruin, to scatter in ashes, and would scatter, if a light saving halo would not fasten them, a light saving halo on which on the top, above the prayeral inscription "Mater Die" is written the simple and great word MAMA.
So, the malicious forces of our days are not too abstract. It is strange to think that even this has given an occasion for writing indignant letters. The pretext for indignation - that Our Lady is represented with bare bust, poured as chalice with swelled teat - so is poured by milk bust of a nursing mother. So the Italians of epoch of High Renaissance felt and represented her. Ancient Russian virgins differ. But you see "Madonna", placed highly above platform, overhangs the station has got the name "Rimskaya".
"Rimskaya" station of the Moscow underground, decorated by reliefs of Berlin, - genuine holiday of sculpture, bringing true, almost childlike pleasure. "Capitoline she-wolf" that feeds by her teats the future founders of Rome: babies Romulus and Remus, is the relief on the arch right after the escalator. Severe, ancient wild-beast, memorable by the textbook of history, meets everyone entering on "Rimskaya". And at once behind turn down, half-broken antique column on the background of dark apertures, associating with entrances in catacombs, there are brightly coloured Corinthian columns. But two extreme natural, almost living children shake and play on these classical fragments as on a trunk of a fallen tree. Who are they? The same Romulus and Remus? Kind spirits of Italy - antique Amours, which would not distinguish from Christian little angels? Or the eternal upgrade of life, just children?
From opposite side - again after descent from the escalator, the antique mask of Tragedy is high above the pass on the platform - and it could be a head of Pan, imperceptibly similar to Leonid Berlin. From time immemorial, in Roman Renaissance times, the artists left somewhere in a secluded corner of a temple, a latent auto portrait. Unusual, not similar in any other station, overhung by a spirit of antiquity and Christianity; the pledge of indissoluble unity of time and people. People of an other epoch in a country so far from Rome, go along on their business, hurry up, hardly noticing the reliefs of Berlin, very tactfully, unpersistently-modestly sprinkled among the architecture of the station. But the reliefs, seem, notice everyone and give back to everyone, besides one's will and mind, a particle of the poetry and beauty.
Why again - to enter the field of battle in protection of the Artist and his creation? Not only in this matter, that "the man in the street" - but fanatically intolerant - cares about "cleanliness" of images of the Virgin and Jesus. There is another underlying reason. The black forces from our recent past have felt and fatally were frightened: you see they all during 70 years of soviet authority crucified the Artist; they are the "militant atheists" who shot the Virgin, in process of the forces struggled both with creativity and with beauty. But the Artist is alive and the Virgin is alive. Worn out, crucified, shot, with traces of bullets - all the same they live, and there is no such force, which could destroy them. The genuine creativity is a thousand times stronger than the low spiteful vanity, from which began and which ends my story about one of the most tragic - yet lightspirited - artists of Russia at the end of the 20th century.
Pleasure and light in the creativity of Berlin overcomes destruction and darkness - it is one more sharp difference of his art from the cult of chaos and nonsense so peculiar to modern "new" art. His victory is in it.


Alexander Morozov
KINETIC SCULPTURE OF LEONID BERLIN

Our Earth, according to the cinema metaphor of Andrey Tarkovsky, is like a vast densely littered waste ground "by the factory of world prosperity". Somebody local gathers from it pieces of iron, scraps of pipes, small wheels, wire and so on. Then he fastens one to another, some clever mechanism is inserted inside, - a new monster begins to rattle and to shoot. The creation of sculptor Leonid Berlin is before us. However, the products of disintegration of socio-industrial utopia receive here unexpected nomination. A list of metal, curved as a cone, is read as a female dress. Iron rods look as locks of a hair. Bent bars - wings of an Angel. Pipe rip opened by welding - man's torso… Mortal becomes animated, realities of human daily occurrence appear in the alien. So the transformation made by the artist.
However, it does not run low his strong-willed expansion. "Recoded signs" rise above an auxiliary neutrality, allocated with figurativeness. Fire awakens in the metal soul, and it opens to us first strikingly cold, than derisive and touchingly unprotected. Here though these beads-drops, clotted on a cut off layer. One more transformation! The material detects picturesqueness not peculiar to it. Here it is of deep black colour, and here it has become ground-warm - like "sfumato" of Falk, - now shines blue. And all turns out only by thermal processing or machining of metal. Colour is entered occasionally. But then the fragment, selected by it, begins to work as culmination of a masterly played performance, from time to time it is nearly grotesque. As you will, the jaw nearly taken out from the hungry mouth of this strange "Angel" with welded red table of "palate", where, by the way, also is written: "To shake, to remove and to put teeth" (this is the way to operate the object, in order to turn in a movement this sculpture-construction).
In such form Berlin personifies the alternative to phalanxes of modern "deconstructors". He is human, yes besides all he is happily dissolved in the mystery of art. It is this natural product, which has fed art over centuries. But chronotope of the artist does not belong to the past. The theme of all creative life of Berlin - pain, involving in catastrophe and the incomprehensible ability of a man to save itself surrounded by chaos and evil. Similar pain was learnt by each forefather of our century. Through it the work of Berlin, - and it is not devoid of intimate personal reference, - refers the spectator to the global drama of socium and time. This is the third of its transformations, which induces feelings on an internal large scale, even monumental way of thinking of the sculptor.
But Berlin exists completely outside of the stereotypes of the monument. He is infinitely far from academism. His works are born as unrestrained antagonism of the beginnings of creation and destruction; they wholly in the mainstream of avant-garde discoveries of the 20th century. The special individual aspect of style of Berlin is the efficiency of his compositions. They provoke us by dynamic contact and in replay utter something. Press, shake, "switch off", and iron begins ingenuously to nod a head, suffering, clanking. Close dialogue with Berlin's objects quite often is full of humour. At times it rises up to symbolical magic. Here is "Tragedy" - both cross and figure, L.L.Berlin with his son Anatolywhich compresses by palms a breaking-apart head. Headache is forced inside the skull, appears by the more and more bright luminescence, being permitted by dazzling flare and explosion. Direction of such spectacles makes the modernism of Berlin distinct and convincing even for an unsophisticated spectator.
Here is something both from kinets and performance; the other co-ordinate is felt also, that links us with the playful imagination of ancestral primitives and even with folklore rituals. So what is this alloy of artistic inclinations, fastened by genuine humanity and ennobled by culture of sensitive plastic? Leonid Berlin - one of the strongest and characteristic line of creative evolution in domestic art of the current century.
Magazine "Decorative art" ¹1, 1993.