"The Art of the New Russia "

Twentieth-century Russian art was so multi-faceted that it would be difficult to write its real and objective history. It seems to break up before one's very eyes into completely incompatible fragments: good-quality professional art, avant-garde, official ideological art, underground art, and the semi-tolerated trends of the Late Soviet period. Today, in the early twenty-first century, art historians are unable to reach anything resembling a consensus on the history of modern Russian art. The dramatic and torn-asunder history of the country gave rise to a radical fragmentation in the history of its art.

No one would ever try to bring the real diversity of Russian art to a common denominator. On the contrary, this great diversity should be taken to be a sign of great wealth. The problem is that intolerance and the desire to have a monopoly are just as common in art as in politics and economics and lead to the same regrettable results.

Dare one hope that Russian art will not only remain multi-faceted and polyphonic but also learn how to live peacefully so that no one tries to infringe upon his neighbor or cut off his competitor's oxygen supply?

The goal of the project Inhabited Islands is to preserve diversity and gather strength for new, systematic and constructive work. Fifteen major painters and sculptors have come together in order to propose a new method of artistic cooperation. Indeed, the differences in world views and the approaches to the problems of art are so great that each of these artists resembles a separate island. Yet none of them would want any of the neighboring islands to go under water and disappear.

Taken together, they resemble an archipelago of sorts. This is not a formal group or association. All fifteen painters and sculptors are independent and mature artists in their own spheres with established reputations and very distinct artistic styles. Each of them is fifty or slightly older, and it is high time to exhibit the results of their extensive work.

These fully-formed artists deserve individual honors and personal retrospectives. Why then did they come together? What is the meaning of this show of force by a diverse, polyphonic and talented team?

They remind us that the art of our great country did not dry up at the end of the twentieth century and that it does not simply consist of commercial sensations and social events. There is still real, high-quality art in Russia. It did not move to the West, lose heart, or sell its soul to countless Mephistopheles. The art of the new Russia exists and is fully viable.

The art of the new Russia is the work of artists who were trained and began to work in the seventies. They were seemingly destined to continue or develop the work of the underground artists of the time. Yet it was not meant to be. The great festival of freedom erupted: a festival in the Russian tradition, with the destruction of one's own home, the loss of property, intoxication, and the wary and mocking glances of neighbors. As Russia got caught up in the whirlwind of events, one got the impression that all the criteria of good sculpture and real painting would be forgotten in twenty years' time.

Yet we managed to weather fairly well this period of destruction, deconstruction and subversion and even began to get used to the fact that attacks on taste, meaning and quality are different: some are intelligent and skilful, while others are stupid and inept. We are grateful for having had the chance to experience and learn this. Yet this useful negative experience is meaningful only when there is a community of professionals who know how to sculpt, carve, paint and draw, how to express themselves in art and how to speak about the simple joys of life as well as its terrible moments. This is what the present exhibition is all about.

One may wonder why their works are exhibited together. Good artists that grew up in the same environment can understand each other without words and do not experience the difficulties that unavoidably arise when dealing with other types of bipeds (bureaucrats, managers and journalists). Good artists always feel more at home among equals each other than in the marketplace commotion of large commercial exhibitions where the size of the exhibition spaces of real masters, semi-masters and non-masters depends solely on the price of the lease.

Yet there are other considerations besides pragmatic and human ones. They are frequently related to something called the world view. Is there something that all the artists want to speak about together (even if not in unison)? Naturally, ideas bring artists together just like they unite other classes, communities and commonwealths. The paintings and sculptures in our exhibition express a few major themes that essentially constitute a "philosophy of life." They are the simple values of life, the Russian province and traditional religiosity.

Despite their different forms and styles, the works of these artists clearly express a common world view. Family, simples things, everyday life, the human body and the food for this body, temples and the sacred symbols of the Supreme Powers may be said to be the elements of this world view. It is fairly traditional. Even the sculptures of the enigmatic Mikhail Dronov, which are not always easy to interpret, ultimately speak about these themes. Even Dmitry Krymov, a city artist, does not depart far from this "primordial philosophy." This is all the more true of Natalya Glebova, who knows how to create panoramas of air, light, movement and life using soft and seemingly haphazard brush strokes. All the artists touch in one way or another on the idea of the family, ancestors and tribe and of their roots in their native country. This makes them appeal to viewers and art lovers not only in Russia but also abroad. Lubennikov, Komelin, Korneev, Rusanov, Voronov, Kornilov, Faidysh, Tolstaya, Epikhin, Vatagin, Tabenkin, and Surovtseva are artists that are appreciated by an international arts audience; their works are found in museums and collections on different continents. Europeans and Americans readily react to paintings and sculptures which convincingly embody Russian life in all its lyrical, grotesque, unexpected and banal aspects.

Nevertheless, a simple answer does not exhaust a complex question. It is not only a matter of world views, spiritual genetics or the national idea. These fifteen "islands" or artists do not trust ideas. As far as one can judge, they have developed staunch idiosyncratic reactions to programs, manifests, conceptions and other expressions of the ideological drive. This "point of absence" may well be the central aspect of the art that is coming to the fore in Moscow in the early twenty-first century. Things are becoming more important than words. No one believes in words any more.

Ideological people always want to look inside you, save your soul, strengthen morality, build a new Russia, raise the cultural level, or to show once and for all why or how all of this should not be done. At one point, it became very prestigious to go to extremes.

Our fifteen artists engage in something different. They make truly good works; they are real masters and top-rate professionals. They model clay, paint on canvas, carve wood, and cast metal skillfully and reliably. This is very important, for the inflation of conceptualist strategies has given many people the illusion that manual work is something unimportant. However, the hands of an artist are not simply means of implementing plans and ideas. Heinrich Heine used to say that the artist's hands frequently know what to do better than the artist himself. It may well be that the technique of manually skilled people even gets the upper hand of their ideas, beliefs and convictions.

World views are naturally present and make themselves felt, despite the fact that artists, who are intellectuals, like simplicity and value straightforwardness. Some of them have dabbled in the theories and complex philosophies that surround us. Nevertheless, they prefer wisdom, i.e., traditional knowledge that is expressed by enduring formulas. This wisdom may well seem naive, yet one clearly understands that the creators of these works do not strive to be sophisticated. They have other goals and functions.

Their art consists of solid and highly-skilled craftsmanship which expresses certain inner states that are not necessary for the life of society, the dream castles of politics, and the golden domes of ideology. The ideas and philosophic postulates of these artists are wisely straightforward while their undertones are fairly complex.

A close look at how the bronzes and canvases are fashioned, how the wood is carved and how the problems of space, light, equilibrium, heaviness and lightness, texture, etc., are solved, gives one the effect of self-forgetting. Let me make a small aside to explain what I mean. Chekhov's short story "Steppe" has a remarkable episode in which a boy finds a well in a steppe on a hot day and greedily drinks the ice-cold water. This scene is written in such a way that the reader (if he likes and knows how to read fiction) completely forgets about social issues, psychological nuances, and religious problems that figure in the short story. One disregards them, for the writer has fashioned the story so well that we feel, as if by magic, the ice-cold water in our mouth on a hot summer day. It completely overwhelms us.

This is the result of the inspired, committed, skilled and intelligent labor of a real professional hand. (It is well know that the artist's hand is the direct continuation of his soul, heart, conscience, memory and instinct.) The "thingness" or "objectivity" of the thing suffices. He who can convey the feeling of cold water on a hot day knows the value of ideas and world views. The corporeality of the body, the "floweriness" of the flower, the "appleness" of the apple, the "jugness" of the jug and the airiness of air suffice. Lofty truths are always complicated, hard to understand, and unreliable. Intelligent people have argued for millennia (and will continue to argue) about political, religious, historical and social issues. A jug, tree, face, body or flower is reliable and even absolute. The combination of textures, the feeling of the material, and the masterful weave of the painterly canvas are real "things" with which one can not argue.

We see here the art of fifteen masters that is not meant to create a sensation, does not try to say something new in art, and does not offer any sharp or spicy sensations. These people know how to work and know their art. Their time may well have come today. One would like to see the day when contemporary art will engage in art rather than "artistic activities."

The fifteen masters of the new Russia may make this dream a reality. They are real masters.