When the Nobel-prize winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August this year the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, described him as “a great writer, humanist and patriot” while the Western press depicted him as a man who stood up against totalitarianism and that Russia’s loss was also the world’s.
That Medvedev carefully skirted around was that, although Solzhenitsyn was accepted by the ruling class in later life and met with Vladmir Putin, during the Soviet period he had been imprisoned for writing anti-Soviet propaganda and, once released, had his works both confiscated and, when published, heavily censored. He died famous and critically acclaimed, an exile returned to his homeland, but lived in a world where expressing your views openly risked imprisonment if not worse.
During the same period that Solzhenitsyn was being persecuted for his views, a Jewish couple from Cologne, West Germany, began to take an interest in unofficial Soviet art produced by artists such as Vladimir Nemuchin, Vladimir Yakovlev and Ernst Neizvestnyj among many others. The couple, Kenda and Jacob Bar-Gera, were not professional art historians but, partly because they had grown up in Nazi Germany, they felt it was their duty to help these artists find an audience despite their straitened circumstances.
Acting on this, they began to smuggle paintings and other works of art into Germany, hiding them, like many of Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts, in the suitcases of diplomats, travelling businessmen and students. What started as a way to help artists express themselves freely in a totalitarian society eventually turned into the Bar-Gera collection which is now housed at the Bar-Gera Museum for Persecuted Art in Ashod, near Tel-Aviv in Israel. The new exhibition at the Slovak National Gallery, Nonconformists, The Second Russian Avant-garde, 1955-1988, brings many of the works from this collection together for the first time in Slovakia.
According to the curators of the exhibition, the main slogan of the group of artists on show was to ‘maintain and defend the right to artistic freedom and independence’ during the Soviet era. Even a cursory glance at the works presented leaves you with the impression that none of the artists were beholden to Socialist Realism, the official communist style of art that found its expression in such pieces as the Slavin Monument which sits grandly overlooking Bratislava.
As you enter the gallery the first thing you see is Nemuchin’s Gaming Table, an actual table covered in playing cards, a game in progress. The paint on the table looks heavily applied and slightly garish, as if Nemuchin were attempting to mimic the Soviet tendency to ape at luxury but not quite hit the mark, like a nouveau riche covering herself in jewellery and thinking herself classy. But that is not the only criticism within the piece. The writer Tolstoy used cards repeatedly in his fiction to portray a character as a time-waster. It was a pastime, he thought, that showed the inherent failings of Tsarism (moral weakness, intellectual flabbiness etc.) and Lenin, taking his cue from him, thought much the same. Nemuchin’s piece suggests both and playfully mocks them: Soviet Russia has turned into a game (the piece was finished in 1988), or perhaps, has reverted to what it was before the revolution, but so what? Cards are cards and nothing more. If anything they’re to be enjoyed. They bring more pleasure than revolution’s aftermath.
A number of the pieces on display were produced after Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956 where he denounced many of Stalin’s practices, and the liberalisation that followed is directly represented in works such as No News, by Vladimir Veisberg, which shows an unplugged radio in different shades of grey, the painting as bland and as uniform as the news the artist would have been exposed to.
Valery Yurlov’s White and Black (diptych) from the same period shows two canvasses next to each other, both black but seemingly in balance, like yin and yang, one marked in the centre with a white semi-circle, the other marked with a black one. The two, however, are not mirror images. For the one canvass to be marked with a black semi-circle, Yurlov painted a white rectangle in the middle so it would show up on the black background. The two sides do not accommodate each other, and the viewer is left wondering whether this is a reference to the artist’s existence in Soviet Russia.
Yet maybe there is no reference to the regime at all and it is just an expression of colour and form, and therein lies the problem with the whole exhibition. As you walk around the galleries, you become more and more aware of the slogan the artists lived by, so much so that the works of art cannot breathe on their own. The context they were created in overwhelms them and it is difficult to see them solely as works of art. They are tainted by polemic. It is impossible to separate them from the period they were produced in, of course (compare Goya’s Black Paintings), but lumping them together threatens their individuality and turns them into representations of social history rather than art.
Pyotr Belenok’s two Tempest paintings, one showing a man overpowered by a thick swirling storm, the other showing demonstrators attacking a twister’s advance, represent the individual as victim and then as defiant against the progress of history. We feel sorry for those that suffered under the Soviet regime then feel emboldened by those that fought against it, but both feelings are too simple, too comfortable, too secure in the knowledge that now, since 1989, we are free to look at these paintings without fear of persecution, and that we are much better off now that communism has collapsed. The paintings invite us, on the surface, to view them as part of a struggle overcome, not one that still goes on. They become period pieces, at most warnings that the Soviet regime could come again, but at times they feel almost irrelevant. (After Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 he was given a TV show where he could express his view freely. After low-ratings, it was cancelled).
There is one painting, however, that seems to be aware of this. Claun by Vladimir Yakovlev represents an angular outline of a red face painted on top of a round grey one, almost as if the man’s grey character has been pushed aside or consumed by a red mask. You look at it and see a similarity with Lenin’s angular face in the red whereas the truth is beyond what you see, beyond the pigeon-hole the curator’s put the exhibition in. The real character of the paintings is in the round grey face hidden behind our muddied eyes.
For more information see www.sng.sk. The exhibition runs till 22/2/2009
