Photos by the artist Ivan Kuskov are all there is. Favorite images of childhood
Having passed along a long narrow corridor of a communal apartment, we find ourselves in a reserved world, in something completely different than all the dwellings or workshops of artists that have been encountered so far. A narrow, cramped room, lost in the midst of alienated everyday life, suddenly turns out to be both a work of art, and an oasis of Freedom - the keeper of cultural memory, and an imprint of life experience, which has been won back by many years of resistance to an average and secured common being. This is a multi-layered, hierarchically built space, and therefore it is a kind of state within a state, physically tiny, but containing the Universe. 
Each (by no means accidental) detail, each smallness and, it would seem, particularity embodies the spirit of remembering the imaginary "promised land", lost, but reconstructed homeland, the image of which is the image of former Europe seen with the farsightedness of a telescope and transformed by the power of imagination . The chivalric antiquity from childhood makes him, like Don Quixote, again and again go in search of adventure, now with the help of his favorite books, retributions to Bacchus and the sharpened pen of a virtuoso draftsman, who so often likens the network of a pen drawing to the intricacies of an etching stroke (and this magic weapon serves him so as reliable as a faithful sword to a knight-errant). In the world he created, he is a demiurge, a ruler, a titan and a master craftsman. Obedient only to God's will, he feels himself to be a conductor of the Divine principle, which allows him to categorically declare: "I am God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit." 
Hence the demand for absolute honesty towards one's craft and one's vocation, towards the chosen heroes and idols. Creativity constantly spills over the boundaries of art as an isolated cultural sphere and turns to being itself, to life in general. A variety of quotes. Like romance, he is also attracted by the manifestation of the mysterious and the supernatural, the real and the fantastic are closely intertwined here: it is not for nothing that the visionary and esthete Edgar Allan Poe was among the first idols. However, the unconditional requirement is the truth and accuracy of the fantastic, the proportionality of the Mystery, logic and empiricism. For example, while idolizing E. Poe, the artist treats Hoffmann with much less sympathy, whose excessive flamboyance of fantasy seems excessive to him. However, in the case of an unconditionally convincing truth of art, he does not exclude any fiction and phantasmagoria: he highly appreciates Hieronymus Bosch, and from the modernist trends of the 20th century he respectfully speaks of the surrealist branch, especially singling out Salvador Dali. The requirement to draw like old masters is aimed at the most visual, tangible, concrete embodiment of the Idea. The illusionism of his spaces, the microcosm of the sheet, is due to the fact that, by his own definition, he wants to travel, plunging into them, in order to touch every detail, every little thing from everything he created. 
This combination of documentary authenticity and the halo of the Riddle, distinct physiological accuracy and thoughtfulness of innermost subtexts, and, finally, the resurrection of the sheet-picture as a kind of “mirror” of some kind of real-ideal world - all this helps to understand why, among the spiritual ancestors from the Renaissance, for him especially Leonardo and Dürer are significant. He turned to the image of Leonardo as a hero-character of one of his sheets back in the post-war Stalin years, which, by the way, served as an occasion for acquaintance and further friendship with another outsider of his time - Dmitry Krasno-pevtsev. The propensity for painstaking reconstruction of the historical costume and other surroundings of the era, along with the already mentioned magical visualization of material realities, should not be identified either with the methods and worldview of the wretched academism of the socialist realist school, or with the infantile-feminine theatricality of the Left Moscow carnivals, or with the kitsch retrospectiveness of any historicizing “salon ". 
Kuskov's retrospectivism, in contrast to the aforementioned "returns to the origins", does not at all smack of a sugary idealization of the past, and the passions and events of the world he generated are by no means a puppet-sham imitation of "children's dreams". His world is permeated by powerful, completely unknowable forces of life and death, fate, fate, fate. The anticipation of fatality, however, does not suppress, does not dissolve the Personality, but, on the contrary, crystallizes it. Such, for example, is the luck of the drunken life-loving sailors in The Plague King: the visible presence of death and danger, the “spell of horror” materialized in the frighteningly captivating panorama of the extinct urban landscape, only shade and sharpen the life-creating energy of the master and his heroes. 
A living character is always visibly or invisibly accompanied by projections of the otherworldly - a mask of death, an eschatological shadow, "the impenetrable presence of the Incomprehensible Other. The night side of the soul, excited by "drinking", reading and tireless creativity, gives the space of life, so vital, lived-in, experienced, a visionary dimension. The element of the irrational is tamed by art. The gifts of fantasy are finely processed, ordered, cultivated in the workshop of the imagination. Having crystallized out of the book world, these sheets have acquired a strange self-sufficiency, no longer being illustrations at all. of these sheets “for oneself” seems to be a kind of meaningful symbolic language, where each image participates in the construction of the overall picture of the universe. 
The image of the world, so merged here with the way of life, is conceivable only through the Image, living, personal, concrete, reliable, always carrying a message of vital importance. Each of these unique spaces is a conclusion from a previous life and at the same time an exit, a magical secret door, a "porthole window" of the captain's cabin. This is a way, without leaving the cabin, to vigilantly observe and map images so familiar, but in fact alluring with the unknown depths, distances, horizons. An absolutely isolated environment, where real windows have not been cleaned for years, is full of "windows", doors and vestibules through which the prospects of unlimited travel open up.
Art critic Sergei Kuskov, son of Ivan Kuskov
Edited by Natalia Brilling
In the museum and exhibition complex of the Moscow Academic Art Lyceum of the Russian Academy of Arts from January 31 to February 18, 2008. there was a personal exhibition of the graduate of the Moscow Art School in 1946, the wonderful illustrator Ivan Kuskov.
Ivan Sergeevich Kuskov is a well-known book graphic artist, the author of illustrations for books that everyone read - “The Three Musketeers”, “Til Ulenspiegel”, “Don Quixote” ... He was admired by his colleagues and just admirers, calling him “the second Durer”, “king of illustrations” . The artist was born in 1927 in the family of a pediatrician in Moscow, in Obydensky lane near Ostozhenka. “Be born, live, die all in the same old house,” this quote from Saint Beve, subsequently written by Kuskov on the door of his room, actually became the motto of the artist, who really lived in this house, in his sixteen-meter communal room all his life. 
After the fourth grade of a comprehensive school, he entered the first grade of the Moscow Art School, which had just been opened in 1939. From 1941 to 1943 he was evacuated to Bashkiria with this school. He graduated from high school in 1946. In 1947 he entered the Surikov Institute and graduated in 1952. Since then, he has worked as an illustrator for various publishing houses. The gift of an illustrator manifested itself in I.S. Kuskov very early. The museum fund contains works made by him at the age of nine. These compositions on historical themes amaze with the ability to compose and knowledge of the historical era. 
Schoolmates said about him that he was a natural phenomenon, and “already in the cradle he scratched illustrations for The Three Musketeers with a feather with a feather ... During his creative life, the artist illustrated about a hundred books. The characters of literary classics for Kuskov seemed to come to life, he was an accomplice in the described action. Interiors, landscapes, costumes of the heroes of the works amaze with their artistic truth.
He had many admirers, he corresponded with many, receiving many reviews from various places in the country. He greatly appreciated these contacts with readers. It was in this not semi-officially Soviet, but in the true sense of the word that he was truly a people's artist. By the will of fate, all the legacy of a talented artist - his numerous drawings, etchings, of which there are more than 2000 items, archives - went to our museum. This is a great honor and a huge responsibility for museum staff. The presented exhibition contains only a small part of his legacy, but it gives a complete picture of the breadth of the artist's talent. I.S.Kuskov mainly worked in the technique of ink and pen. 
But he also turned to easel graphics. His watercolor compositions, which can be seen at the exhibition, have been preserved. In addition to book illustrations made by the artist after graduating from the institute, the exposition includes his school works, which are not inferior in their skill to the works of his mature period. I.S. Kuskov did not have any regalia, titles, but his work will always be admired by true connoisseurs of fine art.
It was not that in 87, not that in 88. I was introduced to Sergei Kuskov, we had a drink somewhere, and our companion took it into her head to drag me into the apartment of his artist father. Having stocked up on wine, we went into the entrance of an old beautiful house in Obydenskoye. The owner, who opened the door with the dignity of a lion and the gallantry of a gentleman, extended his hand to me, introducing himself: "Ivan Kuskov."
But I have already stuck my eyes to the drawings hung everywhere, tightly connected in my memory with a bunch of childhood books: Til, Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Mine Reid, Cooper ... But the main thing is - Three Musketeers!!! Probably half the pleasure of these books was brought by pictures - they could be considered for a long time and in detail.
The owner really turned out to be the author of all these illustrations, and I looked at him, wide-eyed. The Three Musketeers was the first book I read in the full sense on my own: having barely learned to read, I stole a thick red volume with fascinating pictures from an "adult" shelf. I remember that I transformed the incomprehensible names of the heroes in my own way, and when I later heard about D "Artagnan and Aramis, I did not immediately realize that these were the people with whom I already knew in early childhood ...
The only room of the owner was remarkable no less than himself.
Empty bottles were found everywhere. But the storage of empty glass containers is the most important feature of the owner's personality. For example, in the famous apartment of Itskovich on Kalashny, a corner of a large half-empty room that served as a living room was allotted for this. The empty bottles were placed one by one, starting from the corner, and over time they evenly filled the volume of the hall, forming on the wooden floor a map of some oscillating mainland outlines.
Kuskov's bottles were not a container and not a material for creating new forms. These were precisely the bottles and each found its place. Cognac scoundrels sprouted in small shoots among other incredible half-broken souvenirs on a chest of drawers topped with an old lamp with a makeshift shade. Impressive "fire extinguishers" from port wine turned into dusty bottles from under the Burgundy drunk in the dark of the tavern and wrapped in draperies of old fabrics were woven into still lifes with a broken box and a carelessly thrown dagger. In addition to them, there were some decanters and wine glasses - either antique-crystal, or - bought yesterday in a souvenir shop. The walls and ceiling were painted with images barely visible in the twilight. The interior was filled with all sorts of hats, fake swords, old mirrors, horns, shells, and a host of other obscure objects.
Both this apartment and the chivalrous manner of the owner were very attractive. But from the whole conversation, I only remember the discussion of the question of whether to go again for wine or - it's time to go home ...
At the time of the visit, a guest was present in the apartment - a friend, as the owner introduced him, finding it difficult, however, to give his name. It was a drunken philosopher, typical of those old Moscow alleys, who had almost lost the gift of speech by that moment, but behaved with dignity and significance.
I think I visited Kuskov Sr. once more. And since then, with his son, we sometimes crossed paths at some opening days. Sergei Kuskov was a highly respected art critic in certain circles. He worked, it seems, in the Tretyakov Gallery, had colossal erudition, but was more engaged in contemporary art: he wrote, curated exhibitions. In the 90s, he became interested in the art projects of the NBP - still "the one" where the spirit of Kuryokhin, Dugin and Letov soared. We had a few drinks somewhere. After drinking, he at first heatedly launched into the presentation of some ideas that were captivating in their controversy. Somehow, having fallen into a rage, he tried to grab my throat ... I tried to understand him, it seemed that he saw something important, but his speech was too slurred, his diction worsened with each glass, and I was often quite busy other thoughts. Sergei left me with a feeling of some kind of childish insecurity. Once he said that his father was seriously ill. And over time, it completely disappeared from sight.
I recently learned about the fate of both Kuskovs from the diary of an artist:
"The life of the artist Ivan Kuskov ended tragically. During the "perestroika", when there was no alcohol on sale, he, with some former sea captain (I suspect that it was a demon in the guise of a captain) bought and drank left alcohol. nine years, until his death, the blind Ivan Kuskov was bedridden. Art historian Sergei Kuskov was forced to exchange housing on the "golden kilometer" of Ostozhenka for Ryazansky Prospekt. After the death of his father, he ended up in the Krasnodar Territory and died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 53. "
All that could be found biographical about Kuskov Sr. is a tiny note on the website of the Museum of the Moscow Art School, where, it turns out, his works are stored.
And, finally, first_books, collected in the LiveJournal community.
We managed to find only a few mentions about Sergey in blogs and fragments of his articles:
And an example of his signature style:
"So, it is no coincidence that on a black background, as in the heavens of the night, a whole constellation of such small, but cosmic sign-forms, sign-bodies arises. These are often ancient solar or astral signs, more often their modern author's transformations and variations that do not break with the spell Primary Archetypes. This is how it should happen: after all, the Archetype lives only by reincarnating and changing anew each time, always flickering differently on the verge of recognizability and unrecognizability."(from an article about a ceramic artist)
Friend of the owner among his works
Sergei Kuskov and Alexander Dugin at Petliura's squat present a performance with some defiant fire-worshipping fascist idea. I don’t remember the idea, I only remember that the burners of the gas pipes were blazing, and in the fire they were burned by the likeness of these hanging “living corpses”.
DAMN VODKA.
Favorite childhood books… They are remembered all my life, they are the basis of our intellectual baggage. I was lucky, I had many books. And the most beloved ones are decorated with wonderful illustrations. One of the best illustrators, thanks to which I adore book graphics, is Kuskov Ivan Sergeevich. An artist who was quite rightly called the "king of illustrations". Below I will give an excerpt from an article by art historian Sergei Kuskov, the artist's son. The article is wonderful.
“I was born in the family of a pediatrician in Moscow, in Obydensky lane near Ostozhenka. “Be born, live, die all in the same old house,” this quote from Saint Beve, subsequently written by Kuskov on the door of his room, actually became the motto of the artist, who really lived in this house, in his sixteen-meter communal room all his life.
After the fourth grade of a comprehensive school, he entered the first grade of the Moscow Art School, which had just been opened in 1939. From 1941 to 1943 he was evacuated to Bashkiria with this school.
He graduated from high school in 1946. In 1947 he entered the Surikov Institute and graduated in 1952. Since then, he has worked as an illustrator for various publishing houses.
The gift of an illustrator manifested itself in I.S. Kuskov very early. The museum fund contains works made by him at the age of nine. These compositions on historical themes amaze with the ability to compose and knowledge of the historical era.
Ivan Sergeevich is the author of illustrations for books that everyone read - “The Three Musketeers”, “Forty-five”, “Til Ulenspiegel”, “Don Quixote”, “King Solomon's Mines”, ... His colleagues and just admirers admired him, calling him “the second Durer ”, “the king of illustrations”.
The son of Ivan Sergeevich is art critic Sergei Kuskov.
fantlab.ru/art1032
The most vivid memories, as you know, are from childhood. The tastiest ice cream, the most interesting films, fun ski trips, trips to the skating rink, and the scariest stories told to each other before going to bed, all this seems to have happened only then. And of course the greedy "swallowing" of books, especially adventure ones.
Looking through these publications now, I remember that bright and carefree time. How they imagined themselves to be the heroes of the plots, how they tried to finish reading as soon as possible to the picture. Then more and more. And what a pity that the last page was approaching.
I don’t know about anyone else, but my favorite book was The Three Musketeers with illustrations by Ivan Kuskov. And although it is believed that the images of the heroes of Dumas' novel were best conveyed by the artist Maurice Leloir, the "pictures" from the childhood book are dearer to my heart.
Book graphics are complicated by the fact that the illustrator, as a co-author of the publication, should in no case destroy those images that have already arisen when reading the story. On the contrary, its task is to combine the vision of the writer, the illustrator and the representation of the reader.
Ivan Kuskov (1927-1997) - Moscow graphic artist. During his life he designed more than a hundred books. The most famous of them are Charles Dickens, Charles Coster, Fenimore Cooper, Mine Reed, Jonathan Swift, Miguel Cervantes, Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas. His favorite technique is ink and pen.
The artist accurately portrayed the characters of Dumas, the atmosphere and the romantic spirit of that era. The revived heroes of his illustrations seem to have come out of engravings of the 17th century, in which the action took place. Their features, costume details, weapons, every feather on the hat is carefully drawn. All these nuances determined a kind of "dress code" of a nobleman, military or official of that time. The style of Kuskov's work corresponds to the most descriptive style of the novel, reflects Dumas's desire to give an exhaustive story about appearance, habits, and manner of dressing, in order to more accurately reveal the images of his characters.
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