Artist Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov Pavel Varfolomeevich paintings description
Pavel Varfolomeevich was born in 1878 in the family of a Saratov icon painter. Watching his father work in his studio, the boy also became interested in painting and began his career as an artist in the Saratov Studio of Painting and Drawing.
Having received excellent training, in 1897 the young man without much difficulty entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where Arkhipov and were his main teachers. It was here that he found like-minded people who later organized the Blue Rose Society. Its representatives painted in bluish tones, followed the principles of symbolism and strived to ensure that the works were soft, romantic, filled with music.
Kuznetsov took an active part in the activities of various art associations. He was a member of the "Union of Russian Artists", "World of Art" societies, was among the organizers of the "Scarlet Rose", "Blue Rose", became a lifelong member of the "Autumn Salon", worked as chairman of the "Four Arts" society and in other creative associations.
After traveling through Central Asia and the Trans-Volga steppes, the main theme of the artist's work for many years was the East with its bewitching steppe landscapes and the life of nomads. Kuznetsov was no less influenced by other trips, in particular to Armenia, the Caucasus, the Crimea, Azerbaijan, and Paris. His favorite genres were still life and landscape.
In parallel with painting, Kuznetsov was engaged in theatrical scenery, taught at the State Free Art Workshops, worked as a professor at VKHUTEMAS and then at VKHUTEIN. With the advent of Soviet power, he worked in the department of fine arts of the People's Commissariat for Education.
Pavel Varfolomeevich passed away in 1968 at the respectable age of 89.
Creativity of the painter
early painting
In the very first years of his creative activity, Kuznetsov showed himself to be a bold innovator who was not afraid to express his feelings and worldview in paintings. One of his first experiments was the painting of the Saratov church, which he worked with artists and Utkin. Young people decided to give free rein to the impulses of their souls and moved away from the canons of traditional painting. Although the experiment ended in failure (society angrily destroyed their work), all three gained great experience in finding their own pictorial language.
Carried away by the ideas of the Symbolists (especially Borisov-Mustaev), the artist gradually moved from Impressionism to Symbolism. At this time, his famous "Fountains" and "Births" appeared - a series of paintings in which symbolism comes to the fore. So, endlessly appearing new jets of the fountain symbolized birth, ascending streams were a symbol of the tragic, carrying away, descending - a symbol of the gift. Magnificent paintings on this topic: "Blue Fountain", "Mother's Love", "Morning". Due to a special technique, with intermittent strokes, the artist's canvases look airy, filled with special light and space.
Exploring the theme of birth, the artist even worked as an obstetrician for some time. This work helped him realize that the physical side of the issue interests him much less than the spiritual. For the same reason, Kuznetsov preferred soft blue tones, which symbolized for him the embodiment of higher spirituality.
Oriental motives
Pictures of the "steppe" cycle are considered the highest stage of Kuznetsov's work. They organically intertwined his philosophical views, the principles of the Symbolists and the Blue Rose artists, as well as all the experience that the artist absorbed while traveling around the countries and getting to know the painting of other masters. And this helped him to create in a unique style, which is characterized by a special color, softness and amazing rhythm. So, in many works of this cycle, rhythm is manifested in the fact that the contours of the characters follow the contours of the surrounding buildings or the ground.
In the oriental cycle, the artist showed himself to be a skilled colorist, in whose paintings the most delicate shades are organically combined. At the same time, his works retain majesty, monumentality, which is the core of his special artistic style.
Auction records, the price of Kuznetsov's paintings
To find out how much Kuznetsov's paintings cost today, consider a number of examples of sales at auctions.
First of all, we will study the largest withdrawals in ascending order of price. Let's start with the auction held at MacDougall's in June 2018. At these auctions, the painting "Fountain", created by him in 1904, was presented. The appearance at the auction of this work was a significant event, especially in light of the fact that in 1911 a fire in the villa "Black Swan" philanthropist N. Ryabushinsky destroyed many paintings by the artists of the "Blue Rose". Many of Kuznetsov's wonderful works, which were assigned a key role in decorating the villa, perished in the fire.
In addition, "Fountain" is an excellent example of the artist's creative period, when fountains became his favorite topic (see above). The heyday of this phenomenon was observed in his activities between 1904 and 1907.
The canvas came up for auction with an estimate of 250-500 thousand pounds and was sold for 333 thousand pounds (447 thousand dollars).
The following major departures concern two still lifes sold at approximately similar prices. These are the works “Still life on the piano with a portrait of E.M. Bebutova" and "Still life with a decanter".
The first of these canvases effectively captures a bouquet of flowers in a vase, reflected in the polished surface of the piano, and a portrait of Elena Mikhailovna Bebutova, the artist's beloved wife and muse. The master created this portrait in 1922. In this work, the artist depicted objects that were his favorite attributes in other paintings: a vase, a portrait of his wife and notes for classes. In 2014, the still life was sold at MacDougall`s for 338 thousand pounds (565 thousand dollars) with an estimate of 200-300 thousand pounds.
The second still life was sold at Sotheby`s in 2007 for 288 thousand pounds (597 thousand dollars) with an estimate of 200-300 thousand pounds. This work also symbolizes the period when the artist began to show interest in still lifes under the influence of studying the collection of Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin.
But the sale of the painting “Eastern City. Bukhara”, held in June 2014 at MacDougall`s. This work is considered one of the most significant and famous paintings of Kuznetsov about Central Asia. It was repeatedly presented at events of different years: at the World of Art exhibitions in 1915 and 1917, at Moscow exhibitions dedicated to Pavel Kuznetsov in 1923, 1956, 1964 and 1978, as well as at the Japanese exhibition of Soviet art in 1926-1927 gg.
The picturesque masterpiece was presented with an estimate of 1.9-3 million pounds, which fully justified itself. The exit price at the auction was 2.4 million pounds (3.9 million dollars).
For a complete answer to the question of how much Kuznetsov's paintings cost, let's consider smaller departures. His paintings are occasionally sold at various auctions and go in price categories from several thousand to several hundred thousand pounds. Here are examples of canvases sold: Sochi (Sotheby`s, 2012, £85,000), Caravan Stops (Bonhams, 2006, £50,000), City in Central Asia (Sotheby`s , 2014, 22.5 thousand pounds), “Summer. Harvest ”(Christie`s, 2000, 18 thousand pounds).
What affects the price, where and how to sell a painting by Kuznetsov, we will consider in the next section.
How to evaluate and sell a painting by Kuznetsov
What determines the price of a particular job
The value of a painting increases markedly if it is of significant value to society. For example, if it has been repeatedly exhibited at exhibitions, sold to famous galleries or collections, if it is an example of important creative cycles of Kuznetsov, printed on covers, postcards, stamps, has become a cause for hype, or is a rare copy of the master’s almost destroyed heritage. These and similar facts can be revealed by the examination of Kuznetsov's painting.
How to conduct an examination of Kuznetsov's painting
Kuznetsov Pavel Varfolomeevich
Pavel Kuznetsov
(1878-1968)
Nature endowed P. V. Kuznetsov with a brilliant pictorial gift and inexhaustible energy of the soul. The feeling of delight before life did not leave the artist until old age. Art was for him a form of existence.
Kuznetsov could have joined the fine arts as a child, in the workshop of his father, an icon painter. When the boy's artistic inclinations were clearly defined, he entered the Studio of Painting and Drawing at the Saratov Society of Fine Arts Lovers, where he studied for several years (1891-96) under the guidance of V. V. Konovalov and G. P. Salvi-ni-Baracchi.
An exceptionally important event in his life was a meeting with V. E. Borisov-Musatov, who had a strong and beneficial influence on the Saratov artistic youth.
In 1897, Kuznetsov brilliantly passed the exams at the MUZhVZ. He studied well, standing out not only for the brightness of his talent, but also for his genuine passion for work. During these years, Kuznetsov was under the spell of the pictorial artistry of K. A. Korovin; no less profound was the disciplinary influence of V. A. Serov.
At the same time, a group of students rallied around Kuznetsov, who later became members of the well-known creative community "Blue Rose". From impressionism to symbolism - this is the main trend that determined the search for Kuznetsov in the early period of creativity. Having paid tribute to plein air painting, the young artist sought to find a language that could reflect not so much the impressions of the visible world as the state of the soul.
On this path, painting came close to poetry and music, as if testing the limits of visual possibilities. Among the important accompanying circumstances are the participation of Kuznetsov and his friends in the design of symbolist performances, cooperation in symbolist magazines.
In 1902, Kuznetsov with two comrades - K. S. Petrov-Vodkin and P. S. Utkin - undertook an experiment in painting in the Saratov Church of Our Lady of Kazan. Young artists did not constrain themselves by observing the canons, giving full rein to their imagination. The risky experiment caused a storm of public indignation, accusations of blasphemy - the murals were destroyed, but for the artists themselves, this experience was an important step in the search for a new pictorial expression.
By the time the MUZHVZ ended (1904), Kuznetsov's symbolist orientation had become quite clear. The picturesque discoveries of Borisov-Musatov acquired special significance. However, the balance of the abstract and the concrete, which marks the best Musatov's works, is not characteristic of Kuznetsov's symbolism. The flesh of the visible world melts in his paintings, his picturesque visions are almost surreal, woven from images-shadows, denoting the subtle movements of the soul. Kuznetsov's favorite motif is a fountain; The artist was fascinated by the spectacle of the water cycle as early as childhood, and now memories of this are resurrected on canvases that vary the theme of the eternal cycle of life.
Like Musatov, Kuznetsov prefers tempera, but uses its decorative possibilities in a very peculiar way, as if with an eye on the techniques of impressionism. The whitened shades of color seem to tend to merge into one whole: a barely colored light - and the picture seems to be shrouded in a colored fog ("Morning", "Blue Fountain", both 1905; "Birth", 1906, etc.).
Kuznetsov gained fame early. The artist was not yet thirty when his works were included in the famous exposition of Russian art arranged by S. P. Diaghilev in Paris (1906). Clear success led to the election of Kuznetsov as a member of the Autumn Salon (not many Russian artists received such an honor).
One of the most important events in Russian artistic life at the beginning of the century was the Blue Rose exhibition, opened in Moscow in the spring of 1907. Being one of the initiators of this action, Kuznetsov also acted as the artistic leader of the entire movement, which has since been called the Blue Rose. In the late 1900s the artist experienced a creative crisis. The strangeness of his work sometimes became painful; it seemed that he had exhausted himself and was unable to justify the hopes placed in him. All the more impressive was the revival of Kuznetsov, who turned to the East.
A decisive role was played by the artist's wanderings across the Volga steppes, trips to Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent. At the very beginning of the 1910s. Kuznetsov performed with the paintings of the "Kyrgyz Suite", which marks the highest flowering of his talent ("Sleeping in the Sheep", 1911; "Sheep Shearing", "Rain in the Steppe", "Mirage", "Evening in the Steppe", all 1912, etc. ). It was as if a veil had fallen from the artist's eyes: his coloring, without losing its exquisite nuances, was filled with the power of contrasts, the rhythmic pattern of the compositions acquired the most expressive simplicity.
Contemplativeness, characteristic of Kuznetsov by the nature of his talent, gives the pictures of the steppe cycle a pure poetic sound, lyrically penetrating and epic-solemn. Adjacent in time to these works, the Bukhara Series (Teahouse, 1912; Bird Market, In the Temple of Buddhists, both 1913, etc.) demonstrates an increase in decorative qualities, evoking theatrical associations.
In those same years, Kuznetsov painted a number of still lifes, among them the excellent "Still Life with Japanese Engraving" (1912). The growing fame of Kuznetsov contributed to the expansion of his creative activity. The artist was invited to participate in the painting of the Kazan railway station in Moscow, he performed sketches ("Picking fruits", "Asian Bazaar", 1913-14), but they remained unfulfilled. In 1914, Kuznetsov collaborated with A. Ya. Tairov in the first production of the Chamber Theater - the play "Sakuntala" by Kalidasa, which was a great success. Developing the rich potency of Kuznetsov as a decorator, these experiments undoubtedly influenced his easel painting, which increasingly gravitated towards the style of monumental art (Fortune Telling, 1912; Evening in the Steppe, 1915; At the Source, 1919-20; "Uzbek", 1920; "Poultry", early 1920s, etc.).
During the years of the revolution, Kuznetsov worked with great enthusiasm. He took part in the design of revolutionary festivities, in the publication of the journal "The Way of Liberation", conducted pedagogical work, and dealt with many artistic and organizational problems. His energy was enough for everything. During this period, he creates new variations of oriental motifs, marked by the influence of ancient Russian painting; his best works include magnificent portraits of E. M. Bebutova (1921-22); at the same time he published the lithographic series "Turkestan" and "Mountain Bukhara" (1922-23). Attachment to the chosen circle of subjects did not exclude the artist's lively reaction to the current reality.
Impressed by a trip to Paris, where in 1923 his exhibition was arranged (together with Bebutova), Kuznetsov wrote "Paris Comedians" (1924-25); in this work, his inherent decorative laconism of style turned into unexpectedly sharp expression. New discoveries were brought by the artist's trips to the Crimea and the Caucasus (1925-29). Saturated with light and energetic movement, the space of his compositions gained depth; such are the famous panels "Grape Harvest" and "Crimean Collective Farm" (both 1928). During these years, Kuznetsov persistently sought to expand his plot repertoire, referring to the themes of labor and sports.
A stay in Armenia (1930) brought to life a cycle of paintings that, in the words of the painter himself, embodied "the collective pathos of monumental construction, where people, machines, animals and nature merge into one powerful chord."
With all the sincerity of his desire to respond to the social order, Kuznetsov could not fully satisfy the orthodox new ideology, who often subjected him to harsh criticism for "aestheticism", "formalism", etc. The same accusations were addressed to other masters of the "Four Arts" association (1924- 31), of which Kuznetsov was a founding member and chairman. Works created in the late 1920s - early 1930s. (including "Portrait of the sculptor A. T. Matveev", 1928; "Mother", "Bridge over the Zang-gu River", both 1930; "Cotton Sorting", "Pushball", both 1931), - the last high take-off of creativity Kuznetsov. The master was destined to outlive his peers, but even reaching advanced years, he did not lose his passion for creativity.
In his later years, Kuznetsov was mainly occupied with landscape and still life. And although the work of recent years is inferior to the former, Kuznetsov's creative longevity cannot but be recognized as an exceptional phenomenon.
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Kuznetsov Pavel Varfolomeevich
Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov was born on November 18 (5), 1878 in Saratov in the family of the craft icon painter Varfolomey Fedorovich Kuznetsov, whose workshop fulfilled orders of the spiritual and secular order. His wife Evdokia Illarionovna loved music and painting. From birth, children absorbed the atmosphere of love for art that reigned in the family. Pavel's older brother Mikhail became a painter, the younger Victor became a musician. But the most outstanding ability was undoubtedly Paul.
At the end of the 19th century, Saratov was the largest commercial and industrial center of Russia. The cultural life of the city was rich and varied; a conservatory and a music school were opened, the best opera and drama theater troupes toured, and public education activities were widely developed.
All this had a beneficial effect on the formation of the personality of the young Pavel Kuznetsov. But the creation of one of the richest art museums in the country, founded in 1885, was of the greatest importance. Soon, under the influence of this event, the Society of Fine Arts Lovers was organized in Saratov, a drawing studio was opened under it, then transformed into a serious professional school, which Pavel Kuznetsov attended in 1891 - 1896. He studied with prominent teachers who headed the school's two main departments. Drawing was taught by V.V. Konovalov, a graduate of the Imperial Academy of Arts, a student of P.P. Chistyakov. Painting - G. P. Salvini-Baracchi, an Italian artist who lived in Saratov for many years and brought up a whole galaxy of famous masters of painting. A man of romantic enthusiasm, artistry and lively energy, Barakki not only laid the foundations of painting technique, but also gave Kuznetsov the first lessons in plein-air creativity on trips to sketches in the vicinity of Saratov and the Volga Islands.
Years of schooling prepared Kuznetsov and his comrades for mastering new trends in world art and, first of all, impressionistic style. But the decisive milestone in their familiarization with the discoveries of French innovators was the meeting in the mid-1890s with V.E. His own search lay in line with impressionism and neo-romanticism. Visiting his native city during the summer months, Musatov invited novice artists and painted sketches from nature side by side with them in the garden of his house on Volskaya Street. In the process of this joint work, the master told young people about the work of Monet, Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes and other famous European artists.
The result of the Saratov lessons was the brilliant admission of Pavel Kuznetsov to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in September 1897. By the will of fate, it was this year that significant changes took place in the School itself, which contributed to the renewal of teaching methods and aesthetic views in general. The Wanderer K.A.Savitsky left the place of the head of the field class. V.A. Serov, K.A. Korovin, I.I. Levitan became professors of the School.
In the elementary grades of the School, where L.O. Pasternak, A.E. Arkhipov, N.A. Kasatkin taught, education still had an academic character. Well prepared by his studies with V.V. Konovalov, Kuznetsov succeeded in this as well. Already in 1900-1901 he received a small silver medal for sketches; in 1901-1902 - for drawings. Since 1899, he constantly took part in exhibitions of students of the School. However, Kuznetsov achieved real pictorial freedom by working under the guidance of Serov and Korovin, whom he always considered his main teachers. Passion for Korovin's colorism, the mastery of the brush, the plasticity of the brushstroke, the dynamism of the composition even pushed aside the influence of Musatov for a while. But pictorial intuitionism, organic for Korovin, still did not become the main direction of Kuznetsov's early searches. Work in Serov's workshop helped him to join the tasks of creating a grand style, to strict internal discipline and a monumental and decorative writing system.
The role of teachers was not limited to classes with students in workshops. In 1899, Korovin introduced Kuznetsov and his countryman sculptor A.T. Matveev to Savva Ivanovich Mamontov. In his Moscow pottery workshop outside Butyrskaya Zastava, Kuznetsov met with Polenov, Vasnetsov, Vrubel, Chaliapin and other remarkable people of that era.
One of the most famous signs of the times was the active work of leading Russian artists in the theater. Masterpieces of theatrical design were created by Korovin, Golovin, Roerich, Bakst, Benois, a circle of masters who united around the World of Art magazine. In 1901, Kuznetsov, together with his colleague from the School, N.N. Sapunov, first got the opportunity to apply his talent in this area. Young artists created scenery and costumes based on Korovin's sketches for Wagner's opera Valkyries, which premiered in early 1902 at the Bolshoi Theater.
Exhibitions of paintings organized by the World of Art magazine were considered extremely prestigious at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1902, at the initiative of Serov, Pavel Kuznetsov received an invitation to participate in such an exhibition, where he showed nine landscapes. The work "On the Volga" was reproduced on the pages of the magazine.
In 1902, several more important events took place in Kuznetsov's life. He made a trip to the North, to the coast of the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean, from where he brought a series of lyrical landscapes. Arriving in Saratov in the summer, together with P.S. Utkin and K.S. Petrov-Vodkin, he took part in the painting of the border of the Church of Our Lady of Kazan. These murals have not been preserved: the excessive freedom of interpretation of canonical subjects caused outrage among the clergy, and soon the painting was destroyed.
In April 1904, Pavel Kuznetsov graduated from the Moscow School with the title of non-class artist. By this time, a new system of his pictorial language had developed, in which flatness and decorativeness, a restrained palette of pastel colors, and a matte “tapestry” texture now prevailed. Panel paintings painted in this vein were shown at the Evening of New Art in Saratov in January 1904. This evening preceded the exhibition "Scarlet Rose", which opened in Saratov on April 27, 1904. Its organizers were Pavel Kuznetsov and his closest like-minded friend Peter Utkin. The exhibition was the first manifestation of the young generation of Russian symbolist painters, one of whose leaders was Kuznetsov.
March 18, 1907 in Moscow on Myasnitskaya Street opened the second exhibition of the community of artists that has developed around Kuznetsov and Utkin. She was given the name "Blue Rose". It went down in history as the central event of Russian pictorial symbolism. In the period between exhibitions and in the years following the Blue Rose, Kuznetsov created a cycle of works directly related to symbolist themes. These are the canvases "Morning", "Birth", "Night of the consumptive", "Blue Fountain" and their variants.
In 1907-1908, Kuznetsov made his first trips to the trans-Volga steppes. However, his awakened interest in everyday life and images of the East was not immediately realized in painting. This was preceded by an experience of no small importance for the artist in the monumental painting of the villa of the collector and philanthropist Ya.E. Zhukovsky in New Kuchuk-Koy on the southern coast of Crimea.
In the second half of the 1900s and early 1910s, Kuznetsov became a regular exhibitor at many major exhibitions. These are the Salons of the magazine "Golden Fleece", exhibitions of the Union of Russian Artists, the Moscow Association of Artists, an exposition of Russian art arranged by S.P. Diaghilev in 1906 at the "Autumn Salon" in Paris, "Wreath" and others.
In 1911, at the World of Art exhibition, Kuznetsov presented works that marked the beginning of a new period of his work. These are canvases of the "Kyrgyz Suite" - the most numerous cycle of the artist's works. The best of them are “In the steppe. At work”, “Sheep shearing”, “Rain in the steppe”, “Mirage in the steppe”, “Evening in the steppe”, “Sleeping in a shed”, “Fortune-telling” - refer to the first half of the 1910s. In them, the artist achieved the perfection of image and style, finally formulated the principles of his artistic language. Among the main features of Kuznetsov's Orientalism are the contemplation of the worldview, the interpretation of life as a timeless being, the sublime conventionality and impersonality of the characters in the paintings, and the fabulously epic feeling of nature. The plastic solution of the works is dominated by rhythmic calm, compositional harmony, and local coloring.
In 1912-1913 Kuznetsov visited Bukhara, Tashkent and Samarkand. The impressions from the trip to Central Asia were reflected in several picturesque series and two albums of autolithographs "Mountain Bukhara" and "Turkestan", executed in 1922-1923. They show a more traditional look of the East. It is characterized by an open decorative effect and some variegation of color, the desire to convey the spicy aroma of the Asian world. Echoes of oriental motifs are also present in Kuznetsov's large-scale still lifes of the 1910s.
The result of showing works of the steppe and Asian cycles at exhibitions was an invitation to take part in the painting of the Kazansky railway station under construction, which Kuznetsov received from the architect A.V. Shchusev. In the sketches of the mural “Picking Fruits” and “Asian Bazaar”, mastery of the techniques of monumental painting, an organic interpretation of Eastern culture, and the Renaissance majesty of human images are synthesized.
Kuznetsov's ability to convey the special spirit of the East was also appreciated by the famous theater director A.Ya. Tairov. He invited the artist to design Kalidasa's play "Sakuntala", staged at the Chamber Theater in 1914.
In 1915-1917, Kuznetsov was in military service, studied at the School of Ensigns. After the February Revolution of 1917, he took part in the publication of the literary and artistic journal The Path of Liberation. In 1918 he was elected head of the painting workshop of the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he taught until 1930. Over the years, the school was reorganized first into the State Free Art Workshops, and then into Vkhutemas and Vkhutein.
In the late 1910s - 1920s, Kuznetsov, like many other artists, actively participated in the process of updating the state's cultural policy. From 1918 to 1924 he worked at the Fine Arts College of the People's Commissariat for Education; was a member of the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquities of Moscow and the Moscow Region. Since 1919, he worked in the Saratov Collegium of the Fine Arts Department, led the preparatory workshops at this department.
In 1918, the artist E.M. Bebutova became the wife of Pavel Kuznetsov. Her ceremonial, intimate, theatrical portraits of different years became the most successful works of this genre in his work. In 1923, the "Exhibition of Pavel Kuznetsov and Elena Bebutova" was exhibited at the Barbasange Gallery in Paris.
In 1924, Kuznetsov and Bebutova joined the 4 Arts Society, which included artists of various trends who remained in the positions of subject easel art and aesthetic criteria for mastery. Kuznetsov was elected chairman of the society.
In 1929, Pavel Kuznetsov received the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR. His personal exhibition was held at the State Tretyakov Gallery.
In 1930 the artist visited Armenia, and in 1931 - Azerbaijan. Such creative business trips were a common practice in the artistic life of that time. The trips resulted in series of paintings on the topic of building new quarters in Yerevan and oil fields in Baku. The Armenian series was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in 1931.
In the 1930s, the artist made a number of creative trips around the country. One of the creative successes was the panel “Kolkhoz Life” executed for the International Exhibition of 1937 in Paris. It received the Silver medal of the exhibition. The artist collected materials for it during a trip to Michurinsk.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Kuznetsov was engaged in pedagogical work, in painting he preferred landscape and still life, and created a number of genre and thematic paintings.
In 1956-1957 the artist's personal exhibition took place in Moscow and Leningrad, and in 1964 - in Moscow.
In the last years of his life, the master worked mainly on the landscapes of Maiori, Dzintari, Palanga, spending a lot of time in the Baltic creative houses.
Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov died, a little short of his 90th birthday, on February 21, 1968 in Moscow, and was buried in the German cemetery.
P. Kuznetsov. Rest of the shepherds. Tempera. 1927
Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov artist
He is an amazing colorist...
V. E. Borisov-Musatov
Philosophers are also born among artists. Every era knows such creators. They differ from others in their special vision of the world, understanding it in the categories: Good and Evil, Life and Death, Love and Hate, Earth and Space. Each object in their works is endowed with a soul, a thought; it speaks not only with other objects, but also with a person. Man for them is a particle of the eternal and infinite universe.
One of these artists-philosophers Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov. He was our contemporary. It has been 48 years since his death. From the day of birth - 147.
The artist was born in the family of an icon painter in Saratov. The city was merchant. Its provincial appearance is far from a fairy tale. But Pavel Kuznetsov himself created a fairy tale. He was born a dreamer and visionary. On moonlit nights, he liked to walk to the central city square. There were fountains built by a visiting Englishman. Their heavy bowls seemed almost airy in the ghostly blue-yellow light. Thin mother-of-pearl jets beat from the depths, and the sphinxes that adorned the fountains seemed to come to life. They turned their impenetrable faces to the boy, and he ran away with a mixed feeling of delight and fear ...
If the nights gave Pavel Kuznetsov communication with the mysterious, then the hot summer days - the diversity and multicolor of real life. She came to his city along with caravans of imperturbable camels and nomads in outlandish clothes. She brought with her the colors and smells of the Volga steppes, someone else's speech. Different flow of time, different rhythms. Rampant color was combined with unhurried, slow movements of people.
Dreamy, poetic Pavel Kuznetsov became a painter.
In Saratov, there was a Society of Fine Arts Lovers and a Painting and Drawing Studio attached to it. This was a rarity for the province of that time. Teachers V. V. Konovalov and G. P. Salvini-Baracchi did not particularly torment the students in the classes with endless studies. They took them to the Volga, to the fields and forests. Nature, Kuznetsov recalled, "... raised ... to the heights of creative excitement."
At the age of nineteen, Pavel arrived in Moscow and entered the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. With great interest he visited the workshops of two major artists -
V. Serov and K. Korovin. The teachers were senior comrades. They exhibited their works together with the works of students, went with them to sketches.
In the capital, everything was interesting to him - new exhibitions, plays, poetry evenings, philosophical disputes, lectures on art, music. Future painters also showed themselves multifaceted.
Kuznetsov painted sets for the Bolshoi Theater and staged amateur performances. Even in school, he accomplished a lot. Became a participant in several exhibitions, traveled to the North. In 1906 he went to Paris.
This ever-hungry city has discovered Russian art. Russian operas and ballets were performed in its theaters, icons, portraits of the 18th century, and paintings by contemporaries were shown in the Salon. Kuznetsov brought them to the French capital. He studied Paris, and Paris studied young Muscovites, including him. Nine works of the painter interested the French press. He was recognized and one of the few Russian artists was elected a member of the Autumn Salon.
Not a student, but a famous artist, Pavel Kuznetsov returned to his native school.
What paintings made it possible to talk about Kuznetsov as a master with his own vision of the world and handwriting?
This is a series of paintings about fountains. I remembered the Saratov night impressions. The artist called symphonies paintings about fountains and babies: “Morning”, “Spring”, “Blue Fountain” and others.
They are different, but connected by one motive - Eternal Spring. There is no earth and sky, but only strange, always inclined bushes of flowering trees. They seem to hug fountains. Their cups are always full. Shadow-figures move towards them in a solemn, slow rhythm.
The colors of earth and sky, air and water, flowing into each other, are looking for their color essence. In the meantime, as if covered with a smoky veil.
Trying to solve for himself the question: what are the origins of life, the artist constantly varied this theme. He painted one painting after another. But at some point he realized that he was repeating himself. To move forward, he needed to realize life itself, and not just its origins. The usual atmosphere of Moscow with its exhibitions, meetings, disputes began to weigh on him. In 1908 the artist left for the Kyrgyz steppes. And I realized: the vast sky, boundless spaces, people with their homes, camels and sheep - everything speaks of the eternity of life. “Sleeping in a Shed”, “Mirage in the Steppe”, “Sheep Shearing”… On the new canvases, the figures of people dozing in anticipation at the bowls of fountains are no longer the same. Shearing sheep, cooking, contemplating the steppe mirages, sleeping in and around sheepfolds - everything is solemn slowness. The wisdom of this life is in the unity of the three worlds: man, nature and animals.
The embodiment of earthly wisdom for Kuznetsov is a woman - the main character of his paintings. She is the source and center of life. The women in Kuznetsov's works have no age, one is similar to the other and is repeated in the other, like grass in the steppe, leaves on the steppe acacia.
Harmonious and open life in the steppe - harmonious and open color in the paintings of Pavel Kuznetsov. Blue, green, blue, red, yellow alternate with each other, repeat one in the other. They sound like the instruments of a large orchestra.
The artist returned to Moscow, amazed her with his steppe canvases, and soon went to Samarkand and Bukhara.
He finally understood: everything that he saw in the Kyrgyz steppes and here, "... was one culture, one whole, imbued with a calm, contemplative mystery of the East."
With the outbreak of the First World War, I had to forget about the proposed trip to Italy and again to Bukhara. Something else was to come - first work in a prosthetic workshop, then service in the military office and, finally, the school of ensigns.
During these years, when “... we had to arm ourselves with patience and spiritual strength”, when the work was exhausting to the utmost, and one kind of artificial arms and legs could make you forget about the beauty of the world, Pavel Kuznetsov painted the most joyful, bright canvases - still lifes. At night, when the tired artist stood at the easel, the memory generously gave back what he once saw. A bright ray of sunshine seemed to burst into the workshop. Crystal and porcelain vases, oriental fabrics and fruits, jugs and trays, mirrors and flowers appear on the canvases. The beam touched every object, and melons and apples filled with juice appeared. Crystal flashed with rainbow colors, and fabrics with outlandish patterns.
But why did people leave his canvases? Why did he fill all the space on canvases only with objects? They either converged, as if in a round dance, or calmly rested on the spread out fabrics, reached out to empty houses, were reflected in the mirrors and in each other. The objects seemed to want to renounce the people engaged in the war, the destruction of their own kind. War is always unnatural to the cycle of life. It was unnatural to the life philosophy of Pavel Kuznetsov, and he protested as best he could.
Immediately after the October Revolution, the artist plunged into public work. He was one of those who actively desired to create a new, proletarian culture. He worked in the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity, in the commissions for the nationalization of private collections, in the arts council of the Tretyakov Gallery, in the theater board.
Eleven years later, he returns to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, teaches, runs a workshop. In his youth, he wrote with his teachers. Now she works with students on the streets and squares of Moscow. On the day of the celebration of the first anniversary of the October Revolution, a giant panel with the image of Stepan Razin and his associates appeared on the facade of the Maly Theater. It was a joint work of Professor Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov and his students.
Public and pedagogical work did not reduce the creative tension of the master. He returned to the past. And the East again became the past. His new canvases combined Kyrgyz and Bukhara impressions. Familiar scenes appeared.
But now the memories did not hold Pavel Kuznetsov as sharply as before. The pulse of the new life beat too strongly for the artist not to feel it. Creation has become the main meaning of this life. And the painter conceived a series of paintings united by the theme of labor.
In 1923, Pavel Kuznetsov was sent to Paris with his exhibition. It was supposed to refute the opinion of the West that art has been destroyed in Russia. Kuznetsov brought to France about two hundred works: pictorial, graphic, theatrical. It was an imposing exhibition that drew admiring reviews.
What topics worried the artist after returning? First of all, the theme of creation. Work in the fields and vineyards, tobacco plantations. The work of shepherds, builders, oil workers. Almost to old age, Pavel Varfolomeevich traveled around the country alone and together with his students. He visited the Crimean and Caucasian collective farms, the construction of Yerevan and the Baku oil fields, and the cotton fields of Central Asia. But, working on new canvases, the artist now strove for the authenticity and accuracy of natural impressions.
In 1930 he paints a large painting "Mother". It crystallized the wisdom of a mature artist. The main theme of the picture is work. A tractor is moving across a huge field, leaving furrows of plowed land behind it. Almost the entire space of the picture is occupied by the figure of the mother. She is feeding the child. And here, for the umpteenth time, the artist affirms the idea: a woman is the source of life, of everything that exists on Earth.
From the ghostly women at the fountain bowls, from the steppe Madonnas, he went to this image. Pavel Varfolomeevich lived for almost forty more years, painted a lot of pictures. But "Mother" is one of the central ones in his work of the Soviet period.
On the threshold of old age, he mentally returned to his former works. Reflected on them, analyzed, criticized. He treated those that remained in the studio especially meticulously. Many reworked, rewrote. Some were completely destroyed.
Fairy fountains were the dawn of his creative life, the Kyrgyz steppes - her day. The last canvases of the master with chamber, laconic still lifes seemed to be streaming the rays of the setting sun. Slipping over the ground for the last time, they disappeared over the horizon...
Kuznetsov Pavel Varfolomeevich artist
Kuznetsov Pavel First steps in art and study
But the history of Russian art also knows other remarkable painters to whom these words apply. So what is the originality and charm of Kuznetsov's talent? And for the first time the boy came into contact with painting, of course, in the studio of his father, a painter and icon painter, where he and his brother Mikhail, later also an artist, watched how the canvases were primed, how the paints were rubbed, how the initial drawing was applied to the primed base. Kuznetsov's mother, Evdokia Illarionovna, who loved painting and music, contributed to introducing children to art. It was not without her influence that Kuznetsov learned to play the violin, and, despite the fact that he did not later become a musician, like his younger brother, cellist Viktor, his music lessons were not in vain and were largely reflected in the musical structure of his paintings.
As reported in a questionnaire compiled on behalf of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN) in 1926, “from the age of seven, his passion for drawing becomes completely obvious and receives shape and a certain direction thanks to the figure of the Italian artist Barakka, somewhat unexpected for Saratov.” Konovalov, a student of Pavel Chistyakov, informed Kuznetsov of the first concepts of the constructiveness of form; it was not for nothing that Kuznetsov recalled that Konovalov taught him a special “cubist” drawing, meaning the revelation in the form of plans. Salvini-Baracchi, according to Kuznetsov, had an excellent knowledge of painting technique, "he mastered colorful combinations with exceptional artistry."
Kuznetsov's first works - Evening (1895), Blooming Garden (1892), Yard in Saratov (1896) - are clearly plein air. Perhaps the influence of Borisov-Musatov, who, after his first trip to France in 1896, shared his impressions of modern trends in painting with his young comrades Kuznetsov and Utkin, had an effect here.
In 1897, wishing to continue his artistic education, Kuznetsov entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Just this year, Valentin Serov began teaching at the School. With his arrival, and especially with the arrival of Isaac Levitan (1899) and Konstantin Korovin (1901), the character of teaching, which until then had been a wanderer, began to change. However, Kuznetsov met Korovin earlier: “I was lucky to meet Korovin early. He did not teach at that time in our school. Acquaintance with him took place under the following circumstances: in the premises of the Historical Museum, a “Periodic Exhibition” of contemporary art was opened annually, and Korovin was an exhibitor and member of the jury; I came up with a bold idea to participate in this exhibition, and I took three things to the jury; they were accepted, and Konstantin Alekseevich, with a charming smile, shook my hand and spoke very approvingly of my paintings. True, a little lower in the same memoirs, Kuznetsov wrote that Nikolai Tarkhov took him to Korovin's workshop, with whom Pavel Varfolomeevich took an exam at the School together. It was then that the beginning artists became friends, and soon Tarkhov brought Kuznetsov to Korovin, where, together with Serov, Polenov, Sredin and Tarkhov, he painted a nude model. Of course, this contradiction in Kuznetsov's memoirs should be taken into account. But it is important to emphasize that Kuznetsov's communication with Korovin began early, and the young artist could get a lot from him in understanding the coloristic organization of the canvas, in the ability to master complex color relationships. Serov, on the other hand, taught his students to artistic discipline, to a deep understanding of plastic tasks, to thoughtful penetration into the inner essence of the created image. “You are the only one who can be trusted,” Kuznetsov wrote to his teacher.
At the School, Kuznetsov made great strides: his work was noted by critics at student exhibitions, and he gradually found himself in the center of a group of students. Among these young people are Peter Utkin and Alexander Matveev from Saratov, Muscovites Anatoly Arapov, Nikolai Ulyanov, Nikolai Sapunov, Sergei Sudeikin from St. Petersburg, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, a native of Khvalynsk, close to Saratov, and Martiros Saryan, who came from the Armenian settlement of Novy Nakhichevan near Rostov-on-Don. All of them, with the exception of Petrov-Vodkin and Ulyanov, will form the core of the Blue Rose association.
In 1902, Serov recommended a number of works by the young master for the World of Art exhibition. Moreover, Serov acquired several works from Kuznetsov, and, I think, not only because of the fact that he could alleviate the difficult financial situation of the artist by that time. As Ulyanov recalled, looking at the work of Kuznetsov at one of the exhibitions, Serov exclaimed: “Damn it! Look! But nature breathes with him!”
The creative formation of Kuznetsov was also facilitated by the rapprochement with Savva Mamontov, acquaintance with whom, probably, as early as 1899 through Korovin. Then, after the trial and ruin of Mamontov, Kuznetsov and Matveev became regulars at his house at the pottery factory behind Butyrskaya Zastava.
True, at this time Kuznetsov still felt himself primarily an easel painter. It was to improve his easel talent that he, perhaps not without the advice of Korovin and Serov, went to the North in June 1902, and the route of his travel was developed by Mamontov.
Only two works have come down to us from this trip: a sketch of a wooden church (1902), written in a free expressive manner, and a painting White Nights (1902). Of course, in this work there is already, perhaps still an unconscious desire to solve a particularly important for painting, as Nikolai Punin wrote in relation to Kuznetsov, the problem of the plane, "its filling and design with special attention." At the same time, Kuznetsov achieved here a romantic mood of thoughtful silence, mysterious, as if keeping a secret. If we could see the northern series of Kuznetsov in its entirety, perhaps the pre-symbolist motifs in it would appear more clearly to us, because symbolism will clearly make itself felt in the artist’s creative practice immediately after he returns from his travels.
Blue fountain. 1905-1906
Symbolist stage in the work of Kuznetsov
Immediately upon his arrival in Moscow, Kuznetsov, thanks to his father, received an order to paint the summer aisle of the Church of Our Lady of Kazan in Saratov. At the same time, the contract was signed with Utkin and Petrov-Vodkin. Sketches and photographs of these murals have not come down to us; they can only be judged by the statements of the artists themselves and their contemporaries. It seems that it was no coincidence that the area of monumental art was chosen by the artists, because it was by this time that calls for the synthesis of arts, for the creation of such works that would surround a person with truly beautiful, and thereby affect his soul, began to sound more and more actively from the environment of the creative intelligentsia. . These ideas were especially popular among the younger symbolists - Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok, but they appeared in the bowels of the Abramtsevo circle and owned the thoughts of Mikhail Vrubel. Highly appreciating this artist, Kuznetsov, nevertheless, in his temperament, devoid of a tragic worldview, was closer to another representative of symbolism in Russian painting - Borisov-Musatov, but this master, the creator of pictorial harmonies filled with musicality, believed that "life should be beauty" (expression Andrei Bely).
So, already at the end of the summer, Kuznetsov went to Saratov and with his comrades took up the murals, which, although they deviated from the canon, were full of sacred mystery and spirituality. It is unlikely that otherwise such a poetic and chaste master as Borisov-Musatov would have described them as "terribly talented and artistically original."
The mention of Vasnetsov's paintings is indicative here. Borisov-Musatov, apparently, already understood that they contained the prerequisites for a new style, modernity, to which he saw belonging in the murals of the Church of Our Lady of Kazan. Judging by the memoirs of Petrov-Vodkin, Kuznetsov’s art nouveau was expressed in the simplification of forms, and the understatement, the feeling of sleep testified that for Kuznetsov this style was most in line with symbolist moods, because the fact that the composition Christ and the sinner was interpreted in the form of a vision, a dream, indicated its clearly symbolic character. And it is no coincidence that Kuznetsov and his comrades read Maeterlinck, for whom the dream acts as a second reality, and in the fall of 1902 (shortly after the end of the paintings) they even decided to stage Maeterlinck's play There Inside (Secrets of the Soul in the first Russian translation) on their own. We still have to talk about the proximity to Maeterlinck's images of some of Kuznetsov's symbolist works.
In 1903, Kuznetsov painted a number of panels in which he seemed to be striving to continue his search in monumental and decorative art. He creates works that imitate tapestries (not preserved). Everything in them is cleared of everyday reality; the stroke of the forms along the contour, the flatness of the depicted deprives the motives of any illusory nature. It is characteristic that in 1904 Kuznetsov created genuine embroideries, and one of them, The Death of Tentagil, was dedicated to Maeterlinck's symbolist drama of the same name.
By 1904, a group of young artists led by Kuznetsov decided to show their works in a separate exhibition. Such an exhibition was the "Scarlet Rose", arranged in Saratov. Moreover, it was preceded by the “Evening of New Art”, to which Konstantin Balmont specially came to Saratov to read poetry. In general, the evening was supposed to demonstrate the desire of its participants to introduce symbolism into the artistic life of the province. This trend was also seen in the Scarlet Rose exhibition, which opened on April 27, 1904. She owed her name to the romantic drama of Mamontov. By this, the artists, as it were, emphasized the importance of the Mammoth Circle in the development of a new art, to which they included themselves. Moreover, Vrubel, Borisov-Musatov and his wife Elena Alexandrova were invited to participate in the exhibition. This demonstrated the continuity of the work of young artists from the symbolists of the older generation. It should be noted that not a single member of the World of Art was invited to participate in the exhibition. Thus, Kuznetsov and his group opposed their symbolism and modernity to the World of Art. Apparently, by this time, Kuznetsov and his friends, who studied in Moscow and considered themselves representatives of the “Moscow school”, came to the conclusion, which was later formulated by their colleague in the Blue Rose, Vasily Milioti, that Petersburg and Moscow are not “two simultaneous schools, but two different temporal currents”, as, for example, older and younger symbolism in literature. Moreover, both Vrubel and Borisov-Musatov, in the opinion of young artists, were the forerunners of precisely their direction.
However, despite the obvious presence on the "Scarlet Rose" of symbolist works, which were performed by Sapunov, Sudeikin, Saryan, Feofilaktov, Kuznetsov and Utkin showed their plein-air landscapes along with symbolist things. As for Kuznetsov, next to the Archangel, Withering, Capriccio, he also exhibited northern works, as if trying to emphasize his movement from plein-air works to painting of a different kind.
Immediately upon his return from Saratov to Moscow after the closing of the Scarlet Rose exhibition, Kuznetsov wrote a number of works, where there is a decorative element. He makes extensive use of tempera, often choosing the square format of the canvas. Such is the Morning in the Garden (1904), where a circle of a wheel for watering the garden (the so-called chigir) is inscribed in a square. The artist in every possible way emphasizes the plane, refuses chiaroscuro. By doing this, he subordinates the image to the wall as much as possible, bringing it closer to the fresco, the colors bluish, greenish, pink, crimson flow into each other, creating, as it were, gently mother-of-pearl combinations, and the light does not fall from above, “but is mixed inside the color”, which gives the impression of light emission inside each item. The artist uses these techniques in other works of 1904-1906, such as, for example, Morning (1905), where the brush stroke vibrates, transmitting jets of water pouring from the fountain. In this vibrating stroke one can see a certain use of the impressionistic system, but if you peer into the delicate veil that seems to be thrown over the work, then behind it you see wavy, rhythmically organized forms that make it possible to classify these works as Art Nouveau. In this, the artist follows Borisov-Musatov, and the play of shades and subtle wavy forms give rise to musical associations, just like the painting of his mentor. And chigir, and fountains - everything that stood before Kuznetsov's eyes from childhood, now takes on a symbolic meaning. No wonder Vyacheslav Ivanov, in his article On the Descent, wrote that in its “ascent” the fountain is a symbol of the tragic, and in its “descent” it is “a symbol of a gift, a gift-bearer of heavenly moisture. Ascent - break and separation", "descent - return and good news of victory." It is significant that this article was published in the Moscow symbolist magazine Libra, around which the future "Blue Bearers" were grouped together with Kuznetsov. Not inclined to in-depth philosophizing, these masters were nevertheless carried away by the mental constructions of their fellow writers. Of course, they were also impressed by Valery Bryusov's statement in the same journal that “art is the comprehension of the world in other, non-rational ways. The path is intuition, inspired guessing.
Pavel Kuznetsov publishes his drawings in Libra. He varies in them, as in painting, the theme of the fountain, the jets of which rhythmically repeat each other and alternate with branches slanting as if in a dream, with thin garlands of beads. Together with his comrades, Kuznetsov on the pages of Libra creates a new character of graphics, different from those of the World of Art, where, thanks to a thin line like a cobweb, curving as if swayed by the wind, a paper sheet evokes the feeling of some kind of space in which the depicted floats, being born, as it were, from air and melting in it. This technique expresses a clear tendency to create a new artistic language that can express subtle and lyrical, barely perceptible spiritual movements.
Since a symbol, in contrast to an allegory, has many meanings, Kuznetsov's fountains and chigiri expressed not only the ideas of "descent" and "ascent", but also the idea of birth, which was embodied by the new and new appearance of jets and splashes. In the embodiment of this idea, he was not content with depicting only water cannons. The great mystery of the birth of a new soul worried him so much that in 1905 he studied for several months at obstetric courses and worked in a Moscow maternity hospital. But the fact that it is not the physiological side of the appearance of new creatures, but precisely the spiritual one that worries the artist, can be seen from his works Birth (1906), Mother's Love (1905-1906, not preserved), Waiting (1900s). In Mother's Love, for example, female figures are adjacent to the jets of the fountain, babies lie at their feet (are they not unborn souls?), And above the heads of the figures is a circle of a nascent cosmic body, as if setting a rounding rhythm for everything else. The blue overall scale brings to mind Maeterlinck's Blue Bird (1905) with his realm of unborn souls. Alla Rusakova is right when she says that “here, of course, borrowings from one side or the other are completely excluded, and one can only speak of a significant stadial commonality of symbolist themes.” But, like Maeterlinck, Kuznetsov interprets the blue color that dominates the picture as the embodiment of higher spirituality, since the time of the German romantic poet Novalis, comprehended as a person’s dream of purity, as a dream of the supersensible.
Perhaps most clearly this emphasized spirituality manifested itself in the Blue Fountain (1905). The harmony of pale blue tones, ghostly, coming from the realm of sleep, is combined with the fountain's shimmering silver jets, again embodying the theme of birth, and with the lace of weeping branches leaning towards the reservoir. And at the edge of the pool, children's and women's faces, immersed in a dream, are somewhat primitive, ugly, but at the same time touching and attractive. By the way, in these faces there is something from the characters of the French symbolist Odilon Redon. Perhaps Kuznetsov became interested in this master after seeing his works in the Libra magazine.
The symbolist works of Kuznetsov were recognized by Diaghilev. In 1906, he showed them first in St. Petersburg at the World of Art exhibition, and then in Paris as part of the exhibition of Russian art at the Autumn Salon, he also subsidized the artist’s trip to Paris, who met with benevolent criticism there.
Returning to Moscow in December 1906, Kuznetsov soon became involved in the preparation of the Blue Rose exhibition, which was subsidized by Ryabushinsky, who also participated in it as an artist. "Blue Rose" was opened on March 18, 1907 in the house of the porcelain manufacturer Matvey Kuznetsov, its main goal was to show the work of the young Moscow symbolists of the circle of Pavel Kuznetsov as a single, integral trend in Russian art in terms of aspirations. Moreover, the design of the exhibition itself, with walls and floors covered in gray-blue fabric, was the best fit for the exhibited works of sixteen artists, of which two - Peter Bromirsky and Matveev were sculptors. Flowers of soft shades were fragrant everywhere, music played softly. “The Blue Rose is a beautiful exhibition-chapel. For the very few… And pictures are like prayers,” the influential art critic Sergei Makovsky wrote in a review. And then he rightly pointed out the closeness of the “Blue Bears” to the French artists of the Nabis group, especially to Maurice Denis, highlighting their inclination towards primitivism as a desire to return to the childish immediacy of perception. The very name of the exhibition, on the one hand, emphasized its continuity from the Saratov exhibition of 1904, but the changed color of the rose reminded of the blue flower that the hero of Novalis's novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen was looking for, about the flower of "mystical love", about the search for the unattainable, as in the Blue Bird Maeterlinck. Blue as the embodiment of unattainable spirituality has already determined the color of a number of Kuznetsov's paintings created before the exhibition. As for the authorship of the title of the exhibition, it remains unclear. Kuznetsov himself attributed it to Andrei Bely, Rusakova leans towards the authorship of Bryusov. The daughters of Vasily Milioti told the writer of these lines that their father was the author of the title of the exhibition. And here is what Nikolai Feofilaktov reported on this matter: “A group of Moscow artists decided to arrange their own exhibition.
Kuznetsov was presented at the exhibition with eight paintings and one drawing. Of these, only one Birth (1906) has survived, the rest of the things can be judged from reproductions in the Golden Fleece (1907, No. 5). The drawing of Kuznetsov's Birth was very different from the paintings. Merging with the mystical power of the atmosphere. The Devil's Awakening (1906). It must be said that this drawing appeared as a result of the competition on the theme of the Devil, announced by the Golden Fleece in 1906. In the disembodied figures emerging in the foggy darkness, there is no longer a sense of harmony, serene sleep, poetic dreams, but the impression of a painful hallucination is growing. And as a result, the image gives rise to a feeling of oppressive hopelessness. Perhaps this was a response to that “terrible world” that manifested itself outside the exhibition in the bloody events of the first Russian revolution, because the tragedy of life was felt very strongly in symbolist circles. And along with this, the impossibility for the artist to close himself in the "chapel for the few" was felt more and more strongly. And this manifested itself in the subsequent symbolist works of the artist. A terrible delusional atmosphere fills the painting Night of the Consumptives (1907), grotesque to outward disgrace and the figures of the Grape Harvest and the Three Feasts (all of them from 1907-1908, have not been preserved). And only in the Bride (1908, not preserved), the Woman's Head (1907-1908, not preserved) and in the Woman with a Dog (1908-1909), the grotesque is replaced by a tragic facial expression.
Sergei Makovsky, highly appreciating the Blue Rose exhibition, at the same time warned artists about the dangers of trying to make painting "incorporeal". “Painting must have flesh, moreover, a skeleton,” he wrote, “otherwise it is threatened with the possibility of blurring, disappearing in fantastic smoke.” Perhaps Kuznetsov heeded this warning in the works of 1907-1909, but the dense painting brought painful disharmony into the paintings. She also broke through in the verses of Alexander Blok (the Terrible World cycle) and Andrei Bely (the Ashes cycle). The crisis of symbolism and the modernity associated with it began, because the utopian task was the attempts, characteristic of these phenomena, sometimes truly heroic, to find, as Vladislav Khodasevich correctly put it, "the fusion of life and creativity." It could only be carried out within a private dwelling, and Kuznetsov, together with Utkin and Matveev, achieved it in the creation of an architectural and park ensemble on the estate of patron Yakov Zhukovsky in the Crimea in Kuchuk-Koy (1907-1909). Here, indeed, an "earthly paradise" was created, which, unfortunately, has almost been destroyed by now. Only from the sketches and some surviving majolica on the walls of the house can one see how Kuznetsov suddenly showed a craving for intense bright colors, this time subtly harmonized and, as it were, reflecting the impressions of the nature of the Crimea, as if returning the artist to peace of mind for a while.
It is characteristic that the “Blue Bears” themselves felt the crisis of symbolism. And in 1909 both Libra and the Golden Fleece ceased to exist. Symbolism was relegated to the past. The symbolist period was also ending in the work of Kuznetsov.
Kyrgyz steppes, Bukhara and Samarkand in the work of Kuznetsov
The last issues of the Symbolist magazines Vesy and the Golden Fleece had not yet gone out of print, when in St. Petersburg at the end of 1909 a new magazine, Apollon, edited by Sergei Makovsky, appeared. He declared his desire to lead art out of the impasse created as a result of the crisis of symbolism and modernity. Benois echoed Bakst: “What until recently seemed subtle and charming, temptingly poisonous and mystical, in a new outlook, poor in knowledge, seems cloying and pretentious; the ideals of the late century, prostituted by the excesses of the unusual and pretentious, lost, weathered their gold, lost their charm ... ". One should not think that all these thoughts were shared only by the World of Art. A recent enthusiastic visitor to the Blue Rose exhibition, welcoming its opening, Makovsky bitterly wrote: “The Moscow Blue Rose has degenerated into a market of merchant decadence,” and remarked about Kuznetsov: “Here is an artist, apparently, irretrievably dead!”.
Imagine the surprise of the audience and the artistic community when, at the Moscow exhibition of the World of Art in December 1911, they saw the works of Kuznetsov, brought from the Volga steppes and dedicated to the life and life of the nomadic Kazakhs (then they were called Kirghiz) - clear in the plastic system , calm and harmonious, marked by a peculiar classicism.
Now it is difficult to determine exactly when Kuznetsov began working in the Kyrgyz (we will traditionally call them that) steppes. Kuznetsov subsequently arbitrarily dated his works, and the date “1906” appeared on some works of the steppe series, which is simply impossible, given their style. In his autobiography, Kuznetsov names 1908 as the date when he began to live in the Kyrgyz steppes. The first completed works of the Kirghiz and Central Asian series date back to 1911, when the real masterpiece of Kuznetsov, Sleeping in a Shed, appears.
But the overcoming of symbolistic complexity manifested itself as early as 1909 in Spring in the Crimea, where clear colors are dissolved in light, but the generalization of forms, the color zones of the plans are devoid of the impressionistic impression of "accident". However, the new and highest stage of Kuznetsov's art is his Kirghiz and Central Asian cycle. Abram Efros believed that the impulse that prompted the search for peace in the East unclouded by modern civilization of harmony and purity was the art of Gauguin, seen in Paris in 1906. The art of Gauguin could stimulate the search for the Russian artist in nature, the lives of people living in unison with the Universe, but it is hardly fair to apply the term “Russian Hohenid” to Kuznetsov, as the artist was later called after Efros. Abram Romm quite rightly agreed with the words of Anatoly Bakushinsky from an article to the catalog of Kuznetsov’s exhibition in 1929, who said that Kuznetsov’s impulse to the steppe is “a craving for like for like .., a return to their homeland after a short and purely external stay in Babylon of European civilization. Departing from the “Goluborozovsky” symbolism, the master at the same time retained the ambiguity of the image.
The repetition of individual figures is combined in the Kirghiz series of Kuznetsov with the repetition of motifs, themes. So, the artist repeatedly writes an evening in the steppe, shearing rams or sheep. How close are the rounded rhythms of the outlines of the figures in Sheep Shearing (1912, In the Steppe at Work (1913), Steppes (1910s)! These arcs of contours echo the rounded shapes of the sheepskins and bring a special musicality to the compositions. It should be noted that such a development of shades inside Neither Gauguin nor Kuznetsov's Blue Rose comrade Martiros Saryan, who in the 1910s, in works made in Turkey and Egypt, also sought clarity and harmony of images, does not have a color spot. only in Henri Matisse, the Russian parallel to which is sometimes seen in the work of both Saryan and Kuznetsov.Here one rather recalls ancient Russian art, primarily the art of the Moscow school, Rublev, Dionisy, about the color of which Mikhail Alpatov, in particular, remarked: "The general impression of colors - this is the predominance of radiance and transparency. " Moreover, Kuznetsov himself not only loved ancient Russian art all his life, but strove to liken his works without any stylization to a fresco : the lack of illusory depth subdues the plane depicted by the artist, he thinks in general masses, laconically, omitting details. Two more works should be mentioned here: In the steppe (Rain) from the Tretyakov Gallery and Rain in the steppe from the Russian Museum (both - 1912). In addition to them, there are several more works on the same motive, showing how Kuznetsov went from natural observation to creating a synthetic image. In the work Rain from a private collection, painted in oils, everything is betrayed too naturally, with a lot of details. Only color, light and gentle, is full of poetry.
Less etude and more color harmony in the work Rain in the Steppe from a Moscow private collection; only oil technique is too material for this motif. In another Rain in the Steppe from a St. Petersburg private collection, already painted in tempera, the coloring became even more enlightened. But, having surrounded the koshara with figures of horses, the artist, perhaps, introduced into the composition some fragmentation, which disappeared in Tretyakov's work. It is different from the painting kept in the Russian Museum. It is as if rain is conveyed in it in the early morning, when nature is just waking up, when there is fog on the yellow strip of soil, and on the sheepfold, and on the horses. It seems to bring to mind the works of the artist of the symbolist period, when the depicted could be perceived as a dream of morning nature, in which Kuznetsov saw quivering lyrics. And, finally, everything acquires a classical certainty in the work from the Russian Museum. A rosary drawing of a koshara and two horses. The blueness of the sky is opposed by the greenish-ocher firmament of the earth. The sky, like the earth, is divided into stripes.
The brightest at the horizon. But they are written in such a way that the plane is not disturbed, the affirmation of which in the picture is facilitated by three oblique wide streams of rain going from top to bottom parallel to it, their rhythm introduces internal dynamics into an outwardly calm motive, but still the main task of these three oblique streams is to connect the depicted with the plane .
Kuznetsov's Kirghiz series is characterized by an appeal to the same motif, even when it is not dictated by the refinement of the sketch into a picture. He builds compositionally similar works into cycles, only slightly varying the color and objects in order to slightly change the internal plastic melody. These are the three variants of Evening in the Steppe. The first of them - Saratov In the steppe. Mirage (1911), painted in oils, which gives it more materiality. But here are already depicted two trees along the edges, and figures of women in blue and yellowish orange, and almost in the center of a sheep. Variants from the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery (both - 1912) due to tempera became lighter, more airy, the difference is only in minor details. In color, both versions are filled with that poetic harmony that characterizes the best Kyrgyz works of the artist. But Kuznetsov still somewhat weakened the intensity of the color in the version from the Russian Museum. In addition, there is more pink in it - the melody of the evening has become more dreamy.
Later, synthesizing all the impressions from trips deep into the East, the artist created a series of autolithographs, which he supplied with a text where he described in more detail his observations on what he saw. I must say that he especially liked Bukhara, it was not for nothing that he went there again in 1913. And now Central Asian works appear at the exhibitions of the World of Art, which has turned into an exhibition association and where you can see artists of the most extreme trends.
The first Bukhara works of 1912 are decorative, bright to some degree sharpness sketches, where, despite the increased sonority of color, there are natural observations. Then the artist, on their basis, paints pictures of Bukhara already freed from any chance. By the reservoir (1912-1913), several variants of the Teahouse (1913). Unlike earlier steppe works, in Bukhara works the space is closed, the color scheme sometimes resembles an oriental carpet (In the Temple of Buddhists, 1913).
But already in the picture Bukhara. Near the reservoir with its lively mother-of-pearl color, where each form literally shimmers with pink, purple, golden hues, where space is subject to a rounding rhythm, at the same time, in some geometrization of buildings and the side of the reservoir itself, one can see the influence of cubism. Recall that cubism at that time was widely used by representatives of the Russian avant-garde, that the cubist works of Picasso, Braque, Derain were acquired by Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. It is known that Kuznetsov especially liked the art of Derain. It is possible that to some extent he influenced the Russian artist. Moreover, the buildings in the Bird's Market (1913) are even more geometrized. But Kuznetsov was far from cubism as a worldview, he was least interested in the intellectual analysis of visible structures. It is enough to look closely at the rectangular and cylindrical forms that close the space of the Bird Market (1913), and we will see a certain semblance of their precious crystals, because yellow, pink, lilac and bluish shades are used by the artist in such a way as to create an inner glow of these crystal-like forms that immerse what is happening into a magical atmosphere. The figure of a woman in the center, whose folds of clothing are somewhat ornamental and rhythmic, is a kind of transition from a magical landscape, as if composed of crystalline gems, to the figure of a man on the left, whose clothes are given by a deep blue spot. The combination of this decoratively simplified spot and the faceted architectural landscape gives the picture a certain duality, but when Kuznetsov repeated the Bird's Market a few years later without elements of cubism, "the oriental fairy tale disappeared."
The same geometrization of the architectural landscape is in the Eastern City (1913-1914). But Alpatov is right, who saw in it a resemblance to icon-painting hills. Giotto's landscape backgrounds, Iranian miniatures, and Japanese engravings come to mind here. Without stylizing his work for any of the listed arts, Kuznetsov passed the impressions from them through his own unique gift, and most importantly, endowed the work with qualities inherent only in his art. In the Eastern City, the already found iconographic principles are again repeated, again the artist is faithful to the search for the archetypal through the use of what has already been defined as the canon worked out by the master. So, the figure in the center of the composition directly repeats the female figure from the Bird's Market, and the one lying on the right resembles a sleeping one in a koshara.
These words allow us to consider both steppe and Central Asian works as a whole, especially since the artist alternates Bukhara motifs with steppe motifs after a trip to Bukhara. So, in 1913-1914, he again repeats a woman lying in a koshar - In the steppe (Lying in a yurt) (1913-1914), again conveys the bottomlessness of the steppe expanses in Camels (1912-1913), In the steppe (1913), again achieving in these works laconicism and monumentality, like a fresco.
In the Eastern motif (1912-1913), the artist, as it were, merged all his impressions together, achieving compositional unity when various components were included in the work - mountains, steppes, individual trees, and women sitting and reclining by a pond, united by the rhythmic organization of everything canvases and combining the compositional integrity with the color harmony of golden yellow and blue-blue.
Speaking of the remarkable gift of Kuznetsov as a colorist, one cannot fail to mention the painting Divination (1912). The artist singled out the figure of a woman with a beautiful blue spot, again thickening in some places, and in some places weakening the intensity of the sound of the color, very subtly picked up the golden-ocher color of the walls of the barn as a background and with shimmering moving strokes gave the most complex play of pink, lilac, yellow and blue-blue in the image of the floor. The delicate crimson circle of the rug with cards at the fortuneteller's feet fits perfectly into this exquisite color scheme. In 1916, Kuznetsov repeated this composition in a different scale (Fortuneteller. Evening), dressing the female figure in green and simplifying the color variety of shades in the interior. And the picture lost that feeling of some kind of jewel, which was created by the intricately designed refined music, composed of colorful chords and polyphony of shades.
Rusakova saw in the Fortune Telling of 1912 a kind of "Japanism", which, in her opinion, affected both the character of the fortuneteller's face and the laconic, unmistakably accurate color. We have already recalled the Japanese engraving when considering the Eastern City.
In addition to oriental scenes, Kuznetsov also painted a number of still lifes at that time. Moreover, in these still lifes, the artist uses only oil painting. However, in Utra (1916), the paint is applied easily, it is transparent when depicting houses outside the window, which are just as decoratively cubized as in the Bird's Market. This blue transparent color also falls on a crystal vase, and only fruits, depicted definitely in the foreground, dispel the feeling of a mirage, without destroying the general romantic mood.
A Still Life with a Tray (1915-1916) is marked by a clear constructiveness. The forms here are especially cubized. But the sharpness of the lines that outline the glass bottle, the porcelain coffee pot and the cup, again do not emphasize the “thingness” (Pyotr Konchalovsky's expression), but speak of the fragility of these objects.
Kuznetsov's last two still lifes do not belong to the Kirghiz and Central Asian series, but purely plastically they are connected with the Bukhara still life, with Flowers and melons, and with the Still Life with suzani. In the Morning, Still Life with a Tray, there is the same clarity, inner classicism, far from the secondary nature of the neo-academism that arose at the same time, noble simplicity. It is no coincidence that the birth of Alexander Tairov's Chamber Theater in 1914, who was also looking for classical clarity on the stage, began with the production of Sakuntala by the ancient Indian author Kalidasa in the design of Kuznetsov.
It is curious that the costumes that caused Tairov's praise, since they did not constrain the actor, but harmoniously merged with his body, were continued in the costumes of the characters in Nikolai Gumilev's dramatic poem Child of Allah, published in the Apollon magazine with illustrations by Kuznetsov. The amazing beauty of the lines, their smoothness and musicality, the perfect rhythmic organization of the compositions corresponded to what Gumilyov, Gorodetsky and Kuzmin called for in the program articles of the magazine, fighting for the return of the “Apollonic” principle to art. And the art of Kuznetsov in the 1910s fully corresponded to this. In particular, the article by Abram Efros, The Art of Pavel Kuznetsov, testified to his recognition by the magazine, which, perhaps not by chance, was published in the same issues of Apollo, where the artist’s illustrations for the already mentioned creation of Gumilyov were published and imbued with oriental impressions.
Work in the theater, in book illustration, spoke of the wide recognition of Kuznetsov in artistic circles. But Kuznetsov did not consider these types of art to be the main ones for himself. And in the tenth years, he continued to dream of monumental painting, of fresco.
In 1913-1914, he tried to realize these aspirations in sketches for the murals of the Kazan station. Two of them have survived, where the wall plane was affirmed by painting, as in the art of ancient Russian or Italian trecentist masters. Judging by the sketches, both the Gathering of Fruits and the Asian Bazaar are frieze-like and, in their rhythmic organization of movement, are repelled by the experience of Borisov-Musatov. Only in them is Art Nouveau and symbolism completely overcome, and the color is more sonorous, although just as complex as in the easel works dedicated to the East. It is difficult to say why these sketches were not translated into painting. Perhaps one should agree with the opinion that "Kuznetsov, regardless of his will, was deeply alien to the whole spirit of the art of the author of the Kazan station project - Shchusev, with his rationalism and scientific approach to the use of elements of ancient Russian architecture."
Kuznetsov's work during the revolution and in the 1920s
Kuznetsov quickly and unconditionally accepted the revolution. He sincerely believed in the slogans proclaimed by her and believed that just after the victory of the October Revolution, art should have been assigned one of the most responsible roles in the grandiose plans for building a new life. He actively participated in the design of folk holidays, was an initiative member of the Fine Arts Department of the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquities of the Moscow Council of Workers and Red Army Deputies. At the same time, the artist worked at the College of Fine Arts, and even before the October days, in July 1917, he became the art editor of the journal Path of Liberation, combining this with teaching at the Stroganov School of Monumental Painting. In 1918 he was elected professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In both educational institutions, Kuznetsov led workshops, and when two free art workshops merged, which the Moscow School was renamed with the Stroganov School into Vkhutemas (from 1926 - Vkhutein), Kuznetsov headed the combined monumental workshop until the end of 1929.
As for his own art, for a long time he continued to be held captive by memories of the East. Most of the works of the second oriental series have not survived. The artist recorded many works. From the photographs and the few works that have come down to us, it can be seen that the graphic principle has intensified in them, the drawing has become more sophisticated. All this is quite clearly seen in the picture By the reservoir. Girl with a jug (1920). It is impossible not to pay tribute to the skill with which the artist arranged the figure into a vertical format of the canvas, how he uses reverse perspective in the image of a rectangular well in order to preserve the plane, but captivating lightness and purity of color leave the color range, the range of this picture is sustained in dark brown tones , which may have arisen under the influence of Deren, but less organic for Kuznetsov. To be convinced of this once again, it is enough to compare the coloring of By the Pond with the Still Life with Crystal (1919), painted in the manner inherent in the 1910s, in which clarified blue colors predominate, where light strokes are mobile, often lying fan-shaped. The composition of the still life is strictly built, the objects seem to stretch upward, following the format of the canvas, but the pictorial surface is internally mobile, it has a breath of air, thanks to the gentle transitions of blue and slightly greenish. And the coloring of the painting By the Pond is heavy and even somewhat contradicts the exquisitely thin proportions of the figure.
Perhaps the best of the second oriental series is the Uzbek woman (1920), although it also differs from the pre-revolutionary works of the artist. The color scheme here is built on the sharp contrasts of the dark blue night sky, white cloak, black headdress and burqa, yellow sleeves and a red strip of fabric between the burqa and the sleeve on the right. They create a feeling of tension, inner drama, never before so clearly speaking in the works devoted to the East. There is something mysterious in the figure of an Uzbek woman, but the image, despite its dissimilarity to Kuznetsov's previous oriental works, is nevertheless marked, according to Alpatov's apt definition, with a rare charm. “Through the heavy fabric of clothes,” the scientist wrote, “we guess the flexibility and grace of her figure. In front of this mysteriously majestic stranger, one cannot help but recall the ancient Greek caryatids, slender as columns.
And yet, with all the elegance of some of Kuznetsov's works, such as the Javanese dancer (1918), Woman with a fan (1919-1920), there is something secondary in the artist's post-revolutionary cycle on oriental themes, which sometimes leads to some schematism and a certain pictorial dryness. They show through in Ptichnitsa (late 1910 - early 1920s) and Trud. Composition (early 1920s). The artist, apparently, felt this and, for the sake of expressiveness, tried to strengthen in some works the cubist features in the spirit of Derain, who was fond of Kuznetsov's wife Elena Bebutova. This is clearly seen in Fruit Pedlars (1919-1920, location unknown) and Breakfast (1919-1920, location unknown), which are clearly inspired by Derain's Sabbath Day, however, Cubist techniques do not bring bright emotionality into these works.
Apparently, Cubism seemed to Kuznetsov to be the means by which it was possible to solve the themes of labor, which revolutionary criticism called for artists to do. He painted Trud (1919-1920, location unknown) with three boys carrying cubes over their heads, against the backdrop of some strange geometric structures and pots of begonias. But the picture turned out to be far-fetched, moreover, overcomplicated, overloaded with cubized forms.
But in other types of fine art, Kuznetsov continued to create bright and emotional things. Such were his sketches for theatrical productions, among which the works for the ballet Scheherazade (1923) to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov can be especially distinguished. The sketch for the curtain with colorful horses is especially decorative, setting the viewer to immerse himself in the wonderful world of fairy tales. And one should only regret that the staging of Scheherazade was not carried out.
It is known that in the 1920s there was a widespread tendency among artists to go into production, to make things. According to the warehouse of his talent, Kuznetsov could not, like Vladimir Tatlin or Lyubov Popova, become a pure "manufacturer", but in 1919-1922 he worked at a porcelain factory in Petrograd and made sketches for sets. He brought his impressions of the flora of Central Asia into the ornaments of the sets, skillfully stylized plants and fruits, and superbly combined the whiteness of porcelain with a hot red-orange background. Oriental impressions did not let the artist go. And another confirmation of this is two cycles of lithographs Turkestan and a cycle of lithographs Mountain Bukhara (all - 1923).
In contrast to the paintings on oriental themes of the late 1918 and early 1920s, schematism and secondariness disappeared in them. Kuznetsov himself attached great importance to these "drawings" (as he called his lithographs). He supplied all three albums with short prefaces. It is not for nothing that many drawings, based on which lithographs were made, were transferred almost unchanged to the lithographic stone. Examining the sheets of albums, we are immersed in that atmosphere cleansed of everything random, where instead of everyday life there is being, where everything seems to live according to laws that are not subject to time. In this sense, the series of lithographs, as it were, continue the perception of the East, which was so vividly expressed in the pre-revolutionary paintings of the artist. Moreover, Kuznetsov sometimes varied in lithographs what he found in the illustrations of the Child of Allah Gumilyov, sometimes he used photographs taken during the trip, in which everything transient, prosaic and ethnographic is discarded. By the way, he did exactly the same, using motifs from the postcards Types of Kirghiz sold in Bukhara and Samarkand. The master refused a hint of volume, making a conditional plane out of the background, and the lines communicated melodiousness and subordination to a peculiar rhythm. And if we can talk about the monumentality of his oriental paintings of the 1910s, then it is no less in lithographs. One need only look at the Melon Saleswoman (1923) or the Goat Milker (1923) to see that these works can be enlarged to large sizes without losing their usefulness. By the way, this was confirmed by a poster for the Kuznetsov exhibition in 1964, on which the Goat Milker was reproduced, which became almost three times larger than the original.
Certainly, there is something in common with the painting In the Steppe. Lying in a yurt (1913-1914), only in the lithograph did the woman raise her torso and lower her eyes, as if in thought.
Mountain Bukhara is already color lithographs. Moreover, they were made as follows: “On sheets of transfer lithographic paper (cornpapier), Kuznetsov made drawings, then printed in bistre tone. The prints were painted by him with watercolors .., and according to these samples, the master chromolithographer prepared stones for color printing.
The first sheet - Sartyanka with a lamb - with its balanced harmony, as it were, set the tone for the entire series. It is interesting that here the master used in the depiction of rocks techniques close to the depiction of hills in ancient Russian icons. And again, this was done without any stylization, but something biblically majestic appeared in the image. And in landscape lithographs, Kuznetsov built the perspective so that it did not break through the plane, while, of course, using the techniques of the Persian miniature, which are combined with a lapidary, clear and modern artistic language. Sometimes the master recalled compositions previously found in paintings. So, in the lithography of Sartyanka, and his pencil Self-Portrait (1900) is marked by immediacy, youthful purity, there is psychological depth in the also graphic Self-Portrait (1908) with the symbolist figures of the muse and the baby lying, as it were, on the artist’s lap (isn’t it Kuznetsov himself, depicted newborn?). Finally, in 1912, the painter created a heartfelt portrait of his friend Alexander Matveev, where his face expresses immersion in creativity, it is not for nothing that his works are depicted behind the sculptor, which then adorned the Kuchuk-Koi ensemble.
After the revolution, Kuznetsov created a number of portraits of Elena Bebutova. To one of them (1918), the artist gave a fantastic character, giving the female figure four hands with fans. Perhaps the artist recalled the many-armed Shiva, because Indian culture interested him during the years of work on the design of Sakuntala. A certain stiffness of the face, as it were, personifies immersion in nirvana, and around it, in a seemingly endless movement, fans flicker among the cubized background, with the capitals of the columns in some places distinguishable. I must say that the breaking forms of the background are some tribute to the "left" trends, but here they bring a romantic phantasmagoria into the image. Of course, a certain ambiguity of the image gives it something mysterious, which goes back to that period of the master's work, when he was the brightest representative of symbolism.
Another artistic solution in the Portrait of Elena Bebutova with a jug (1922). Here the desire for pure harmony dominates, which expresses itself both in the melodious lines of the slender figure of the artist's wife, and in the musical echo of her round contour with the outline of the jug. And at the same time, the figure perfectly correlates with the detail of oriental architecture - a pillar with two decorative lancet arches, emphasizing the solemn aspiration to the sky. And the color system of this work is soft blue, as if permeated with air, shades, changeable, turning into pinkish and golden. Both the color scheme, the architecture, and the clearly oriental jug in Bebutova's hands connect the work with the steppe and Central Asian series, although now the artist is returning to oil painting. But the color here is light and not material. That high spirituality that Kuznetsov acquired in the 1910s, he transferred both to this portrait of his wife and to another portrait of her created almost simultaneously Otdykh (1921-1922). In it, the artist, on the contrary, thickened the colors, making them darker. The greenish color of the chair dominates, turning into blue along its edges. A terracotta table with an oriental jug, of exquisite shape, but no longer clay, but metal, stands out brightly. But in this work there is no heaviness of color, due to the fact that everything is immersed in a light-air environment that softened the shape of the face, vibrating in the interior space. It seems that the portraits of Bebutova can be considered a worthy epilogue to the most remarkable thing that was created by Kuznetsov, and these are the Kigiz and Central Asian works of the 1910s.
In the 1920s, Kuznetsov continued his active social work. In addition to teaching, he joined the work of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences, where he delivered theoretical reports on the issues of composition in painting, the peculiarities of artistic perception. Not a single major exhibition of Soviet art could do without his work. And since Anatoly Lunacharsky favored him, it became possible for him to travel to France together with Bebutova to organize their exhibition. Previously, the exhibition was exhibited in Moscow, and then went to Paris. The basis of Kuznetsov's works was oriental works, and among them are such masterpieces as Mirage in the steppe, Evening in the steppe, Divination. Of course, these works were favorably received by artists and critics. From the memoirs of Bebutova, we also learn about their communication with Pablo Picasso and Andre Derain. But it is quite remarkable that neither Bebutova nor Kuznetsov mention Matisse anywhere. Perhaps a certain closeness of Kuznetsov to Matisse was the reason for this. Kuznetsov, apparently, did not rule out and was afraid of reproaches for imitating this artist, although with outward proximity they were very different from each other, because in Kuznetsov's own words, Matisse's painting seemed to him "denying the romantic impulse."
The Bridge over the Seine (1923), The Arab Chefs (1923) performed in Paris, and especially the Paris Comedians (1924-1925), written after returning to their homeland, differed from what the artist had done before. Poetic harmony disappeared, in some places the grotesque appeared, but it grew out of concrete reality. With all the skill in these works, there was no longer a sense of the integrity of the universe, manifested even in small things, as it was expressed in oriental works. Everything became more concrete, and therefore lost that unique poetic charm that distinguished Kuznetsov's art in his best period of the 1910s. And yet, in the 1920s, Kuznetsov's works still retained a high plastic culture. It was for its approval that he fought, creating the Four Arts Society, becoming its chairman. It arose in 1925 and united the artist’s associates on the Blue Rose and many other outstanding artists (Sarian, Utkin, Feofilaktov, Matveev, as well as Bruni, Petrov-Vodkin, Istomin, Favorsky, Tyrsa, Miturich, Ostroumova-Lebedeva) . Bebutova and Kuznetsov believed that society should unite representatives of "all four arts", based on "the urgent need to introduce a true synthesis of arts into the life of Soviet society." Of the architects, the society included Zholtovsky, Shchusev, Tamanyan. Moreover, there were also masters of the left direction - El Lissitzky and Klyun. But, although Bebutova and Kuznetsov declared that "Art had to be realistic", this association was immediately accused of "restoration tendencies", and Kuznetsov was directly called the bearer of "mystical weariness". It was the solution of purely artistic tasks, “a sharp pictorial and color perception of the world, the search for new expressive constructive forms” that did not suit art officials, the future ideologists of “socialist realism”, who gave art a purely propaganda role. Such demands on art may have subconsciously influenced Kuznetsov. An example of this is the completely unsuccessful picture of Lenin among children (1926, location unknown) shown at the first exhibition of the Four Arts. More successful were his landscapes of the Crimea, but in their naturalness, with all the skill, there was less pictorial subtlety, giving rise to high spirituality.
Since criticism called on the artist to sing of "liberated labor" and the theme of the working man, Kuznetsov painted such paintings as Peasant Women (1926), Kyrgyz Shepherds (1926), Shepherds' Rest (1927-1934), Grape Harvesting (1928), etc. The color scheme changes his works - the color becomes more frankly intense and at the same time more simplified. I must say that these works of the artist cannot be denied monumentality. Figures pushed forward in Peasant Women or Kirghiz Shepherds "keep the plane". But the faces of the characters, acquiring greater concreteness, at the same time lost that all-humanity, that complicity with the eternity of being, which was in the eastern cycle of the 1910s. Speaking of Peasants, Alpatov and Sarabyanov rightly remembered Venetsianov. Indeed, in a woman with a sickle there is something reminiscent of Venetian heroines. But the "Venetian" beginning appears more outwardly than the general one that brought the works of the Russian artist of the first half of the 19th century closer to the steppe series of Kuznetsov. Now Kuznetsov, instead of being, began to show more life. It is felt both in the Woman with a bull (1927) and in the Crimean collective farm (1928). Of course, in these works, in the integrity of the figures, in the balance of the composition, in the skillful distribution of color spots, one can feel a great master, standing above many phenomena of the then Soviet painting. But one cannot but agree with Alexander Morozov: “The best thing about the late P. Kuznetsov is what he retains from the rise of the Kirghiz Suite.”
Of course, there is something majestic about the embodiment of the theme of motherhood in the painting The Mother (1930). The picture could be translated into a fresco, which the artist especially dreamed of at that time, naively believing that the new social system would allow him to make "connection with the feeling of a working person." He often used the Alfresco and Alsecco techniques in his paintings. The space of the paintings deepens, even plein air is used in its interpretation, but the distances are so generalized, the objects are weightless, volumeless, that for all the spatiality, Kuznetsov still avoids naturalistic depth during this period.
But even these pictures caused a sharp assessment from official criticism. Fedorov-Davydov, who then stood on the positions of vulgar sociology, wrote about Kuznetsov's work: “It is dangerous, because our artistic youth has already become infected from it ... in part. The interpretation of the theme outside of time, space and everyday life, the composition in the desert, the stunted color, the iconographic connectedness of movements - all this Kuznetsov heritage began to pass to our youth.
The master is not saved even by Lunacharsky's sympathetic review of the Portrait of E.M. Bebutova. Reading (1926), which stated: "This woman is a man in the best sense of the word - a new man." By the way, the portrait of Matveev (1927), which realistically conveyed the uniqueness of the individual, yielding in ambiguity and depth to the earlier one, also did not satisfy Soviet orthodoxies. The works were nevertheless decided in color decoratively, which began to seem like a vice.
And here is the result. In 1929, despite the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR and a large solo exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, the persecution of the artist in Vkhutein begins from part of the student body, committed to the principles of the so-called proletarian art. The orthodox Bela Witz came to the monumental department, who at the end of 1929, as class aliens, "swept with an iron broom representatives of bourgeois art: Kuznetsov, Favorsky, Istomin, and Bruni." And in 1931, the Four Arts Society was dissolved. An even more severe period for the fate of our art was coming.
Art of Kuznetsov in the 1930s and beyond
and technology." The Armenian cycle, of course, differed from the boring ones both in painting and in the construction of the works of “proletarian artists”, for opportunistic reasons, referring to the industrial theme - after all, it was a social order. But even in the works of Kuznetsov, the reddish coloring, dictated by the color of the tuff, became somewhat intrusive, in some works the abundance of small figures introduced excessive verbosity into the paintings; the decorative principle inherent in his art, which Kuznetsov tried to preserve, sometimes turned into variegation. The same can be said about Baku landscapes with oil rigs (1931-1932).
Kuznetsov, pure in heart, perceived everything that happened as some kind of misunderstanding. He believed that his art responds to the demands of the time. In 1930-1931, he traveled to Armenia and a new theme appeared in his work - an industrial landscape associated with the construction of Yerevan. Instead of concentrated depth, expressive movement, dynamic rhythms, and unexpected angles appeared in his works. One can speak of a certain influence on the work of Kuznetsov by OST artists with their passion for technical structures, with their desire to maximize the composition. The master often chooses a point of view from above, striving for the sharpness of perception of the depicted. Such, for example, is the landscape of the Outskirts of Yerevan (1930), repeated in the work Bridge over the Zanga River (1930), where the color scheme is still clear, subordinated to the general silver scale.
But it completely changes, becomes reddish-red, in the landscapes Processing of the Artik tuff (1930-1931) and in a number of works Construction of Yerevan (1930-1931). Kuznetsov said that he wanted to convey in them his sense of “the integrity of nature, human labor.
The industrial theme was alien to the artist, as well as the theme of sports, which he turned to in those same years, I think, again, not without the influence of the Ostovites. The best of the pictures of the Pushball sports series (1931), in which, according to Punin, Kuznetsov managed to "combine in one image or in one form several positions of this image and this form at different times, take into account the life of the depicted body in time." But agreeing with Punin in assessing the formal skill of the artist, you still catch yourself on the fact that this work does not evoke deep emotions, that it is devoid of that inspiring power that so excited and captured the viewer in Kuznetsov's work earlier. Kuznetsov also demonstrates great skill in Sorting Cotton (1931), where the expressive rhythm of the figures of women in blue and dark brown in the foreground directs the gaze upward, parallel to the plane, thereby asserting it, as in a wall fresco. Yes, and the picture was made with lime paints on damp lime soil, as a monumental work. “In the painting Sorting Cotton, there is more reliability in the transfer of the situation than in the early paintings on the topic of sheep shearing,” wrote Alpatov. But this reliability, in our opinion, reduces the universal meaning of labor, the original, and therefore truly solemn deed, which just gives a high harmonic and poetic harmony to the mentioned “sheep haircuts” by Alpatov.
By the way, Alpatov’s confession, which he cited in his Memoirs, published already in the post-Soviet period, is noteworthy: “In the landscapes of the East, Kuznetsov fulfilled his dreams of a golden age and at the same time managed to achieve accuracy of transmission. Kuznetsov surpassed even Vrubel and Borisov-Musatov in the power of fantasy.
His work is not always equally successful. In my album, published by the publishing house "Soviet Artist", a number of bad paintings spoil the impression of Kuznetsov's work. From conversations with Alpatov, I know that he considered the Armenian period a clear decline in the artist's work. Of course, there may be some
it is an exaggeration that the scientist called some of the works published in the album bad, because they also have certain plastic qualities. But they no longer open to the viewer a new view of the world, where everything is subject to the laws of higher harmony. And therefore, for example, the monumentality of Cabbage (1932), which was a success with the artistic intelligentsia at the exhibition of the 30th anniversary of the Moscow Union of Artists in 1962-1963, but deserved reproaches for formalism from those in power, nevertheless, bears a certain smack of social order and therefore yields to the monumentality of oriental works, in which the eternity of life is embodied.
Nevertheless, we will be grateful to the artist for the fact that he managed not to become a humble implementer of the conventional dogmas of socialist realism. And during the years of the Great Patriotic War, trying to capture the appearance of its participants, he is far from any pomposity, and the picturesque restraint, conveying the spirit of the times, is combined with the solution of picturesque tasks that help to reveal the volitional principle in a person (Portrait of pilot V.I. Andreev , 1941).
Since the second half of the 1930s, the main genres of the artist are landscape and still life. In contemplating the beauty of the visible world, he found respite from the unfair criticism that led to the fact that in 1948 Kuznetsov was forced to leave teaching at the Moscow School of Industrial Art and, enrolled in the Formalists, from that time practically ceased to participate in exhibitions. But he wrote a lot - bouquets of flowers, landscapes near Moscow or the Baltic. At the same time, he returns to plein-air painting, admiring the fresh breath of a summer morning or the changing shades of a Baltic sunset. These are mainly sketches; it is more and more difficult for an aging artist to paint pictures. But these etudes are sometimes penetrated by exquisite color melody (Peonies, 1950s), and the rhythm of compositional construction (Flowers and Grapes, 1953).
During the Khrushchev thaw, recognition returned to him, retrospective solo exhibitions were held in 1956-1957 and 1964, young artists are drawn to him, and he willingly shares with them his knowledge of art, his creative experience.
Nowadays, when there is a shortage of spirituality and kindness, wise, pure, full of deep humanity, expressing at its best the divine harmony that artists have dreamed of for centuries, Kuznetsov’s art is especially relevant as an example of the highest service to beauty, in the healing power of which the master believed throughout his long life.
Soon Sudeikin and Sapunov joined Kuznetsov and Matveev.
At Mamontov, young artists closely communicated with Paolo Trubetskoy, Matveyev's teacher at the School, with Chaliapin, whose portrait Kuznetsov would paint and put on display at the Scarlet Rose exhibition. Mamontov began to introduce the future Blue Bearers to theatrical scenery. For the Private Opera, Kuznetsov, Sudeikin and Sapunov painted scenery for Eugenio Esposito's Camorra, Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orpheus, Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.
Painter, graphic artist, theater designer. Landscape painter, portrait painter, author of still lifes, decorative panels. Teacher.
Husband E.M. Bebutova. Studied in 1891-1897. at the Bogolyubov Drawing School under V.V. Konovalov, from 1897 to 1903 - at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under K.A. Korovin and V.A. Serov. Participant and one of the organizers of the exhibitions "Scarlet Rose" (Saratov, 1904) and "Blue Rose" (Moscow, 1907). Member of associations "World of Art", "Four Arts". Since the early 1900s experienced a strong influence of V.E. Borisov-Musatov. In pre-revolutionary art, he drew subjects for decorative and symbolist paintings from the brilliance of the East ("Mirage in the Steppe", 1912, State Tretyakov Gallery). Subsequently, while preserving the poetic structure of the images, he gives the compositions greater dynamics and concreteness ("Shepherds' Rest", 1927, State Russian Museum; "Cotton Sorting", 1931, State Tretyakov Gallery). In addition to the philosophical landscape, he paid tribute to the portrait ("Portrait of Elena Bebutova", 1922, State Tretyakov Gallery). He worked in the field of theatrical and decorative painting and graphics. His paintings are also in the museums of Astrakhan, Barnaul, Vladivostok, Kazan, Kirov, Kostroma, Kursk, Novokuznetsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Saratov, Smolensk, Syktyvkar, Khabarovsk, Cheboksary, Yaroslavl, Almaty, Yerevan and others.