Artist of one kiss – Newspaper Kommersant No. 148 (7349) of 08/16/2022

The famous Russian-German artist Dmitry Vrubel died in Berlin. In June 2022, he contracted COVID-19, the disease was severe, with complications, he had to resort to being connected to a ventilator, but the doctors failed to save Vrubel. He was 62 years old.

Seeing signs and symbols in the dates of birth and death is a thankless task. However, in the case of the departure of Dmitry Vrubel, it is in this terrible year that it is not possible to bypass the “Danishness”. The artist, whose main work became a symbol of the end of the first cold war, died in the midst of the second. His work “God! Help me survive this mortal love” appeared on the Berlin Wall in 1990, and if there is a work of Russian art comparable in world fame to the “Black Square”, then this is it.

The image of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing passionately, taken from the most successful reportage photograph of 1979, has turned into a symbol of the fall of the wall, the USSR and the old world with its post-war confrontation of the superpowers as a whole.

It was in this very easily readable symbolic form that this composition entered popular culture, and later was repeatedly transformed into a symbol of completely different times and movements. It could have been a kiss for the glory of the LGBT community, or it could have been a symbol of the merging of different pop figures, but everywhere, of course, the prototype was read – the same “Brotherly Kiss” (Bruderkuss, as the Germans shortened the long Russian name).

Vrubel liked such immeasurable fame – let him be an “artist of one picture”, but what a one! However, there was Vrubel both before and after the Berlin Wall. Moscow life “before” was one big gulp of freedom suddenly given to his generation. A professional artist, who almost completed his diploma at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, he became a member of the Union of Artists in 1983. However, in fact, he became a “modern artist” on completely different platforms, more precisely, in their complete absence. His showroom was Nikita Alekseev’s apartment, where the Avant-Garde Club (KLAVA), a couple of other semi-underground places that suddenly appeared, was located. And in 1986, he took matters into his own hands and organized the “Vrubel Gallery” in his apartment, which, in one form or another, lasted for almost ten years. The artist himself will later recall this period as “one of the happiest in the life of artistic Moscow, a time of endless hopes and, most importantly, their realization”: “No one from my generation at that time was an “established artist” yet. And so am I. There were only ambitions. An amazing time has made many of them artists, and some have endowed with a place in history.

In this Moscow whirlwind of booze, apartment openings, conceptualist “country walks”, social art banter, foreign guests who promised mountains of gold, a prototype of the future Bruderkuss was born: “A girl I met in Paris came to Moscow and brought me a photograph of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing: look, they say, what a cool picture, you should draw it. It was a disgusting, disgusting thing, I almost threw up at first. But still, as is usually the case, I wanted to fix in art that which is impossible to fix there, and this work somehow began to live in my head by itself. I started doing some underpainting on paper, and one day Prigov saw them and said: “Dmitry Vladimirovich, it would be nice to have this work on the Berlin Wall.” We laughed and forgot, of course.”

As it often happened, it was definitely not necessary to forget what Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov said. And when, in 1990, “a certain uncle from abroad, gallery owner Sasha Brodovsky, brought him to Berlin, took him by the handle, took him to the wall and said: “Draw!” – Vrubel already knew exactly what to draw.

Vrubel’s life “after” was in many ways a constant conversation on the topic of what to do when there is already fame, and you are still young and you have unlimited strength. After the voyages around Europe and America, which were obligatory for the then Russian artists, from where after 1995 they increasingly returned with the understanding that they could not fit in, there was Moscow with its, on the contrary, ever-expanding opportunities. There was work with the Gelman Gallery (Marat Gelman was included in the register of foreign media agents), there were projects with major state corporations, there was an ironic “calendar” of “Putinian” – a cycle of portraits of the President of the Russian Federation, today perceived quite differently than in peaceful 2001; The Tretyakov Gallery received its copy of The Fraternal Kiss, and the Evangelical Project (already in a duet with his wife Victoria Timofeeva) was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize. For some time there was a feeling that contemporary art in the Russian Federation is rising in influence and relevance, including, as it were, in the highest echelons of power. But in 2008, after the Georgian campaign, something broke for Vrubel and Timofeeva. Their Berlin life began.

Vrubel entered Berlin on the same horse: “I remember exactly how in March 2009 I walked past the wall and saw that there was no Kiss. I came to a completely terrible state and at that moment I said: stop, this is not possible. I photographed it and through the newspapers drew the attention of the Germans that there was no “Brotherly Kiss”. And the Germans said: guys, what are you doing, they just took our history from us and took it away? It was then that it became clear that this is already part of history, an integral part of Berlin. The artist takes matters into his own hands and breaks through the reconstruction of historical graffiti for himself.

It must be admitted that the second “Kiss” was written much better than the first, but it was the first one, with all its “mistakes” in the painting technique, that was rougher and really hit backhand.

However, the Germans recognized him: “After a couple of days, when the faces were already ready, five German newspapers simultaneously came out with a photograph of this work and editorials like “we found the Bruderkuss”.”

The technique that Vrubel took as his main one is great for pop art – translation from a photograph or other canonical image was mastered by Warhol as ideal in this context. Vrubel’s successes and failures exactly depend on the accuracy of the hit. In the case of “Brotherly Kiss” it is almost ingenious. In the case of the critically acclaimed Gospel Project, not everything went smoothly; those who were lucky enough to wander around the VR space of the Berlin workshop of Vrubel-Timofeeva say that many of his images from different years in such a digital version live better than in the form of paintings on the walls.

The presence of Dmitry Vrubel in the Russian art space has never stopped.

This is the case when immersion in the virtual world of social networks allows the artist to be inside the public discussion of his circle, regardless of where he lives. He has been especially active in recent months. He led a touching broadcast “Save an ordinary mother-in-law” about how a very elderly loved one was taken out from under shelling. He was in touch with friends and colleagues who came to Berlin. In general, it was an important center of Russian Berlin life. The monstrous course of covid knocked him off his feet, as it turned out, forever. All the disputes, in which he, as a passionate person, sometimes managed to say a lot of things where as ambiguous, now cannot be resolved. And the prayer “Lord! Help me survive among this mortal love” is relevant again.

Kira Dolinina