At the exhibition of Alexei Kravchenko, a hidden trace of the Beautiful Lady was found
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The secret of the Soviet romance
The talent of this artist matured in the era of the Silver Age, and revealed itself during the bronzed Stalinism. Alexey Kravchenko is widely known as an illustrator – his graphics illustrate replicated Soviet editions of Pushkin, Gogol, Dickens, Hoffmann, Hugo, Zweig. Less people know and appreciate painting, which Kravchenko did secretly at night. In his house on Nikolina Gora, built according to his own sketches, while “nuts were being tightened” around and repressions were raging, he wrote beautiful ladies from Bryusov’s lyrics to distract from painful thoughts. Moreover, the muses are not always easy to find in the paintings, so the exhibition with the romantic title “Secretly Looking Out the Window” becomes a kind of quest.
It is no coincidence that the title of Alexei Kravchenko’s exhibition at the Vellum Gallery includes a quote from a poem by Valery Bryusov. “And the stars, dreamy sorceresses, / Secretly looking out the window, / Whispering greetings to dreams …”. This is the key to understanding the master, whose art cannot be read out of the context of time, despite the fact that the artist’s romantic plots seem completely divorced from the reality of the era.
In 1912, when the great poet of the Silver Age wrote these lines, the artist Alexei Kravchenko receives his first serious recognition. After returning from a trip to Italy and Greece, he becomes a member of the significant Moscow Association of Artists (MTKh), his works are acquired by the Rumyantsev Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, and several paintings fall into the imperial collection. Soon the artist, together with Vasily Vatagin, was sent by the Academy of Arts on a creative business trip to Japan and Ceylon. And a year later he falls in love – with Ksenia Tikhanova, the daughter of an influential merchant (later Kravchenko’s wife became a famous art critic). It would seem that the stars themselves smiled at the young artist. However, the path to them was thorny and difficult.
Alexey Kravchenko was born in 1989 in Pokrovskaya Sloboda (now the city of Engels) into a peasant family. The father died when the boy was three years old. His first art teacher was the icon painter of the local church. Then Alexei entered a real school, but did not graduate from it, because the teachers, having seen the talent, recommended that he go straight to the Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The mother decided to move to Moscow, and Alexei went through a serious competition – there were 27 applicants for one place in the MUZhVZ. Kravchenko studied with Konstantin Korovin, Valentin Serov and Apollinary Vasnetsov (Viktor Vasnetsov’s younger brother). He did not break the established canons, unlike many of his contemporaries, but he worked masterfully. Then the First World War began, Kravchenko ended up at the front as a correspondent. It was there that his graphic talent was revealed, which would later feed him and bring him worldwide fame. “Etching unexpectedly helped my father overcome the state of despair and lack of meaning in life that gripped him in the war of 1914,” recalls the artist’s daughter Natalia. The editors of the magazine “Nedelya”, for which he shot photo reports, did not immediately, but decided to add etchings to the publications, and the artist had the opportunity to visit his family in Saratov. The daughter had just been born.
The artist met the revolution there: family property was confiscated, Xenia’s father Stepan Tikhanov was executed. The future seemed vague, but then the work of Kravchenko was appreciated by Lunacharsky, who arrived in the city, the People’s Commissar of Education, as a result, the artist became the director of the Radishchevsky Museum, where he opens the graphic department. In 1921, the family moved to Moscow, where the fame of the engraving and etching master continued to grow. Kravchenko, in spite of everything, remained a romantic: even Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don with his illustrations turned out to be completely lyrical.
Few people knew that the famous graphic artist painted paintings at night in his house on Nikolina Gora. He showed them to almost no one, fearing accusations of “bourgeois formalism.” Many of Kravchenko’s friends were repressed, Alexey Ilyich feared the same fate, so he always kept a bundle with the necessary things at the ready and stayed awake until four in the morning, waiting for his arrest. That’s why he died early: his heart could not stand it. He was 51 years old when he had a third heart attack, which he did not survive, it was 1940 …
His paintings were shown for the first time decades later. And now most of them are kept in the family, although they are also in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin and Russian Museums. The curator of the exhibition Lyubov Agafonova lives not far from Kravchenko’s descendants on Nikolina Gora and knows his work well. Therefore, he notices the details that became the core of the exhibition with a poetic name. There are many beautiful ladies in Kravchenko’s painting, both explicit and hidden. Here is “Nude by the Water” – an almost antique image of Rubens’ puffy Venus. A completely different nude in the 1921 painting is in the style of classical realism. And here is the (already dressed) girl – a fragile ballerina Nadezhda Venediktova, looking away from a distance – a portrait in the spirit of French impressionism. The romantic “Girl in Red” resembles the female images of the Pre-Raphaelites. And “Bathers on the Volga” is bright and avant-garde. Next to them is a mysterious female portrait in the spirit of the Symbolists. It seems that while creating his lyrical images, Kravchenko methodically sorts out the trends that have sunk into the past.
But there are also implicit muses at the exhibition. In the painting Quarrel over Cards, where the men, having caught one of the players cheating, swing a chair at him, the most attractive image away from the brewing fight is a girl in a yellow blouse stealthily peeking out from behind the door. On another canvas, looking closer, we find a female image reflected in a small mirror that hangs on the wall. Even in a sprawling landscape, muses hide among the trees. But the most romantic picture of the exhibition “The Kiss” in the Art Nouveau style: lovers reach out to each other, it seems, not in order to strengthen feelings, but to convey air. Such air for the artist was his painting, hidden from the eyes of strangers, in which the Silver Age and the image of the Beautiful Lady sound.
Newspaper headline:
The secret of the Soviet romance
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