Lost Man in Paradise Lost – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
In New York, at the age of 79, Natalya Nesterova, an artist of the seventies generation, who painted every garden as a lost paradise and created the image of the seventies as a lost paradise, died.
If a critic of the 1920s, armed with a sociological method, got to the big museum exhibition of Natalia Nesterova, he would immediately notice that he was dealing with class-alien art. The streets of cities – most often this is the old Moscow of her childhood, Samoteka and the Arbat lanes, unprepossessing, cozy, retaining in places the pre-revolutionary two-story building – are filled with loitering citizens, lonely flaneurs, stubbornly refusing to merge into a close-knit masses of the people. The same idlers are found in squares and parks, or rather, they don’t meet, even if it’s only he and she in the alley, they are not destined to find each other, everyone walking passes by, and all couples consist of two solitudes, and when they are brought to Peterhof or Summer garden, they are easy to confuse with the statues there. Because everything in this world is vacationers wandering along the edge of the sea, and flocks of seagulls soaring above them, and boys in sailor suits on bicycles, and playing badminton, and riding boats, and circling on a carousel, and staring in a circus, and playing solitaire games, and eating oysters, and walking along the embankment, and entering cafes – numb, frozen, frozen in an airless atmosphere. It is in a state of stagnation – oppressive, stuffy, hopeless stagnation. “It will be a sluggish and boring film in which our people and our modernity will look very dull” – words from an internal review of the script for “Long Wires”, which almost buried Kira Muratova’s masterpiece even before its birth, could also describe Nesterovsky holiday series, which, however, did not lay on the shelf, unlike Muratov’s film. But, fortunately, art criticism of the 1970s became much kinder.
Petty-bourgeois petty topics, extreme individualism, intellectual digging into oneself – a critic of the 1920s would not be mistaken when determining the social origin of the artist: from the Moscow creative intelligentsia – parents, architects, met at the Moscow Architectural Institute, grandfather studied with Robert Falk and Sergey Gerasimov at the Moscow School of Painting and Art , deeper genealogical research does lead to former people. Critics of the 1970s, freed from sociological conscription, did not note any class alienation in Nesterova’s paintings and, on the contrary, praised for the intellectual depth of plastic thinking and broad cultural erudition, especially emphasizing the interest in the lubok and primitive, which was kind to Moscow-Tartu semiotics – everywhere they there are references to self-taught geniuses, to Niko Pirosmani, Customs Officer Rousseau, Maurice Utrillo and Tivadar Kostka Chontvari. The critics of the 1970s were instructed to favor the “young generation”, “new names”, “youth of the 1970s”, and they favor, but cannot say that, like self-taught geniuses, Nesterova presents us with an image of paradise, only forever lost , do not see obvious quotes from old masters in her feasts, so as not to accidentally agree on religious overtones, and, of course, do not notice the seditious interest in surrealism and attempts to reconcile Rene Magritte with Alexander Tyshler, but appreciate the skill of the young artist who found his resort theme, “transforming life into being.” Critics of the 1970s, who still do not know that they live in an era of stagnation, do not feel the atmosphere of stagnation in Nesterova’s art, explaining the strange stillness of this world by the fact that the characters are immersed in memories, and the paintings “conceal some kind of nostalgia for a lofty ideal.” “Nostalgia” is a word exactly found, a password for all future times.
True, it would be difficult for critics of the 1920s to get into the big museum exhibition of Nesterova – in Russia there were only two of them, more precisely – one: in 2005, something like a retrospective arranged for the 60th anniversary of the artist by international efforts, drove into the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian museum – on the way from Aachen’s Ludwig Forum to Washington’s National Museum Of Women In The Arts. The Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian will not be able to repeat such a project or do something on a larger scale in the coming years – and not only because of the current severance of all international relations: the museum area of Nesterova’s paintings is extremely wide and perfectly reflects her strange – between official and unofficial – position in late Soviet system of arts. In all Russian art, perhaps, one cannot find another artist who, like Nesterov’s characters, hovering between sleep and reality, would turn out to be such a two-stop not a fighter, but not a guest either.
On the one hand, in the list of museums that store Nesterova’s works, in addition to the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum, you can find almost all regional art galleries, from Yakutsk to Bryansk, and a good half of the capital’s museums of the former Soviet republics, from Tbilisi to Kyiv. This geography is explained by the fact that Nesterova’s career developed in a purely official way, which involved purchases by the Khudfond and subsequent distribution: Moscow Art School – Dmitry Zhilinsky’s workshop at the Surikov Institute – a diploma about indispensable “geologists” – joining the Union and twenty years of work in the Combine of Painting Art, about which the artist recalled not without pleasure – specializing in the topic of harvesting, she traveled all over the country with creative business trips. Perhaps, with this theme of collective farm labor, she bought the right in her private, albeit quite official practice to write on the theme of idleness, not at all festive, emasculated and dreary idleness. Or maybe the ideologically savvy critics of the 1970s should have praised this “generation of the young” as opposed to another, underground youth, and such a metaphysics from the life of Soviet vacationers was still preferable to the metaphysics of the underground Sretensky Boulevard.
On the other hand, the list of museum collections with works by Nesterova includes Zimmerli at Rutgers University, the largest collection of Soviet non-conformism, and the entire world wide web of the Ludwig Museums, and even the New York Guggenheim, which is somewhat unusual for an official Soviet artist. Houses of cards, solitaire, preference – Nesterova loved cards in life and in art, and in the 1980s, when the iron curtain began to rise, the map of her fate fell well: she came to the attention of the German collector Peter Ludwig, who was looking for pearl grains in official art East Germany and the USSR, and was liked by the New York gallery owner Hal Bromm, now almost forgotten, and in the 1980s he worked with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Keith Haring, Kiki Smith, David Voinarovich, so Nesterov’s resort flaneurs found themselves in worthy company.
In her non-conformist laurels of Soviet painting, Ludwig and Bromm must have been surprised to find features close to the transavant-garde that conquered the Western world: in expressive, over the years more and more pasty and uninhibited painting – an analogue of neo-expressionism; full of allusions to the old masters, but she still came out of the workshop of the main Soviet retrospectiveist Zhilinsky, compositions – a postmodernist game of quotations. And besides, the feminist movement was gaining strength – Nesterova and her Surikov classmates, Tatyana Nazarenko, Elena Romanova, Olga Bulgakova, stuck the stupid label of “the Amazon of the left MOSH.” In general, since the late 1980s, she has lived in three countries and three cities – Moscow, New York and Paris, where she, since childhood, a fan of the forbidden French from the GMNZI, worked best. Ironically, Nesterova received all her high awards, state awards, titles, academic titles after her departure to the West – as if for her services in promoting the best achievements of the Soviet school abroad.
Since the 1980s, the language of Nesterova’s painting has been constantly becoming more complex – both at the level of manner, and at the level of plots and allegories, she has large biblical and gospel cycles, so it became clear that all the seventies “cafes” and “meals” were in fact In fact, “marriages in Cana of Galilee” and “Last Suppers”, all sad couples are “adams and eves”, and the gardens, then Summer and Boring, present Versailles and Central Park, speak of a lost paradise, nostalgia for which is imbued with Christian culture. But no matter what new scales, textures, compositions and motifs arise in this painting, it, in essence, remains in its seventies. And today, at a time of universal nostalgia for the “golden age” of stagnation – for its spiritual complexity, for its relative prosperity, at least in the capitals, for the lost paradise of the late Soviet consensus of the intelligentsia and power, when the rules of the game were clear and the leashes were weakened so much, that now these indulgences are taken for freedom – Nesterova’s paintings are perceived doubly, triply nostalgically.
A critic of the 1920s, having looked at Nesterova’s art with a sociologizing look, would probably say that it is self-portrait not metaphysically, but socially — this resort and restaurant image of the world is revealed to the prosperous Soviet bohemia, endlessly moving from a creative business trip to a creative dacha. However, Nesterov’s characters have almost no special temporary signs – ladies in white dresses and hats with gentlemen in canvas suits can be mistaken for a kind of Chekhov-Gorky summer residents. During the years of perestroika, when the previous period began to be called stagnant, a lot of intellectual effort was made to ensure that in the historical imagination of the nation the first decade of the 20th century, until 1913, was imprinted as a short golden age of Russia, with nostalgia for which she will now live , trying with all his might to restore the connection of times. In perestroika 1985, Anatoly Vasilyev’s performance “Serso” was released, starting in a completely Chekhovian way, and then leaving no stone unturned from Chekhovism, because in the times that came after 1913, no “Uncle Vanya” survived. Lost people in Natalya Nesterova’s lost paradise speak of the same thing in other words – from their seventies paradise they whisper to us breathlessly that the real object of nostalgia may not be time or place, but a hero who will never return.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
