Lyubov Agafonova revealed the secrets of the art of a turning point

— Lyubov Leonidovna, happy birthday to you! Just in time for your birthday, the film based on your book “Korovin’s Constellation” was completed. How does the artist appear there?

— I devoted many years to studying the fate and creativity of Konstantin Korovin. It is symbolic for me that I, like the great artist, was born in December. And every year I celebrate his birthday with an event worse than my own. This time there is a film based on my book. This is the result of a lot of work and my many years of communication with painting and graphics, the literary heritage and the life story of the great artist. We played with him a little in the film. The master appears in different “faces”: Korovin the teacher, Korovin the writer, Korovin the artist, Korovin the man who loved beautiful women. He was the spark that lit other stars around him. Entire artistic movements were also sparked. Everyone knows Korovin as the author of the Moscow art school, thanks to whom impressionism took root in Russia. But few people say that Korovin also trained a whole galaxy of avant-garde artists: Larionov and Goncharova, for example, attended Konstantin Alekseevich’s master classes. There was no conventional understanding of teaching back then. Korovin could come to class, show his skills to the students who stood nearby, and then come back two or three months later. His teaching was not edifying. He gave me the impulse to be like him. Therefore, we made a film about how personality influences the course of history and culture.

— In your works you write that there was no first and second wave of the avant-garde – it was all one wave. The concept of the influence of artists on each other is being built, where Korovin is the sun, from which rays stretch in different directions. Can we say that contemporary artists Andrei Bartenev and Pavel Pepperstein, who played in the film, are also a continuation of the so-called first wave of the avant-garde and are associated with the era when Korovin lived?

— We approached the creation of a painting based on the idea you voiced, playfully: Pasha Pepperstein plays the role of Korovin the writer, Andryusha Bartenev is Korovin’s teacher, Lyubov Agafonova is a generalized image of the artist’s lovers. Yes, I believe that the second wave of avant-garde does not exist, it is just a stuck-on term that art critics came up with and which everyone is now repeating. There was no first wave, no second, and there will not be a third. This is all one dynamically developing story – with attenuation and ups. In 1957, a festival of youth and students was held, when it was possible to see abstract art, which had been forgotten for 30 years in the Soviet country. And there was a return to the ideas of the early twentieth century. In addition, the artists of the Russian avant-garde influenced the development of European and American art and gave it impetus, and 30 years later the same avant-garde returns from the outer limits of the Soviet country and instantly lights up new stars in the USSR. But then there were still artists living and working who remembered the art of the revolutionary years, like the cubist artist Nathan Altman, who in 1920 created a mythological picture of the capture of the Winter Palace, when the buildings were covered with futuristic paintings, and avant-garde structures stood on the streets. There was a living artist of the younger generation, Efrosinya Ermilova-Platova, who was friends with Vladimir Nemukhin and Anatoly Zverev. That is, there was no interruption, the wave continued, ideas and techniques were passed on directly – from generation to generation. Anatoly Zverev has early cubic works, the prototype of which were those that George Costakis showed him in his collection. That is, Zverev looked at the works of Rozanova, Popova and Kandinsky and made homages.

— The research that you did at the exhibition at the House of Russian Abroad refracts this topic from different angles. Three projects – about Korovin and the circle of his students and friends, about the collector and philanthropist Nikolai Ryabushinsky, about artists who were forced to leave for Uzbekistan, where their art is combined with Eastern traditions – add up to one story…

– Yes. In Uzbekistan, avant-garde art lasted longer because it was on the outskirts and there was not such acute pressure from censorship. Many artists ended up there against their own free will, but it saved them. But even there, in 1946–1947, the struggle against formalism and cosmopolitanism began, they also received a blow: Alexander Volkov was expelled from the Union of Artists, for example. But the avant-garde artists survived there. Back in the early 1920s, artists came there as part of an expedition to study monuments to save the Ulugbek madrasah in Samarkand, on Registan Square. We arrived and raised the falling minaret. I write about this in the book “Touched by the Sun,” which will be presented along with the film about Korovin. Vladimir Shukhov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Viktor Ufimtsev literally recreated Registan Square, later recognized as a great architectural monument, a UNESCO pearl. To raise the minaret, Shukhov figured out how to raise it, rotate it and strengthen the foundation underneath. That is, the artists of the Russian avant-garde, among whom were Korovin’s students, re-raised the great culture and quoted it in their works.

— In this system of “communicating constellations” there is one more figure – Nikolai Ryabushinsky, to whom a separate project is dedicated. How does he fit into it?

– There is an amazing story with Nikolai Ryabushinsky – he is my favorite fairy-tale hero, like Korovin, and Volkov, and Ufimtsev, who are no less close to me. Ryabushinsky wanted to become famous; he staged shocking performances with bears running out onto the platform. Anything, as long as they write about him in the newspapers. But then he embodies his fury in the most expensive and richly illustrated magazine of Russian symbolism, “The Golden Fleece,” where he invites his artist friends, including Korovin. All this happens during the first revolution of 1905–1907, after the closure of another influential magazine, World of Art. Ryabushinsky helps with the organization of the famous “Blue Rose” exhibition, which we reconstructed at the House of Russian Abroad, and then opens a magazine that will be read everywhere – in Europe, Russia, and even America. The Golden Fleece magazine is a kind of dispute with Sergei Diaghilev and Alexander Benois, the creators of the World of Art magazine. Benoit is not delighted with Ryabushinsky, but cooperates with him. “I’ll work in gold shit,” writes Benoit. Despite this assessment, Benoit was right, because the magazine became the most important art publication, revolutionary for that time, it was published in spite of everything. At the exhibition following “The Blue Rose,” Ryabushinsky exhibited not only Russian artists, but also then little-known artists from France – Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, with whom Ryabushinsky would later be friends for a long time in exile.

— Currently at the Tretyakov Gallery there is an exhibition “Heroes and Contemporaries of the Silver Age”, where the same period is examined through the prism of theatricality. At a time when the world is collapsing, there is poverty and revolution all around, artists try to isolate themselves from this, replacing reality and the premonition of the end of the old world with an atmosphere of celebration, nostalgia for the past or hope for a better future. Artists change styles like gloves, move from one association to another, this is the time of masks. How much do you agree with this idea?

“In this difficult time, artists wanted to create. They felt like geniuses, even poorly educated ones; they did not want passion and blood, but wanted to become gods. But it turned out that they became fallen angels – demons who created a revolution in art with their broken lines, breaking the world and their soul. But the symbolists, whom I talk about in the book, in the film, and at exhibitions, did not want something new, unlike the avant-garde and futurists. They are not about the future, but about dreams, with the help of which they sought to escape reality. On the one hand, they walked on thin ice, and on the other hand, they melted it and drowned. They couldn’t save the world. Instead, the tragedy that we know about happened – the October Revolution.

— Did the next generation of artists who returned to the avant-garde in the 1960s and later also “melt and break the ice”?

– No, it was no longer so powerful. The intensity and metaphysics are not the same. By exploring the past, we are engaged in the return of that most important culture that existed a hundred years ago. To move forward, you need a fundamental basis, which is in that era. Unfortunately, over the past forty or fifty years we have forgotten what was going on then. Soviet art criticism gave rise to some myths and stereotypes, due to which many details are lost or forgotten. At the exhibition “Nikolai Ryabushinsky: “Blue Rose” and “Golden Fleece”. Origins and continuation” there is, for example, correspondence between Ivan Morozov and Ryabushinsky, where the latter discusses how to collect. We are accustomed to the fact that Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin are our main patrons of the arts, that they were the first to buy French impressionists. But few people know that Ryabushinsky brought the first French impressionists to Russia. The exhibition includes Nikolai Pavlovich’s archive, which he collected throughout his life: photographs, letters, invitations, notes. And he testifies that at the third exhibition of the “Golden Fleece” Falk, Shevchenko, Larionov, Goncharova were shown, who would later become the founders of the “Jack of Diamonds” association, and that, as I already said, he was the first to bring Matisse, and Picasso, and Van Goga. All this was kept silent for a long time, because Ryabushinsky, unlike Morozov, who gave money for the revolution, Shchukin, who also flirted with the revolution, or Savva Mamontov, Ryabushinsky was Lenin’s personal enemy. Ryabushinsky’s surname was either erased or presented with a negative connotation. But I was not afraid to return Ryabushinsky’s name and tell his story based on archives and documents. Unlike other art historians, I turn primarily to the individual and the influence of the individual on the environment.