Paintings by Vasnetsov’s grandson were shown in Moscow: the “severe style” of the singer of Leningrad landscapes

An exhibition of the People’s Artist of the USSR, Academician Andrei Vladimirovich Vasnetsov (1924-2009) opened in the exhibition halls on Arbat of the State Museum of A. S. Pushkin. Many of the works of Viktor Vasnetsov’s great-grandson are being shown for the first time, so the project could not help but come to the attention of Moskovsky Komsomolets.

Andrey Vasnetsov is well known in the professional community. Participant of the Great Patriotic War, laureate of all conceivable state awards, monumentalist. He studied to become an artist after the war (at the time it began, the young man was seventeen). But Vasnetsov got great teachers: Alexander Alexandrovich Deineka, Andrei Dmitrievich Goncharov, Pyotr Petrovich Sokolov-Skalya. What, in fact, predetermined fate: Vasnetsov became one of the founders of the “severe style” of Soviet realistic painting, based on the experience of the masters of the 1920s – the same Deineka, Pyotr Konchalovsky and others.

Of course, Andrei Vladimirovich could not help but find himself in the shadow of his great grandfather: there is no doubt that at least 1% of visitors to the halls in Denezhny Lane adjacent to Arbat simply come “to Vasnetsov”, expecting to see “Bogatyrs” or “The Knight at the Crossroads” . But Soviet Vasnetsov is an original artist who deserves attention regardless of his family affiliation. By the way, his figure confirms the naive scientific theory that genius (a penchant for a certain type of art is passed on through generations. Andrei Vasnetsov’s father was a biologist, or rather an ichthyologist, a specialist in fish. And only his grandson returned to the path paved by his great predecessor.

In relation to Vasnetsov’s paintings, the epithet “metaphysical” is often used. If we explain this definition with examples, it turns out that the characters, attributes and locations of his paintings are located, as it were, in Leningrad or in a specific apartment/house – and at the same time nowhere.

What I mean? The most important layer of Andrei Vasnetsov’s creativity is still life. He has many of them, with the main color being dusk gray, and “bulb” yellow or glowing red is used to bring important details out of the darkness. “Still life with a mortar”, “Pack of tea”, “Still life with books”, “Still life with lemons and a saucepan on a round table” – a distinctive feature of these works is the impossibility of attributing objects, there they are like people without faces, with empty ovals instead of faces.

There are no titles or even ornamented letters on the covers of the books, the bottles have no labels, a pack of tea is an abstract rectangular parallelepiped, and not a concrete product of a domestic factory with an elephant on the packaging.

What time is it in the picture? The 1970s or 1870s cannot be determined even by the shape of the bottles; they are not clearly Soviet or pre-revolutionary; they are the embodiment of the lexical meaning of the word “bottle” in the sense of “a glass vessel for liquid.”

Andrei Vasnetsov and St. Petersburg have the same neutral, timeless look. This is the city of Lenin in the name, but it is located nowhere. If you study in detail the paintings of the 70s:

“Gate. White Night”, “Leningrad. Fishermen on the Bridge”, “Bridge in Leningrad”, then there is no instant recognition, as on postcards or souvenir cups with the “Bronze Horseman”, Kazan or St. Isaac’s Cathedrals.

No, this is not one iota specifically the Soviet period of the existence of St. Petersburg, not St. Petersburg itself, which you can learn to draw from a photograph or from nature in a year, but a certain shadow of the Heavenly City. Although, perhaps, the native St. Petersburg residents will correct me by saying that they understand exactly which bridge, inhabited by fishermen, is depicted here and where it is located.

It remains to be said about the most powerful picture — “Eclipse”. According to the catalogs, it was created in 2003-2004, that is, several years before the artist’s death. There is a version that the figures of people in the boat are Andrei Vasnetsov himself and his son Fedor. And above them is Mandelstam’s black sun:

This night is irreparable

It’s still light here.

At the gates of Jerusalem

The black sun rose.

“Still worthy” — A well-known phrase from the world of memes applies to this epoch-making work. It’s worth stopping next to him for about twenty minutes to understand: Andrei Vladimirovich Vasnetsov was worthy of bearing the illustrious surname. In “Eclipse” he is more than ever a real painter who has overcome the boundaries of earthly existence during his lifetime.