The New Tretyakov Gallery hosts the exhibition “Magnificent Eyewitnesses”: Time and People. 1910–30s”

The New Tretyakov Gallery hosts the exhibition “Magnificent Eyewitnesses”: Time and People. 1910–30s” – about 70 graphic works (exclusively portraits and self-portraits) shed light on personal relationships among artists, poets, writers, directors, as well as on the vicissitudes of artistic life, which was especially intense and dramatic in those three decades. Tells Igor Grebelnikov.

The exhibition was named after the book of memoirs of the poet-imagist Vadim Shershenevich: he wrote and rewrote them in the 1930s – carefully, with an eye on moods and censorship, but still they were published only in the 1990s. The memoir intonation, when the facts are colored by the personal impression of the witness and it is valuable in itself, is clearly audible in the current exhibition: many of the portraits are well known, some are being shown for the first time, but in any case, these characters have never been seen in such a composition. The place where they met is also important: the “magnificent eyewitnesses” are gathered in the middle of an exhibition of art from the early twentieth century, between the Filonov and Kandinsky halls. In general, on the fourth floor of the New Tretyakov Gallery, the viewer is tightly surrounded by large names and important “-isms” of avant-garde art, and here all of this is suddenly personalized, as if in the most unpretentious way: just think, drawings, portraits, when abstract compositions, Suprematism, counter-reliefs “rumble” nearby . However, against this background, the quiet memoir-like sound of the graphics is especially captivating.

There are quick sketches from nature, masterfully created portraits, and avant-garde tricks. Here Mikhail Matyushin depicted his head in the form of a crystal, in the edges of which you still need to try to consider the features of a specific face. He began working on a series of similar drawings back in 1914, and later at Ginkhuk (Leningrad Institute of Artistic Culture), heading the department of organic culture, among other things, he began to train employees in “extended vision,” the ability to see almost from the back of the head. Next to “Crystal” is a watercolor self-portrait of Matyushin’s devoted student Maria Ender (1930s)—the result of Ginkhuk’s studies, pulsating with bright colors. And a little further away there is an echo of the artist’s personal life, also amazing in its own way: in the portrait Ender is Matyushin’s second wife Olga Gromozova, she helped sort out the manuscripts of his first wife, artist and poet Elena Guro, and also acted as a medium at spiritualistic séances to conjure the latter’s spirit . In his house on the Petrogradskaya side (now there is the Museum of the St. Petersburg Avant-Garde), Matyushin and his students regularly got in touch with the other world – the activity, apparently, was not empty. Here, for example, is an entry from his diary for 1923: “Through Olya. Lena says that my paintings are a manifestation of a great spirit that has broken through illness. They are of great importance, but at the present moment of enormous discord between spirit and matter they will not be understood…” That’s right – although the avant-garde was still far from officially banned.

How much this ban changed everything can be judged by how artists saw themselves before and after. Nearby are a couple of self-portraits of Ivan Klyun, Malevich’s closest associate in Suprematism: one, 1914, futuristic, where the facial features are akin to a disjointed and crookedly assembled mechanism – what a slap in the face of public opinion. On another, from the late 30s, Klyun carefully draws his facial features, as if he is looking intently at himself – this is the image of a man hunted, but not giving up. In 1934, Klyun demonstratively renounced the avant-garde in favor of socialist realism, but did not go over to the side of propaganda art, and in December 1943 he died as an almost forgotten artist.

The selection of portraits in this exhibition deftly weaves personal and creative themes into the biographies of the subjects. Fortunately, these dashing decades are also described in detail in many memoirs – it’s a pity that the labels quote them rather selectively. Pavel Filonov painted his son-in-law, his sister’s husband, Nikolai Glebov-Putilovsky (1928) in the spirit of the method of “analytical art” he invented: his face, as if assembled from atoms, seems to balance on the edge of the visible and invisible worlds. But the value of the portrait of Sergei Yesenin with a cigarette, painted by Yuri Annenkov (1923), on the contrary, lies in the accuracy of the pen, which recorded how debauchery affected the appearance of the handsome man. The artist recalls that by the time this sketch was created, “the “girlish beauty” of his face… had turned pale. He remained such a slightly fatherly young man, who had not lost the slenderness and rough grace of a Russian apprentice, until the end of his days, or at least until the day when I met him for the last time… This is how he was preserved in my sketch.”

Sometimes the portraits make it seem as if time has stopped: for example, the famous portraits of Akhmatova from 1928, made by Nikolai Tyrsa using the technique of lamp soot and black watercolor, can easily be signed with Mandelstam’s lines about the “false classical shawl”, written 14 years earlier. The portrait of Boris Pasternak, which his father drew in charcoal in 1923, looks just as iconic, without age: Leonid Pasternak painted his son many times, each time emphasizing his detached, poetically sublime appearance. It’s understandable—the look of a loving father.

Another thing is the Kukryniksy: the trio of artists Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiry Krylov and Nikolai Sokolov, before becoming virtuosos of political caricatures and propaganda posters in the 1940s, cut their teeth on cultural figures. Boris Pasternak with his sculpted face in their performance for the collection of cartoons and epigrams “Literary Orators” (1935) appeared as an ancient Egyptian sphinx, lying down on the pulpit for performances. Vikenty Veresaev grumbled about the Kukryniksy in his memoirs: “One can still imagine that there was some artist capable of spitting on a person like that. But I can’t understand how three artists could suddenly appear with such contempt and disgust for a person.” And, in general, it is difficult to disagree with him, looking at Kukryniks’s portraits of Vsevolod Meyerhold or Vasily Kamensky. Yes, that time was generous with satire, especially in literature – remember Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, Olesha, Ilf and Petrov. However, as the exhibition involuntarily reminds us, there comes a time when not only does satire cease to be friendly and carefree, but the very position of the eyewitness does not seem magnificent at all.