The works of Igor Mayorov, signed by Anatoly Zverev, were shown at the detective exhibition

Igor Mayorov is one of the most enigmatic figures on the art scene of the turbulent era of perestroika. He is called “Petersburg Zverev” – for his dashing and light brush. Even outwardly, the artist, nicknamed Major, looked like his Moscow “sidekick”. The bearded man, originally from St. Petersburg, drank with the same passion, burned through life and created excitedly. Could write hundreds of sheets per night. And not only in the author’s style, but in any manner – under Bakst, Tyshler, Chagall, the icon painter of antiquity. He was especially successful in Zverev, who became a teacher and student for Igor Mayorov. The fates of the two artists were mystically intertwined and years later met in the homeland of the muses – in Tsvetaeva’s Tarusa, where an exhibition was opened, built as a detective story about a secret collusion of two “Mozarts”.

“AZ” – the sweeping signature of Anatoly Zverev is difficult to confuse with someone else. In the house of creativity of the Moscow Union of Artists, all 40 drawings made on wallpaper and wrapping paper are autographed by the artist, who was called “Russian Van Gogh” or “Soviet Pollock”. However, the poster contains the name of another master – Igor Mayorov. The style of portraits and still lifes betrays a different hand, as evidenced by the subtitle of the project: “Too bright for Zverev.” Indeed, in these images there is much more color and sunny mood than in the works of the Moscow master, painted in the same burgundy, but with a tragic note in every stroke. What’s the secret?

– The signature is real! – says one of the curators of the exhibition Irina Dudina. – It really belongs to the hand of Anatoly Zverev. The fact is that in the 1980s he already had so many orders that he did not have time to fulfill. Therefore, if he came to St. Petersburg, he ordered a dozen or two works from his student Mayorov, and then signed them in one fell swoop. In Japan, the artist’s apprentice had to put the teacher’s signature for the first three or four years, while Mayorov was a well-read person and was fond of the East. Igor approached the task from the position of the Japanese.

There is a 15 year difference between two artists from different cities. But their fates are very similar. Both self-taught, who were lucky with mentors. Anatoly Zverev got lucky with a school teacher – he turned out to be Nikolai Sinitsyn, a student of the Amazonian Russian avant-garde Anna Lebedeva-Ostroukhova, the first female academician. After school, he entered the art school in 1905, but was expelled for his untidy appearance. Igor Mayorov also discovered the gift of an artist at an early age. At the age of 10, he received the Grand Prix at the prestigious children’s drawing competition held in 1957 in India as part of the festival of youth and students, and was enrolled in the famous Ioganson Central Art School at the Academy of Arts, where only gifted children were admitted. After graduating from Mayorov, he went to the Serov Art School (now the school is named after Roerich). Among his teachers was Marina Time, the niece of the poet Alexander Blok, who was called the heiress of Russian modernism, she saw the gift of the young artist. But he failed to complete his academic education. Igor went to jail. He took the blame of his younger brother Sergei, who unsuccessfully “fooled around” – he gouged out his eyes in a portrait of Lenin and added a Chapaev mustache to him. He thundered for several years – in a correctional colony in the village of Metallostroy. There, Igor befriended the self-taught artist Vladimir Artemiev, who taught him the art of chasing, which was popular in the Land of the Soviets in the 1960s. After prison, Mayorov became a sought-after chaser – he worked with jeweler’s precision. Could create a huge panel in a matter of days. But something prevented me from starting to paint again with paints and brushes. And then he met Zverev – and how it broke.

“Artemiev set up a workshop at his home at 27 Gatchinskaya Street, he and Mairov were engaged in coinage,” says Mayorov’s friend and student Robert Gabitov. – Zverev also knew Artemiev and stopped him when he was in St. Petersburg. It was there that they met Mayorov. Zverev was amazed by the atmosphere in the workshop and decided to learn the art of chasing from Igor, but did not succeed. But Major seemed to have rediscovered the artist in himself. Signed.

Although the character of the Moscow joker showed up here too. Once Zverev came to Artemiev with a girl – one of those that Mayorov wrote in his series “Night butterflies of St. Petersburg.” Only, unlike the images of the romantic Petersburger, this “moth” was in decent condition, and her companion Anatoly Zverev was in the same stage of intoxication. “Word for word, the booze ended in a fight,” says Gabitov. After that brawl, which ended in the police, the Moscow artist did not visit Artemiev for some time, but in the 1980s he began to visit again. He quickly forgot such stories, because they happened to him regularly. And one of the most violent events took place here, in Tarusa.

Once Anatoly Zverev almost died on the banks of the Oka. In the summer of 1963, he came here together with Alexander Kharitonov and Dmitry Plavinsky, who almost bought a house here. There he worked rapidly, later Plavinsky recalled: “Armed with a shaving brush, a table knife, gouache and watercolor, he threw himself on a sheet of paper with a half-liter jar, doused paper, floor, chairs with dirty water, threw cans of gouache into a puddle, smeared it with a rag, or even with boots all this color nightmare, slapped on it with a shaving brush, drew two or three lines with a knife, and a fragrant bouquet of lilacs or a church, or the face of an old woman flashed outside the window appeared before our eyes. In the evenings, the artists walked along the banks of the Oka. Once they were standing on a hill, and suddenly someone pushed Plavinsky hard in the back. As a result, a serious fight ensued between the artists and two “local dudes”, as a result of which Zverev was struck in the head. “Later, in Sklif, an x-ray revealed three open fractures of the left arm and a dislocation of the shoulder joint,” Plavinsky recalled. The working right was saved because Zverev hid it behind his back during the brawl. Igor Mayorov also visited Tarusa, but much later. His wife Lyudmila Troynikova was a teacher of Russian language and literature, and Mayorov himself was a book reader and poet, so the “Russian Barbizon” attracted him with its creative atmosphere. It is no coincidence that many Tarusa heroes appeared on Mayorov’s watercolors, including Marina Tsvetaeva and Konstantin Paustovsky. These portraits will remain here – one in the Tsvetaeva Museum, the other – in the Paustovsky Museum.

– Mayorov loved Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and Okudzhava. Especially Anna Andreevna – Igor made many portraits of her. In addition, he was friends with Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilyov. Igor liked to listen to his lectures on ethnogenesis at St. Petersburg University, but Gumilyov also wrote excellent poetry, like Maiorov, so they agreed. In a sense, he is his student,” recalls Gabitov.

Pushkin, Yesenin, Gogol, Akhmatova – poetry at this detective exhibition comes to life in the faces. There are also aerial landscapes with churches, and touching cats with dogs, and popular cinema heroes like Chaplin. Despite Zverev’s expressiveness, the flying brush, it is clear that this is a different artist, who hardly doused his work with dirty water and definitely saw the world in more romantic and bright colors. The graceful manner makes Mayorov related to his heroes from the Golden and Silver Ages. And despite the fact that the artist was destined for a more difficult fate than Zverev. He was a famous joker, but he got away with everything. Mayorov was less lucky, he was imprisoned twice. The second time for standing up for a woman who was attacked by her former partner, an alcoholic with five convictions (he was released ahead of schedule – after 1.7 years). Mayorov’s works were bought up as briskly as Zverev’s, and he, too, was famously skipping everything. Igor Mayorov died at the age of 44, and Zverev lived to be 55. The genius of the Moscow artist was widely recognized after his death. Moreover, Mayorov’s works flaunt on some of Zverev’s catalogs, so in a sense he helped his comrade gain posthumous fame. Mayorov’s gift has not received such wide publicity, although his works are in many well-known collections – in the Louvre, in the Russian Museum, the Irish National Gallery, private collections of the Yevtushenko, Gagarin, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya families, Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin, Academician Likhachev, D. Granin , V. Tereshkova, Nikita Mikhalkov, Gina Lollobrigida, Paul McCartney, Yeltsin, Chirac, Gorbachev and Medvedev. The famous collector Georgy Mikhailov, in a conversation with the writer Daniil Granin, said: “Igor Mayorov is ten heads taller than Zverev: he, like an expensive foreign car, can pick up incredible speed, any technique is subject to him – painting, watercolor, chasing, enamel; cast bronze. Renaissance personality!