Theater of one painter – Newspaper Kommersant No. 146 (7347) dated 08/12/2022

The famous Russian artist, academician of the Russian Academy of Arts Natalia Nesterova died at the age of 78 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York after a severe and prolonged lung disease at the age of 78.

When the New York publisher decided in the late 1990s to compile an album of Natalia Nesterova’s works Reflections of Lost Time, he spent 12 years looking for them in private collections and museums around the world. This says a lot about popularity, although hardly anyone could have suspected such success in the 1960s, when Nesterova began her professional career.

She was born into a family of Moscow architects, spent her childhood in a house in Lavrsky Lane on Samoteka and was the granddaughter of an artist – not the famous Mikhail Nesterov, but Nikolai Nesterov, a student of Apollinary Vasnetsov, Konstantin Korovin and Leonid Pasternak. The world of art, in which Nesterova was immersed from childhood, determined both her consciousness – she considered herself a student of her grandfather, whose works hung in the house, and her biography – Nesterova studied first at the art school at the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute, and then at the institute itself from Dmitry Zhilinsky.

She was touched by everyday scenes – cafes, metro, parks with their carousels, cyclists and birds rushing after them, simple holidays, life as such. Her gaze was devoid of a satirical squint, movement gave way to statuary, but the shift in reality seemed obvious.

Some unexpected carnivalism reigned in that City, which Nesterova was constantly writing.

Her pasty and at the same time Cezanne-inspired painting at first developed in the spirit of commedia dell’arte in the Soviet style, trying to hide from ideological pressure with irony and references to the immortals: quotations from the classics, the Renaissance and Baroque, references to Magritte and surrealism, well-known to the inhabitants of the capital from Western albums, and no socialist heroism, Komsomol construction projects and pathos of the editorials of the Pravda newspaper. So the two biblical cycles created in the 1990s and 2000s do not look like an apology to their own past, but the next step towards the world.

From literature, according to Nesterova herself, she refused, while her painting is very scenic and even cinematic, sometimes the works look like ready-made scenery for a script that has not yet been fully written, the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bwhich nevertheless has already completely formed in the author’s head.

It is no coincidence that, since the beginning of perestroika, she spent most of her time in America, and already in the 1990s she became a professor at the department of scenography at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts. Prior to this, there was no official recognition: yes, she was admitted to the Union of Artists early, at the age of 25, many considered this an unacceptable gift, but then there was silence. The only solo exhibition, in 1974 at the Moscow House of Artists on Kuznetsky Most, turned out to be one-day. All major awards, from the State Prize to the Triumph Prize, including the title of Honored Artist of the Russian Federation, belong to the post-perestroika era – it was probably convenient for the new government to accept a mixture of artistic dialects that it understood as new art.

Not every bird is a Hitchcock reference; not all figurativeness is necessarily a polemic with abstraction. What in Russia seems like a classic – and Nesterova is, of course, a classic in our country, in the Tretyakov Gallery alone there are fifty of her works – for Europe looks like a belated echo of the “Paris school” of the 1930s. But this was the sad, if not to say vile, paradox of the time: socialist realism stopped the free development of art, the Procrustean bed forcibly imposed not even from above, but from somewhere on the side and an ideology completely unusual for painting gave rise to a difficultly surmountable lag of Russian artistic life from the world context.

The unnatural situation “we will go our own way” has led to the emergence of original works that are difficult to fit into the general history of art, their interpretations turn out to be so diametrically opposed. But they also have something in common, uniting cultures and its languages.

As critic Igor Shevelev wrote about Nesterova, “her world is cruel and hopeless, regardless of whose power is in the yard.

It’s just the way the world works… Life is a showcase, and the people in it are mannequins. The truth is not new, it is important how it is said, written, lived.

Alexey Mokrousov