What the painting of Vyacheslav Zaitsev screams about: “I give all the pain to the paintings”

Yesterday, May 4, the famous couturier, who was called “Red Dior”, was taken on his last journey. Vyacheslav Zaitsev rested in the cemetery in Schelkovo, which is 20 km from his house in the village of Kablukovo. In recent years, the fashion designer, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, did not often get out of his three-story mansion, more like a museum. Zaitsev has been painting and drawing since 1990 and dreamed of creating his own museum. What he said with his works and whether his desire could come true, MK understood.

“I am an artist and an artist – originally.” That was the name of Vyacheslav Zaitsev’s exhibition in his small homeland in Ivanovo, which opened in 2017 at the local library. This quote. Vyacheslav Zaitsev has repeatedly said that he is not a fashion designer, but an artist. And he always enthusiastically talked about his work, which went beyond the fashion world and served as an outlet for him.

“My painting is impulsive, full of faces, images-symbols that are unexpected for me, replete with exits to the astral world, the surreal world, in which I find answers to questions that torment me, unspoken insults, disappointments, anxieties, emotional upheavals, unexpected actions; sometimes these are dreams realized in drawings, poems, sometimes visions in the night, ”he said.

Zaitsev began writing in 1990. “Then a new era began in my life – the Fashion House was established, a stable life began. Since then, all my pain, I give pictures. Is that why on my canvases all the faces are strange, suffering? For me, painting is the liberation of the soul,” said the couturier.

His characters really look strange and seem to suffer. Some are devoid of arms, others have several noses, others do not look like people at all. Most of the works are written in sad green and blue colors. They are influenced by Pablo Picasso. Such art was called “different” in Soviet times.

Zaitsev’s painting cannot be called an innovative breakthrough in the visual arts, but it accurately reflects his inner world. And she is not like the romantic images that he created for the catwalk. And different from graphics. If on canvas he painted his extraordinary creatures with smooth lines and as if in a dreamy haze, then in graphic drawings one can feel sharpness and angularity.

For the first time, the couturier showed his painting and graphic experiments to the public at two exhibitions in Belgium in 1993. Since then, his work has been shown many times at various art venues around the world. Works by Vyacheslav Zaitsev are in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Prado Museum (Madrid), the Gallery of Modern Art (Warsaw), as well as in private collections.

In 2021, his exhibition was held at the Moscow Museum “Collection”, which showed both his models and sketches, as well as paintings, poems and photographs. Yes, Zaitsev also wrote. The poetic talent in him was discovered after the death of his mother, when he was already over 40. Here is one of his poems:

I go into loneliness.

I open the door, I hurry

Light a heat-radiating lamp.

The stream of its rays hastens

Warm me up and comfort me.

But I know how hard it is.

It’s hard for me, it seems to be the same for others.

But the one, the other, the loneliness of my soul

It can only be understood externally.

Leave, I’ll be left alone again –

And all over again.

At that exhibition in 2021, Vyacheslav Zaitsev announced that he dreamed of opening a folk museum of his work and began fundraising. It seems that he furnished the Kablukovo house with the hope that his dream would come true. In fact, this is a ready-made exposition: the interiors are designed in three colors – white, red and black, which dominate the couturier style; mannequins are dressed in outfits that Zaitsev showed in museums; The walls are decorated with author’s paintings and photographs.

Last year, in honor of the 100th anniversary of Cartier, Vyacheslav Zaitsev arranged a sale of his paintings, painted during the days of the pandemic. Prices started from 600 thousand rubles, but not a single one was sold at that time. However, his graphic and pictorial works are sold on the art market.

So, in 2001, at Sotheby’s auction, a small pastel called “A Hat with Fruit, or an Erotic Nightmare” (48 * 63 cm) went under the hammer – for £ 6809 (that is, over 600 thousand rubles).

In 2009, an ink drawing of a nude was sold at MacDougall’s for £4,408. And from 2019 to 2021, several sales were recorded at various Russian auctions.

For example, a watercolor portrait of Alla Pugacheva (1980s) was sold for 10 thousand rubles, and a felt-tip pen drawing “Three Graces”, which depicts naked girls, sold for 22 thousand rubles. From the point of view of the art market, the prices are moderate.

Experts believe that the name of a well-known fashion designer played its part in sales, as sales were random and spontaneous. But who knows how things will turn out after the departure of the trendsetter from life: the art market is so arranged, after the death of the master, the prices for his works invariably grow.

And if the relatives competently manage his legacy, perhaps Vyacheslav Zaitsev’s dream will come true. While they are not ready to comment. At the funeral, neither son Yegor nor granddaughter Maria said a word to reporters.

However, Vyacheslav Zaitsev has already gone down in history – as an eminent fashion designer and original artist. He had his own vision of beauty, which was reflected in different ways by the facets of his talent. But all of Zaitsev’s creations are created with the utmost sincerity – be it the “Russian collection” of clothes, created in 1963, which became a protest against the dull Soviet fashion and was triumphantly shown in Paris 25 years later, or painting “with access to the astral world”.

Perhaps the time to discover a lesser known facet of Vyacheslav Mikhailovich’s work will still come.