Video: What "anti-Soviet" secret was kept all his life by the beloved illustrator-storyteller of the USSR: Yuri Vasnetsov
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The inhabitants of the house-house are setting the table, Lisa Patrikeevna rushes through the forests and hills, the rider on the Dymkovo horse gallops after the sun … The fabulous illustrations of Yuri Vasnetsov are familiar from childhood to each of us. It is impossible not to fall in love with them, it is impossible to take your eyes off them, and this world, so cozy and dear, fascinates once and for all. But during the artist's life, critics destroyed literally every of his work, and he himself miraculously escaped many tragic events …
Yuri Alekseevich Vasnetsov was related to two other Russian artists - Viktor Mikhailovich and Apollinary Mikhailovich Vasnetsov, but in the distant one. He was born in Vyatka, in 1900, in the family of a priest. In adulthood, he remembered how much he was influenced by the traditional crafts of the Vyatka province, bright and simple Dymkovo toys, carved platbands, the diversity of a folk holiday … In his youth he painted signs for local shops, at twenty-one he left his home and moved to Petrograd, dreaming of becoming a painter. At that time life was in full swing there, there were creative disputes, new art was created … The young artist soon became a student of the Petrograd state free art and educational workshops (later VKHUTEIN). Studying there was not easy for him - as the son of a priest, he always walked around the edge, and even had to publicly renounce "all ties with the clergy." In the future, the course in which Vasnetsov studied, completed his studies without defending a diploma. He devoted a year to teaching at the Leningrad school, and then fate brought him together with Kazimir Malevich.
Fairy-tale characters, Russian dalas, riders on Dymkovo horses and little hares with their fascinating life … Surprisingly, the creator of these slightly naive illustrations was a student of the father of Suprematism. It's been a fantastic two years. If studying at VKHUTEIN did not give Vasnetsov little, then Malevich's apprenticeship became a revelation for him. He rediscovered color, looked anew at the shape and texture of objects. And at the same time he got carried away with the study of folk, "organic" art.
In 1925, Yuri Vasnetsov came to work in the editorial office of children's literature at the State Publishing House - in the Singer house. He came there with his bosom friends, also artists - Evgeny Charushin, a native of Vyatka and later an outstanding animalist, and the future classic of the poster Valentin Kurdov, all in checkered socks, with a provincial dialect and snooty laughter … They worked there under the leadership of Samuil Marshak and Vladimir Lebedev.
Book illustration, surprisingly, did not immediately submit to Vasnetsov, and his first works were clumsy and awkward. But he soon found his own path. In the 1930s, the experimental style of "Detgiz" caused a flurry of accusations of "formalism." Lebedev lost his publishing house, although he remained a good friend to his wards, Vasnetsov's favorite teacher, Kazimir Malevich, was also arrested …
Yuri Vasnetsov himself managed to survive these difficult times and remain in demand as an artist, but a series of severe disappointments awaited him. He was entrusted with illustrating Ershov's The Little Humpbacked Horse - a dream for a man whose artistic language is based on the tradition of popular prints and folk ornamentation. He selflessly worked on this order, for the sake of it he mastered the technique of color lithography, but … the book never came out. All of his sketches were rejected, the stones for impressions destroyed. Then, out of despair, he almost broke off the engagement with his beloved woman …
Then everything worked out, he received more and more new orders, illustrated fairy tales, although he lived in constant anxiety, trying to find a balance between the requirements of leadership and creative expression. And yet, time after time, Vasnetsov, unwillingly, looked into the abyss. Once director Alexei Dikiy invited him as a set designer for the play "Bourgeois". Vasnetsov created a defiantly "philistine", hypertrophied vulgar stage interior … The reviews were sharply negative. Dikiy was arrested, and Vasnetsov no longer worked for the theater. The theater became his "underground" hobby. He made sketches of scenery, staged home performances. But not more.
He could not and did not want to take risks, his daughters were growing up (colleagues once jokingly portrayed Vasnetsov as a "nursing mother", sneering at his parental involvement).
And yet every time his cozy, warm illustrations full of enchanting details fell victim to endless edits … But Vasnetsov generally had a bad relationship with official, politicized art. During the war years, he was, among other artists, attracted to create postcards and posters depicting Soviet soldiers. And Vasnetsov … could not. I was just physically unable to draw what my soul was not in love with. While he was evacuated (he was able to send his wife and daughters to Perm even earlier), a bomb hit the house where the Vasnetsov family lived in Leningrad. And … by a miracle, his entire creative archive was preserved.
After the war, Vasnetsov plunged headlong into illustrating children's books, mainly Russian fairy tales. "White-sided magpie", "Teremok", "Ladushki" … Let envious people write that humanized animals of Vasnetsov "scare children", little readers could not tear themselves away from these picture books. Over time, he began to work with typefaces, drop caps and headings in his own recognizable manner.
In the life of the fabulous illustrator Yuri Vasnetsov, there was one and another big "anti-Soviet" secret. While still a young, but already well-known artist - a little over thirty - he created several paintings, where he combined popular prints and techniques of European modernism. During his lifetime, such artistic experiments of Vasnetsov were not exhibited anywhere. He, a student of Malevich, could not and did not want to create according to the laws of socialist realism - but, having repeatedly faced devastating criticism and poisonous pamphlets, he concealed what he was writing. Only at the end of the 70s, after the artist's death, Vasnetsov's primitivist works saw the light of day.
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