The main artist of our childhood: Why Tatyana Mavrina's illustrations were not taken to print for many years

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

More than one generation of children of the Soviet era grew up on illustrated books of the famous Russian artist Tatyana Mavrina, which experts put on a par with Vasnetsov, Bilibin and Polenova. She was the only Russian illustrator of children's books to be awarded the prestigious international Andersen Prize, which has been awarded to the best illustrators around the world since 1956.

Tatyana Mavrina, a famous illustrator and graphic artist, winner of the USSR State Prize (1975) and the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1981), as well as the most important award, the Andersen Prize (1976), was considered an informal artist. Therefore, despite her talent and recognition, the artist's works did not make it into the official catalogs of Soviet painting. Probably, the officials considered that the style of Mavrina's naive art was too bright and euphoric for the gray Soviet reality.

Nevertheless, her works were inspired not only by images from Russian naive art, but also from verbal folklore, traditional regional crafts based on the principles of folk crafts - from deliberately "simple" to finely worked out illustrations.

Throughout her creative career, the artist, whose drawings are familiar to many almost from the cradle, illustrated more than 200 children's books and went down in Russian history as the brightest master of the twentieth century, who lived a difficult but happy life.

About the artist

Tatyana Lebedeva was born in 1902 in Nizhny Novgorod in the family of the writer Alexei Lebedev and the hereditary noblewoman Anastasia Mavrina, where a fascination with literature and Russian antiquity was a natural daily routine. The atmosphere in the Lebedev family was practically exemplary. Intelligent, well-read parents and four cute, drawing, playing music. At home, news of culture and society was discussed, poetry was read aloud. Parents in those years were passionate about collecting items of primordially Russian folk crafts. And the children "published" their own home magazine. They themselves wrote poems and stories, illustrated them themselves. Some of the children's drawings of the future artist of those times have survived to our time.

When the Lebedevs moved to Moscow after the revolution, Tanya entered to study at VKHUTEMAS - the best of the country's art universities at that time. Then these workshops were not yet legendary, but students and teachers already felt that they were creating new art, creating "tomorrow" of Soviet painting and sculpture. Everyone burned creatively, brought their ideas, argued, tried, searched … These wonderful workshops forever remained in Tatyana Alekseevna's memory as the brightest pages of her life.

Her teachers and mentors at VKHUTEMAS were the masters who shaped the Russian artistic culture of the first decades of the twentieth century: avant-garde artists Nikolai Sinezubov and Robert Falk. These masters were able not only to teach the profession of their students, but also to preserve their own handwriting, to develop an individual style.

Creation

Already in the late 1920s, 27-year-old Mavrina became a member of the Thirteen Association, whose members did not make loud statements and manifestos, but solved direct artistic problems through plastic art. - these were the basic principles of this group. The artist carried them through all her work.

In the 1930s, Tatyana Mavrina began to work on illustrations for children's publications in the popular popular print style. It was at that time that she began to use her mother's maiden name, Mavrina, as a pseudonym. The artist was not afraid to take the noble surname of her ancestors in the dashing 30s, thereby throwing a challenge not only to the system, but also protesting socialist realism with her extraordinary creativity.

In 1942, Tatiana married Nikolai Kuzmin, with whom she was once a member of the artists' association "Thirteen". Nikolai Vasilievich was a Soviet graphic artist, an illustrator of works of Russian and foreign classical literature, a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR. It should be noted that this union turned out to be quite happy. The husband supported his soul mate in everything, despite the fact that the work of Tatyana Alekseevna was often criticized for "otherness". The main artists of the state publishing houses were very reluctant to sign the Mavrin books for printing. It was almost always separated by an invisible wall from official Soviet art.

Despite all the troubles and persecutions, Tatyana Alekseevna continued to write in her characteristic manner - bright and open, close to primitivism, ancient Russian and folk art. Her graphics have always been fabulous, intricately patterned, folklore, saturated with euphoria. The world around her aroused genuine interest in Mavrina, with which she generously shared with her audience. And the whole nation, so familiar to her from her Nizhny Novgorod childhood: with spinning wheels, chests and painted rockers, was embodied in her drawings.

Creating illustrations, Tatyana Mavrina continued to work on urban Moscow landscapes. She also endlessly traveled to small provincial cities, bringing from trips not only impressions, but also her unpretentious painting: - the artist wrote in her memoirs.

Creating entire albums on creative trips, Mavrina captured not only the architecture of small towns and old Russian villages, but also the fate of their inhabitants - people and animals. Exhausted by everyday life women, drunks who exchange glass containers for beer, blue crows and purple magpies screaming over all this provincial disgrace - in a word, the hopeless life of ordinary people. By the way, the drawings made during travels to Russian cities aroused great interest and were rightfully considered a part of Russian art of the 70s and 80s.

Confession

Now Mavrina is known and appreciated as an artist who embodied in her work many principles of Russian folk art, which she knew and loved so well. Russian icon painting, popular prints, embroidery, clay toys were of interest to her not only as collectibles, but also as examples of high artistic folk culture, a living language to which she turned in her work.

The famous style of the artist - deliberately simple, "for the people" - only in the sixties became acceptable for Soviet book publishers. And her illustrations for children's books and Russian fairy tales in this style were finally allowed to print. And since in the seventies the ethnos and other nationalities became firmly in fashion, officials and critics finally looked at Mavrina's drawings with the same eyes that her husband Nikolai Vasilyevich had been looking at for decades. Finally, they liked the Mavrin horses, sleighs, wolves, birds and cats and cats adored by the artist.

P. S. I would like to note once again that it was precisely for this “otherness” of her in her work that Tatyana Alekseevna was awarded the international prize named after G.-Kh. Andersen in 1976. For a very long time she remained the only Russian children's book artist to receive this prestigious award in the field of book graphics. And only 42 years later, in 2018, such an honor fell to another Russian illustrator - Igor Oleinikov, whose work the reader will be able to get acquainted with in our next publication.

For lovers of the Russian avant-garde, we suggest reading the publication: Refined avant-garde artist Robert Falk: 4 muses, unnecessary Paris and later recognition at home.