The philosopher artist who paints the passing time: Soviet American Yuri Cooper

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

Opening to our reader new names of painting masters, we would certainly like to turn to the work of a contemporary artist with an amazing destiny. Yuri Cooper, an internationally recognized artist of the sixties, even encyclopedic sources are presented with an incredible phrase - Soviet-Russian-American artist … As a painter and graphic artist, he is also noted in the same encyclopedic data as a set designer, sculptor, architect, designer … And in addition, Cooper is known to many as an outstanding writer with philosophical thinking.

Yuri Cooper (by birth Kuperman), at 79, impresses the viewer with canvases filled with intelligence, thought and charm. His works make you contemplate, think and hear. It was with this that the artist won worldwide recognition in his time. Today, in the art market, his work is in great demand, the cost of his work is sometimes simply exorbitant. I would like to say that most of them are kept in prestigious galleries and museums around the world from the Tretyakov Gallery to the New York Metropolitan. This is probably why Yuri Cooper is called the artist of the world and, therefore, the public receives so warmly his works, which are regularly exhibited in museums and galleries in New York and Paris, London and Geneva, Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as many other cities.

And so it all began …

And in Moscow, in the distant 60s, the artist was known as Yura Kuperman. Born a year before the war, in 1940, in the family of a musician and copyist. In childhood and adolescence, the boy was left to himself. His father died during the Patriotic War, and his mother, having received a funeral, was actively engaged in arranging her personal life. The son was raised by a street and a communal apartment, where almost only criminals lived. From a young age, Yurka and his hooligan friends drank vodka in the alleyways and played football. Such a dysfunctional habitat did not even predispose to the fact that young Kuperman would be able to escape from her clutches.

However, after graduating from school, when Kuperman faced a choice - where to go to study, he followed his classmate, who decided to enter Stroganovka. And if you consider that the friends did not even have an elementary concept of drawing, let alone painting, they were not even allowed to take the exams. And what is curious, the classmate quickly found a new goal for himself, but Kuperman literally got hung up on the idea of becoming an artist. Having shown extraordinary determination, the young man was preparing for admission with perseverance for a whole year. He even took lessons from a professional artist, who at one time was a student of Pavel Chistyakov himself. Surely even then the teacher was able to discern great inclinations in him. And the next year the young man became a student, and in 1963 he graduated from an art school.

Having emigrated from the Union in 1972, Kuperman discovered the whole world for himself. And in what countries did the artist's life not throw: Israel, France, USA, England for many years became his haven. There he created his canvases and created his name. But with his heart and soul, he always strove to Russia.

And more recently, in 2016, the artist was granted Russian citizenship, since then he has been living in his homeland, continuing to work fruitfully. His creative ideas in the field of theater and painting, architecture and design, as well as literature are inexhaustible as before. And, despite his venerable years, Yuri Leonidovich keeps up with the times and with incredible ability to work puts his ideas into practice.

A little about creativity

The artist, working in different techniques and genres and using material with a complex texture, has created his unique "visiting card", which is a pictorial installation with extremely simple objects. It can be rusty metal, old plywood, canvas, paper, ordinary paint brushes and old artifacts picked up by the artist and transformed in the process of his work into unique objects of art that seem to the viewer frozen in some kind of timelessness.

And the first thing the audience associates with,

However, in parallel with this, there is a feeling that the old household items that have served their time, faded and worn out under the brush of the master suddenly found a new life and began to speak for themselves. The succession of generations played a significant role in such a striking respect of the artist for old and decrepit things that have history. His grandfather was a junk dealer, and apparently that is why the artist still loves to wander around the markets and buy old objects with history, which he transforms into works of art. At the same time, the color scheme is muted, gloomy and very dull, as for painting:

I would like to pay special attention to the background space of the artist's canvases. The background of each work is like a map of time, along which one can wander, examining the picture plane centimeter by centimeter. And each time, finding more and more new islands of memory, a new echo of temporary space.

And I would also like to note that in his works, Yuri Cooper does not just recreate the world of things covered with the patina of time, he seems to be exploring time itself and human existence, introducing his viewer to this. Although, you must admit, it is not at all easy to interest the modern public with ordinary, old things. But Cooper did one hundred percent. And it is not for nothing that his works enjoy significant success with world-class collectors.

What is noteworthy, the unique style of the master, to a greater extent manifests itself in the interest in decomposed matter, to the fact that it was exposed for a long time "to the influence of rain, wind, and the burning sun, to that which put a trace of patina on objects". It is such an unusual colorful material that Cooper uses in his work, modifying them with light and shadow.

The artist was never attracted by a pure painting plane, he was always inspired by a space that can tell a lot. And it should be noted that the master did not come up with this style himself, he borrowed his idea from a new trend in the middle of the last century, which was widespread at that time in Italy. Arte Povera - "poor art" was subordinated to the rejection of the traditional idea of painting, which was successfully embodied in his work by the master from Russia.

"Intellectual artist of a world scale" - so they say now about Yuri Cooper, recognized both in Europe and in the United States as a talented artist of the sixties. I would like to note that during the 50-year career in many countries of the world, about 60 personal exhibitions of the brilliant master have been organized and held.

A few words about the personal life of the master

And finally, I would like to touch upon the personal life of the master. Yuri Cooper has always been in the spotlight for women. And at one time he was even married to a fashion model Mila Romanovskaya. However, there were many novels with successful and famous, including with the French film actress Catherine Deneuve. However, the artist remained lonely, no longer daring to start a family. And this is also his philosophy of life.

Unlike Cooper, many artists of that time lived and worked in the Soviet Union, creating brilliant canvases where life was in full swing. Colorfulness, lightness - these are the distinguishing features of these works: Moscow and Muscovites on the canvases of the impressionist of the era of socialist realism Yuri Pimenov.