Video: How creativity brought the prisoner of the GULAG back to life: Kind watercolors by Maria Myslina
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
In the watercolors of Maria Myslina, there is a cozy Soviet everyday life. Here people rush to work, hiding under umbrellas from the pouring rain, here friends, like antique statues, froze at the water's edge, but a multicolored crowd of children poured out for a walk from the door of the kindergarten … And many of us still remember the wonderful postcards created artist. But few people know that these beautiful works were preceded by years of loss and pain. The years of the GULAG …
Not much is known about Myslina's life before the labor camps. She was born in 1901 in Moscow, presumably in a family of peasants who moved to the city. It is known that Myslina studied with famous Russian artists - Konstantin Korovin, who even painted her portrait, Ilya Mashkov, Ilya Leblanc. At the age of twenty, she entered VKHUTEMAS, although she studied there for a rather short time. Scattered references to the life of Myslina allow us to see that she was very active creatively and took on any interesting work. In the mid-1920s, Myslina moved in the circles of avant-garde-minded youth, supported the ideas of the AHRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia), and took part in their exhibitions. She has worked with many publications as an illustrator, decorated clubs and holiday demonstrations …
She married artist Vladimir Kaabak, famous for his propaganda posters, a participant in the Civil War. During the years of the revolution, Kaabak was close to the Left Social Revolutionaries, but in the first years of Soviet power he worked actively and successfully, drew propaganda illustrations, advertising signs and cinematic posters … Maria, together with her husband, lovingly arranged a completely unusable room in the workshop, they were related by common ideas and plans, common hobbies and love for art. It all ended in 1937. Overnight.
Vladimir Kaabak was arrested and soon shot. Maria Myslina was repressed as the wife of a traitor to her homeland and sentenced to eight years in forced labor camps with subsequent disqualification. The young woman ended up in one of the GULAG departments, Karlag (Karaganda region) at the Dolinka camp, and then in ALZHIR - the Akmola camp of the wives of traitors to the Motherland.
In Karlag, the artist worked at a textile factory and in an embroidery workshop, but at any free moment she took up a pencil and drew, painted, painted … Her sketches are a cruel and honest report on the life of the camp's inhabitants. A virtuoso line, a clear and confident stroke, vivid imagery - and behind all this, swollen joints of the fingers, pain, fear, melancholy. But the look of a modern person does not immediately see in her sketches the gloom of the camp life - with such warmth and love the artist paints the concentrated and tired faces of women. And there was life - together with another convicted artist Maria Myslina, she designed amateur performances at the club, made friends …
Myslina left Karlag in 1946. For another nine years, she had no right to return to the city of childhood. At first, she ended up in a settlement in Chuvashia and even joined the regional union of artists there, then, due to the ban on living in large cities, she moved to Vladimir. After the XX Congress of the CPSU, Maria Myslina was officially rehabilitated. After rehabilitation in 1955, Myslina nevertheless returned to Moscow, but her life never returned to its former course. Somewhere old friends disappeared, the workshop, lovingly cared for with her husband, was also lost…. The artist lived with her mother, in a tiny nook, where she had no room even for an easel. She wrote applications to the board of the Union of Artists with a request to provide her with a workshop, at least some opportunity to work, but to no avail. She understood that only a return to painting would truly revive her soul after those painful years. This is how Myslina's path began as a watercolorist.
Watercolor did not require a lot of space or expensive materials, but it was necessary to live on something. The works of Maria Myslina of those years seem to be created on a whim, instantly, under the impression of nature, but colleagues recall that these watercolors were always preceded by many precise, scrupulous pencil sketches. She painted landscapes, still lifes and bouquets of flowers, city views - but Myslina's best success was genre street scenes.
The artist did not withdraw into herself, did not hold any grudge against anyone. She took part in exhibitions with great pleasure, became famous as an animal painter, illustrated children's books - perhaps some of us still have editions with her illustrations. She went on trips whenever possible, and most of all she loved Goryachy Klyuch in the Krasnodar Territory. The artist even drew holiday cards - this genre was usually treated by easel painters with a certain degree of contempt, and Myslina, with her amazing sense of composition and color, created real little masterpieces.
She had only two desires - peace and creativity. And “the desire to serve the people with art,” but not in the way the leaders of the Union of Artists understood it. What Myslina was doing was unprincipled, as if petty - but in this charming everyday life, routine, there was all the pain and all the love of a person who asserts his right to a normal life.
In the last years of her life, the lonely artist was seriously ill and was bedridden. Years of hardship undermined her health, but the love of life did not leave her until the last day. In 1974, Maria Myslina died. She is buried at the Vvedenskoye cemetery. Posters by Vladimir Kaabak are kept in several museums in Russia and private collections around the world, but Myslina's small personal fund is now practically inaccessible to researchers, although not so long ago, some of the artist's works were presented to the audience. Maria Myslina may not have made a significant contribution to Soviet art from an artistic point of view - but as a person she did much more. She showed how important it is in the darkest days to remain who you are …
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