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Video: Sergey Kalmykov: Why the last Russian avant-garde artist was considered an urban madman
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The popular opinion, according to which every genius is a little crazy, in relation to Sergei Ivanovich Kalmykov takes on special significance. The history of this artist, who managed not only to survive in the era of repression, but also to continue the traditions of the Russian avant-garde, proves: there are times when madness turns out to be the highest form of wisdom.
Young man on a red horse
Although Sergei was born in 1891 in Samarkand, his first impressions are associated with Orenburg, where the family soon moved. There Kalmykov graduated from high school and, making sure that provincial life leaves little chance for self-realization, he gave up first to Moscow, where he studied for some time in Yuon's studio, and then to Petersburg.
Petersburg in the 1910s. a unique creative environment was formed, in which such masters of the brush as Dobuzhinsky, Petrov-Vodkin, Bakst worked at the same time. An aspiring artist gets to know them at the Zvantseva art school and is fond of the ideas of avant-garde art. Very soon he finds his own style, his ideas and enters the circle of avant-garde artists as an equal. Moreover: Sergei's work begins to influence his teachers. It is believed that the famous Bathing of the Red Horse (1912) is doubly indebted to Kalmykov: Petrov-Vodkin not only portrayed him as a young man on a red horse, but was also inspired by Sergei's painting Red Horses, painted a year earlier.
By 1917 Kalmykov became one of the most promising representatives of the Russian avant-garde. He was considered as such after the revolution - in that short period when the Soviet government considered it permissible to deviate from realism in painting and even patronized the same Malevich. But the favorable period did not last long.
Return to Central Asia
Even in his youth, friends considered Sergei a man living on his own wave. Paradoxically, this detachment from this world allowed Kalmykov to feel what was hidden from others, to notice the slightest changes in the social atmosphere, to anticipate and foresee. In 1926, on the eve of the first wave of persecutions against the "former", he left Leningrad for good, saving himself from many problems. Kalmykov returns to the city of his childhood - Orenburg, where for the time being the censorship does not pay unkind attention to the strange world of his paintings, far from revolutionary ideas.
In Orenburg Kalmykov fruitfully worked for 9 years: he painted pictures, made sketches of theatrical costumes and scenery. But little by little the screws are beginning to tighten here too: every now and then there are remarks that Kalmykov's paintings are incomprehensible to Soviet people, and there is no realism in them. The artist did not wait until he was interested not only by critics, but also by the relevant authorities, and moved again.
This time Kalmykov returned to where he was born - to Central Asia. From 1935 until his death in 1967, he lived without a break in Alma-Ata, where he worked for many years as a decorator at the Opera and Ballet Theater. There he created a huge number of works - about one and a half thousand. Modern art critics define their style as a combination of expressionism and surrealism, although many researchers believe that the late Kalmykov cannot be counted among any artistic movement - his work is unique.
City crazy
Looking at Kalmykov's paintings with their fantastically bright colors and mysterious subjects, it is difficult to imagine that they were created in the era of socialist realism. But in Alma-Ata, the attitude towards surrealism or avant-garde was simpler than in Moscow, also because the local creative elite had a vague idea of what it was. However, the main means of salvation for the last Russian avant-garde artist was the mask of a madman who he voluntarily put on.
Well aware of the very special attitude towards the holy fools inherent in Central Asia, the former representative of the Petersburg bohemia appeared before the townspeople in a characteristic image. He wore a raincoat, to which were attached cans, a yellow frock coat, multi-colored pants, a scarlet peakless cap, and he himself invented and sewed his own bright outfits. Every day he went out and painted, but he never sold his works, preferring to give them away. In his one-room apartment, instead of furniture, there were stacks of newspapers, and the artist ate only bread, milk and vegetables.
Exotic appearance and eccentric behavior did not prevent Kalmykov from doing his job as a decorator perfectly: he was even awarded a medal for valiant labor. But everyone considered him to be something like a city madman, but what is the demand for a madman? And therefore, all the repressions of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the persecution of the abstract artists of the Khrushchev era, bypassed Kalmykov. He managed to preserve absolute freedom of spirit and creativity, participated in exhibitions, lived an intense spiritual life.
However, the line of conduct chosen by Kalmykov had a downside. All his life the artist lived in monstrous poverty, and his pension was only 53 rubles. He was deprived of the joy of communication with creative like-minded people, did not have a family. And yet the "madman of Alma-Ata" was happy in his own way, and his work, having survived a period of oblivion, returned to the people and was recognized as one of the heights of the Russian avant-garde.
Entered the history of painting and another avant-gardist - Vsevolod Meyerhold, who did not fit into Soviet ideology.
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