The Scarlet Flower
In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had a spring in its collectivised step. Censorship had softened; premier Nikita Krushchev had encouraged a scintilla of freedom by permitting cultural exchanges with the west. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin created a galvanising upsurge in national pride by becoming the first man to reach space.
Into this relatively tractable atmosphere stepped the London gallerist Eric Estorick, an avid collector of modern Italian art, who was hoping to reconnect with the culture his Jewish parents had left behind in 1905 when they emigrated to the US. Visiting Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1960, he met the artist Anatoli Kaplan, who introduced him to a group of talented friends known as the Leningrad Experimental Graphics Laboratory (LEGL), the graphics section of the state-run Union of Artists.
So impressed was Estorick that he bought hundreds of their works — some for as little as nine roubles each — and staged an exhibition in May 1961 of paintings by 27 of them in his new Grosvenor Gallery back home. For the first time since the Russian Revolution, western art lovers were able to see contemporary art from the USSR — and, perhaps more telling, discover works that defied the glum stereotype of Socialist Realism. Instead, the art historian Nikolai Kononikhin has written, “they found an unexpected vitality and humanity free from ideological cliché”.
Lithography from Leningrad, currently at London’s Estorick Collection, is a small but perfectly focused display of works by 15 of the artists who featured in the original show — the first time they have been exhibited together in the UK since the 1960s. The catalogue gives a wider insight into their work, with many more examples of paintings by the artists who strove together, elbow to elbow, in a scruffy basement cluttered with easels, presses and the stones used for printing. It was, wrote the Leningrad poet Lev Mochalov, “an island of the blessed”. (A comprehensive exhibition of their work will be held in St Petersburg next November.)
Kaplan already had a reputation for designing posters and illustrating books. His work is characterised by his atmospheric black-and-white lithographs of Jewish life. Here, we see “Summer Garden”, a poetic, rather wistful scene of a boy pulling another on a sled beside railings and a foreboding urn-shaped tomb. Estorick snapped Kaplan up for a solo show later in 1961, which was so successful that The Burlington Magazine was moved to declare: “They are so brilliantly good that in comparison Chagall seems like a sloppy amateur.”
If Kaplan was the best known of the collective, Boris Ermolaev was the father figure — “like a holy elder”, declared fellow artist Valentin Kurdov — to whom many turned for help and encouragement. Like Kaplan, Ermolaev stayed true to his roots throughout his career, rarely deviating from charming, stylised scenes of peasant life represented in simple primary colours — images of a stone mason, women doing embroidery or resting from their labours during the harvest. They capture a Russian world that was disappearing even then.
As the 1960s progressed and the effects of the second world war and the Stalin era diminished, awareness of the outside world within Russia grew — particularly in the arts scene. Books and journals slipped past the censors containing revelations of European movements such as Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, which brought a dose of modernism into the folk art traditions the Laboratory embraced.
Among the most significant influences were Matisse and his contemporary the French Fauvist-cum-Naturalist Albert Marquet, as the vivacious still lifes of Aleksandr Vedernikov and Mikhail Sculyari testify. In the words of Aleksandra Yakobson, the ferment of creativity in the Leningrad basement amounted to “a hotbed of free thinking”.
Yakobson herself produced a series of engaging images, such as the child we see in “The Scarlet Flower”, pink-cheeked and artless, about to inhale the perfume of the blossom. She also portrayed cheery family groups, a drunken musician being bundled home and a nude emerging from the bath looking clean and wholesome.
The work of Vera Matyukh, one of many women who were part of the collective, is altogether bolder both in subject and style. Her images depict women in urban settings and as independent as she was, such as the spirited “Petrol Station Queen” or the magenta-lipped “Mother”.
Having survived the blockade of Leningrad with a newborn baby in her arms, Matyukh was evacuated to Kazan in south-west Russia before moving back to Leningrad at the end of the war, where she joined the LEGL. “I remember it all with joy,” she wrote. “Besides art, which was the most important, there was a lot of joyfulness, dancing, skiing trips and excursions. All this was part of the life.”
Given state strictures, Soviet artists were required to take inspiration from their own heritage and immediate surroundings. Yet one artist, Gerta Nemenova, was allowed to study art in Paris where she had classes with Fernand Léger and met the pioneering avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova, who had moved there from Russia before the 1917 Revolution. Nemenova developed a style that was quite different from the others; her sketches of writers and actors, mostly in black and white, are done with expressive and deceptively simple strokes, which captured her subjects with a forceful immediacy.
Only one artist featured here, Grigor Israilevich, rocked the political boat. His sinister image“Owl and Hourglass” is part of a series about time slipping away, but he also painted a fierce monochrome series entitled “Rhinoceros”, inspired by the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 satire on fascism and mob mentality.
Israilevich, who died in 1999, was also the only one who ventured into abstract art, with angry, expressionist works attacking the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.The Union of Artists was finally disbanded in 1992, the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the LEGL was closed. By then, most of the group had died or moved on. The island of the blessed was no more.
Lithography from Leningrad: Eric Estorick’s Adventure in Soviet Art is at the Estorick Collection, London, until December 22
