Far more so, I believe, than in literature, Moscow at this time was particularly rich in the visual arts, and I was fortunate to be able to see a variety of new work and various related activity. I was most pleased, for example, by a visit to an art auction preview, though it was a rather anemic affair by Western standards, held in an ugly, mostly vacant light-industrial space down by the river that bore the same name relationship to the London and New York sale rooms as the dreariest Moscow café bears to a four-star restaurant. But it was rewarding in a number of ways. Although without doubt much of Russia’s movable past—books, pictures, antiques, and the like—was destroyed during successive revolutions and wars, it was probably not subjected to a deliberate policy of mass destruction except briefly when the Bolsheviks took power (quite a different situation from China’s during the days of the Red Guards). Rather, it simply became irrelevant; Lenin’s mission after all was to build a new world; new was the operative word. That the export of all art and antiquities of the remotest consequence was prohibited for so many decades contributed to the strength of the pool, as did the low level of disposable income. Now, in the secondhand bookshops, and not just those found among the upscale souvenir places in the Arbat, the European custom of selling old books under the same roof as pictures and prints seemed to be creating some bargains for collectors. Nothing of great importance in the art-historical sense, perhaps, but plenty of attic clutter from late tsarist times, which in shop windows or in the auction preview I mentioned hung side by side with minor contemporary work—not amateur but not really professional either—from which it was often indistinguishable in terms of manner.
This is an important point, it seems to me: the sheer force of accumulated tradition is a question young artists there must come to terms with. The response that painters and sculptors formulate is one of the many factors that determine whether they will be official artists or avant-garde ones. The former term did not change its meaning much under perestroika; such artists are not like those in the Stalin era, working on huge murals of heroic workers marching behind tractors, but they did resemble the social realists of old in that they were members of the U.S.S.R. Artists’ Guild or a similar body. Avant-garde takes a little more defining, and I was lucky in having a skilled explainer who could also get me inside studios representative of the two types of artists.
Maria Pustukhova, 26, was born in the closed city of Vladivostok in the Far East when her mother was the first woman in local television there; her father was a creative writer who then became a journalist with Pravda, which brought the family to Moscow when Maria was 12. Shopping trips to Prague helped her to cultivate the Western appearance admired by Soviet young people, at least of those in the big cities, but her look was altogether more stylish than the usual blue jeans and Reeboks. She was an art critic and art historian. “I live for the avant-garde,” she told me as a plain statement of fact, without any of the faux-drama such phrases carry in English. She and I scampered along to a small street behind Starokonyushenny Lane, where the Canadian embassy is located, to the two-room basement apartment that Alexei Mironov used as his sculpture studio. The space, quite separate from the flat where he lived, in another part of the city, was crammed with works in stone, clay, wood, plaster, and various metals. Sometimes a painter friend used the space as well, and as we descended the dark steps we caught the faint smell of turps, which all studio-hounds love, whether they admit it or not.
Mironov, not yet 30, got a sound start. Both his parents were recognized artists, and he graduated from the Stroganov College of Industrial Design when he was 22. For monumental works he sometimes employed assistants, in the traditional manner. Maria told me going in, “He is very rich for an artist”—to the extent that he owned an automobile, or did until quite recently. By Soviet standards he was richer in experience: he had been to the West. He was represented in several public collections in the Soviet Union and in private ones there and elsewhere. In the past couple of years he had been able to accept invitations to visit Britain—first Glasgow, then London—where he had pieces in group exhibitions.
I noticed that like many of the young artists whose work I saw, Mironov used quite a lot of found materials (one exhibition of kinetic Rube Goldberg-like structures included a room-size contraption that incorporated everything from hand saws to skis to an old pram). I was bound to ask whether this element was part of his aesthetic or indicated that the flow of normal supplies was tenuous. “Not problem getting what I need,” he replied. “I deal with, you know, Soviet robbers.” He laughed, but I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, for he was a nervously gregarious fellow. Later he played Russian folk songs on his guitar and poured brandies all round and offered slices of what I first took to be a piece of wood, for it looked like a carpenter’s leavings, but turned out to be an Armenian meat, spiced within an inch of its life—and of ours.
What impressed me about Mironov’s work was not only its range but its range of sincerity. Maybe intensity is a better word. His painted wooden figures of contemporary everyman and everywoman, often with right angles redesigning the human form and commenting perhaps on the angularity of big-city existence, struck me as the most deeply felt, followed by some very personal pieces in stone or wood, such as a torso of his wife when she was pregnant with their son, who was now three. But the same person could also commit an enormous plaster bust of Peter the Great, of the sort appropriate to a schoolroom long ago—not as one of his many lucrative commissions but totally self-assigned. The spectrum was so broad, East to West, contemporary to traditional, that it was almost a kind of doubt. Mironov couldn’t be more different from Harry Vinogradov, a true underground and decidedly unofficial artist who, for reasons that did not quite survive the translation process, signed himself Bicapo.
At 32 he was of the same generation as Mironov. His great-grandfather was a famous St. Petersburg mystic and faith healer, who was sent to Siberia where in 1937 he was killed. Vinogradov/Bicapo carried on some of the same fascination with the idea that madness was sometimes connected to saintliness, a proposition that runs deep in Russian culture. “All people have to do rituals,” he said, “to help them to re-establish relations with nature.” His head was shaven, like a penitent’s or a prisoner’s rather than like a skinhead’s, and he affected unusual modes of dress. One day, he recalled, he was wearing a scarf over his head with a hat jammed down over top of that, and a police officer took him to task, saying, “You’ll never be another Marc Chagall unless you have a proper smoking suit.” The cop didn’t know that at that moment Bicapo was naked under his coat.
He studied architecture, found work as a draughtsman, but gave it up “because it was an impossibility for one of my temperament—I prefer the status of a free artist.” A number of Soviet painters found the term free artist useful. It suggested people who were not direct descendants of the old avant-linegarde of 1910—30, of the Kandinskys, Komardenkovs, and Konstamntinovs who paralleled the modernists in the West, but rather of the artists whose work, in one especially notorious incident, was ordered destroyed by Khrushchev in 1962—an entire group show ground up by bulldozers.
The point was not necessarily that Bicapo worked in art forms that the state did not recognize.