New Russian Art
Andrei Karpov’s Self-Portrait, which almost fills the frame with the painter’s figure, has a combined sensuality and ethereality reminiscent of Russian icon painting but also includes other, more “modern” elements. The painter’s figure is round and plump, Botero-like (though a nearby photograph shows him as thin). And in the tradition of many female nudes, he’s seen reclining luxuriously with a cigarette and drink beside him, with several softly painted female nudes on the wall behind. The way that Karpov combines various art references is a sign that he sees art movements, which for earlier artists represented worldviews between which one had to choose, in the postmodern manner–as mere styles, all equal, none “true.”
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Swan Lake, by Arsen Savadov and Georgii Senchenko, is more acerbic. An image from the most famous of Russian ballets is painted within a metal, cameolike oval placed at the center of a piece of a Red Army canvas tent. One way of reading this is as a juxtaposition of opposites, the delicate ballet image contrasting with the rough fabric of the tent. Another is that ironically the Red Army is, or was, needed to support Russian culture, keeping the USSR together by force. But my favorite of these anti-Soviet images is Natasha Turnova’s Lenin and Tolstoy, What to Do? Part fauvism, part child’s drawing, it simply outlines the heads of these two “icons,” smearing each face with irregular daubs of paint. The artist says she was responding to “stiff,” “serious” traditional poses; by replacing that pomposity with imagery suggestive of child’s play, she suggests one way artists can make a new beginning–that a culture, like a child, needs to start with the simple pleasures of color and shape.
