FLYINGINTHEWAKEOFLIGHT by Flying In The Wake Of Light

flying in the wake of light

Irina Stolyarova Collection

Oh, how I wish, unbeknown to all, To fly in the wake of a ray Where I am ever not! And you in a circle aglitter There is no other happiness. From the stars learn What light denotes. It is but a ray, It is but light As a whisper is mighty Or warmed by prattle. I wish to tell you: My child, I am whispering That, as a whisper, I entrust you to a ray. Osip Mandelstam 1937

Irina, please tell me when and how you started to put together your collection? I started collecting about twenty years ago. I think I ‘grew’ as a collector and connoisseur of art with my collection. I was initially keen on the so called ‘Little Dutch’ school; Russian painting seemed to me derivative. But then, gradually, I began to discover the names of Sudeykin, Mashkov, Kustodiev, Benois... It was also quite a typological approach, even though I was beginning to have more freedom to act out of my personal taste and personal considerations. And so it went on until, in a collection of a Moscow collector, I saw a work by Malevich. It was the only abstract work surrounded by the old masters, but it overshadowed everything else, even though the collection had some serious names. And I suddenly realised that my personal feeling for figurative painting had suddenly been interrupted. Those pictures I had been collecting no longer coincided with my emotions and life experience… I finally realised what it was that interested me when I visited a Lanskoy exhibition. Indeed it was Lanskoy, and then Charchoune, that initiated my NEW collection. I understood that becoming intellectually and emotionally tuned to abstract painting in its various forms was where I could express myself as a collector. Who are your favourite artists in the collection? My favourite artist is Pierre Dmitrienko. Dmitrienko does not belong to the ranks of conventionally recognised artists. Many consider him to be just a follower of Lanskoy, which I think is unfair: Dmitrienko is an outstanding master with his personal poetics. In his work abstraction acquires associations with the natural world — like in this work ‘The Garden of Gethsemane.’ When I look deeply at this painting it reminds me of the eponymous poem by Pasternak: The meadow suddenly stopped half way. The Milky Way went on from there. The grey and silver olive trees Were trying to march into thin air. This is how the otherworldly — the lofty — becomes palpable. In Dmitrienko I find everything I seek in abstraction. I read a lot about him and studied his work. Like Malevich his work originates in the Russian icons. He said that his paintings were ‘icons,’ or ‘like icons,’ though he was very far from imita ting orthodox icons. Icons left imprint on his work in abstract symbolic understanding. His attitude to painting is very close to my own: “I am looking for a kind of painting that could convey the essence of a human being. I’m looking for signs that can be understood outside the language that each and every one of us speaks. A kind of painting that, with a help of very few signs, could express the quintessence of life. I have to find a way of painting which would be tangible, devoid of narrative, free of time and space.” I have three of his works. One of my favourite is ‘La Route.’ When I look at it I am reminded of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ choreographed by Béjart. In this picture there is the same rhythm and composition, which reminds one of the staging and set design of the Béjart ballet. Irina Stolyarova, Sasha Gusov Photography

You know a lot about ballet. Some people compare painting to dancing. As a matter of fact, in 2012, at the Boston Museum of Modern Art, there was even an exhibition called ‘Dance/Draw’ dedicated to the metaphor of dance and its expression in contemporary art. We have a very limited vocabulary to describe art — a dozen terms at the most. And I admit that for me there are many dance associations in art. I do know a lot about ballet; I come from a family of dancers. My mother was a ballerina at the Bolshoi, and I danced there too, and this is something that remains with one forever. But ever since I was a child I have felt more of an affinity for modern dance, which is known as the avant garde. I was unfortunately unable to take up Béjart’s invitation to go to the Mudra School in Belgium. In those days... But I was still fortunate enough to dance in his ‘Isadora’ which he choreographed for Maya Plisetskaya. Incidentally, he originally conceived it for Jorge Donn, but he was fascinated by Maya’s temperament and expressiveness. For me, when I look at an abstract painting, there is always an association with the dance; I think that there is a lot in common between them, especially when you think of the works of such great choreographers as Pina Bausch, Maurice Béjart, Martha Graham. Dance, in my opinion, is the main metaphor of the world, bringing it close to the equally metaphysical abstract painting and poetry.

Unlike many collectors you do not invest in art. Furthermore, as far as I understand, for you, your collection is not a matter of prestige. What artists do you have in your collection? Well, these things are really of little concern to me. It’s probably more of a coincidence that all the works that I buy have been published somewhere or exhibited in public. I look primarily at the work not at the artist, although, of course, I appreciate the names of their creators. In my collection there is Lanskoy, Charchoune, Dmitrienko, Yankilevsky, Plavinsky, Pivovarov, Kantor, Brui, and others. All of them can be seen in this book. I know that you are a great connoisseur of poetry and write a poetry blog for ‘Snob’ magazine. You said that you see a relationship between art and poetry: What is it? You know, when I buy this or that piece of art, I value it according to how close it is to my spiritual disposition, exactly the same thing happens when I read poetry. I always find works that are close to me. Sometimes when I look at a picture I begin to understand what poetic image it corresponds to. Sometimes my feelings actually coincide with the feelings of the artist. For example, this is the case with Yankilevsky. I was given a copy of his handmade book where there is a poem by Anna Akhmatova:

Why do people collect abstract art? This is quite a complicated and intellectual form of collecting. You know I’d better quote Russian poet and philosopher Vasily Rozanov, who very precisely expressed this ‘why’ in his book, ‘The Last Leaves.’“Metaphysics lives not because people ‘want it to,’ but because the soul is metaphysical. Metaphysics is a thirst... a hunger in the soul. Man has a thirst for the ‘other,’ the unconscious; I want to look over the edge,” he says. “I want to get to the end. One cannot know. So then I will try to dream, create, to guess, to say it in poetry.” For me my collection is my dialogue with art, where painting, philosophy, poetry, and dance are intertwined in a single whole. Abstract art for me is at once a language, a visual dramaturgy, a way of thinking, an unlimited seam of meaningful opportunities. Moreover these are my choices; I do not need a mandatory set of names to give the col lection the stamp of ‘good taste.’ No, in this way, it seems to me, there are more opportunities to put my own mark on the collection; it is important for me to articulate the possibilities of dialogue because I talk to the works that belong to me and share emotions with them.

Lunatics Lunatics! I myself have no idea where I am going Wandering towards the black abyss, the finality of death, or to paradise, But I will take you with me. We shared a ferocious obstinacy, like an eagle-eyed enemy, Constancy and the devotion of fiery oaths frighten me. You will hardly remember where I took you, Where we feasted on a black scaffold at a grim time, As if immured in a vault. You shared with me such shame, years of my muteness.... You will be, you are, you were, And I am a falling star.

By the way, have you not noticed how dancers often collect art? Baryshnikov, Nureyev... Yes, no doubt there is some connection. As to Baryshnikov, I am particularly interested in what he did when he moved to the West. I understand how difficult it is for a dancer educated in the classical tra dition of ballet to start doing something modern. His collaboration with the famous Martha Graham changed him, made him a truly great dancer. Later she created dance numbers for him. She taught him how to dance ‘another’ dance vocabulary that expressed the language of the soul. I respect him even more because he is constantly moving forward and developing that language. In 1962 there was a movement in America called ‘Judson Church’: an attempt to reject the inflexible dictionary of classical ballet, to move away from the formalised expression of gestures and body movements and instead focus on the movement itself — the first glance at what is most ordinary and everyday. I mean, for exam ple, the movement of pedestrians hurrying about their business. The ‘PASTForward’ performance was an attempt by Baryshnikov to recreate Judson Church, and it is very interesting for me to follow what he is doing. And now I would like to see his collection which will be exhibited in Moscow. Our artistic paths cross in some ways; I know that we have some of the same artists, Tselkov for example. I would still like to clarify one thing: Among the works in your collection there are still works that could be called representative — Tselkov or Rabin. How is their presence linked to your concept of a preference for abstract art? That’s a good question. Everywhere, and especially in collecting, I’m trying to avoid intransigence by no means do I want to be limited by some dogmatic restrictions. If you look at the history of modern art after Malevich one cannot ignore abstraction. So those ‘figurative works’ in my collection I actually perceive as abstract; I see them as encodings, as iconography, if you want. Lanskoy once said that when we stop seeing girls or apples in a picture, and see painting, the difference between figurative and non-figurative disappears. And there are works — Yankilevsky, for example — in which the drama and theme shape themselves; the image that is ‘developed’ on the surface of an abstract universe is ready to ‘disappear’ in to it. With regard to such things, abstract and figurative categories stop being relevant.

October 10, 1959 Moscow (afternoon) Almost half a century ago Akhmatova invited poet Anatoly Naiman to her house to ask him to translate the lyrics of Giacomo Leopardi. Naiman has kept several of Akhmatova’s notebooks from that time, and one of them contained this poem, which he first published in Yankilevsky’s book, ‘Anna Akhmatova.’ Or, take for instance, the conceptual painting of Pivovarov which is in complete harmony with the works of his closest friend Igor Kholin: Our History EVOLUTION REPRODUCTION CONCENTRATION POPULATION DISPLAY CONSCIOUSNESS HARMONY UNIVERSE STUDY QUEST EXPOSURE EXTINCTION CHAIN REACTION NUCLEAR HURRICANE PAUSE CELEBRATION OF CHAOS

The Oscar Rabin painting, ‘London–3,’ from my collection, is mounted with a poem by William Blake: London I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear And so on. These comparisons are endless... Tell me Irina, you talk with poets, but what about artists; do you communicate with them? Yes, I have friends who are artists, particularly Maxim Kantor and William Brui. I am always talking with them; we telephone each other. We talk in this seemingly easy companionship, when what we are really discussing are very important issues such as the philosophy of art. Kantor and Brui are completely different artists but they both have the same roots; they came from Russian culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. And as your collection grows are there other artists that interest you? Recently I discovered Faibisovich, and he interests me very much. Also I am thinking about Vulokh and Zlotnikov. Although I don’t know in advance what I will buy; I have no clear plan. I am guided by the work and the feelings it evokes in me.

Irina Stolyarova in conversation with Valeria Gorbova

Detail: Pierre Dmitrienko, The Garden of Gethsemane, 1956

Deceits of Surface: Artists in the Irina StolYarova Collection John E. Bowlt

As the USSR passes into remote history, so its cultural achievements also assume a mythical dimension, regenerating very basic questions as to how Soviet art, literature, and music were created, controlled, and promoted. What was Socialist Realism? What exactly were the criteria of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, the Academy of Arts of the USSR, and the Union of Artists of the USSR, for example? Who occupied the Pantheon of Soviet culture? And who did not? If, for example, Aleksandr Gerasimov, Dmitrii Nalbandian, and Fedor Reshetnikov were among the pillars of the artistic establishment, then who were the dissidents? How did they diverge in their aesthetic assumptions as they proceeded to create another subterranean culture?

Serge Charchoune Temple Mystique, 1950

The painters represented in the collection of Irina Stolyarova document that alternative tradition, reminding us of the forthright vision, moral courage, and artistic integrity of that counter-movement; they also remind us of the fact that, in order for any culture to withstand and survive the verdict of ages, it must retain intrinsic values which transcend the immediate social and political perimeters of its particular time and place. The spontaneity, artistry, and mys tery of this pictorial polyphony demonstrate that its creators possessed these constant values and that they did, indeed, move beyond their Soviet roots to become an organic part of the contemporary global process. In this respect the Stolyarova collection is not merely a casual assemblage of various artifacts but a single celebration of private initiative and the total freedom of aesthetic expression — ”Freedom is freedom,” as the poet Vsevolod Nekrasov wrote (1). In other words, if at first glance the Stolyarova collection produces the impres sion of diversity and versatility, closer scrutiny reveals a common denominator of purpose, mission, and message. An especially patent and earnest statement in the Stolyarova collection is the picture, ‘Zénith du Zen,’ which Serge Charchoune painted in 1951, one of his many gestures towards the absolute condition of Zen or Nirvana. Embark ing upon his professional career as a Cubist and then Dadaist, Charchoune discovered an occult presence that he went on to represent in his paintings and drawings of the 1920s onwards. Whether the goal was to manifest a cos mic consciousness in general, or a Chinese philosophical tenet in particular,

Detail: Serge Charchoune, Zénith du Zen, 1951

Léon Zak

philosophy, and Pierre Dmitrienko, with his ‘La Route’ (1957) and ‘The Garden of Gethsemane’ (1956) — informed by the Biblical story — pointed to other territo ries: umbrageous, oblique, and often ominous. Lydia Masterkova, too, seemed to follow a spiritual path through the mystical cosmos that Kazimir Malevich had created with his Suprematist geometries. The apparent equilibrium sug gested by her restrained colours and forms, and the pregnant silence of her compositions, as in ‘Composition’ (1965), generate the same evocative force as prayers offered to a distant deity — unidentifiable yet omnipresent. Obvi ously, for Masterkova, as for Malevich, non-figurative painting, which she began to investigate in the early 1960s, is a vehicle of spiritual engagement with a higher harmony: a painted liturgy that invites the spectator to commune with her art in reverent solitude. Dmitrienko, Kropivnitsky, and Masterkova made up a philosophical, if not religious, reconnaissance: an avant-garde at the border between the pervasive ‘here’ of the Soviet state and the ‘there’ of private dream.

Composition, 1973

The presence of works by Charchoune, Lanskoy, and Zak in the Stolyarova col lection is important because they reconnect the younger artists with a distant artistic legacy that, in Soviet Russia of the 1960s and 1970s, was hardly known. Even if most of the dissidents would not have been aware of the émigré contri bution to the Ecole de Paris, it is striking that, intuitively, they maintained and enhanced those traditions — the occult tendency being one such denominator.

Charchoune used his métier as a refractive medium between the material world (subsumed in the technical elements of paint, brush, and canvas) and the wonderland beyond the looking-glass — a ‘Temple Mystique 1,’ to cite the title of one of his pictures of 1950. André Lanskoy and Léon Zak, both of Charchoune’s generation, also pursued this path, eliciting moods, sensi bilities, and allusions — constituting semaphores towards a noble and divine condition. Informed by Theosophy, Spiritualism, and other occult faiths their abstract compositions are like individual frames extracted from a film, as it were — brief and tantalizing glimpses of Genesis — an omnipotent universe of light and darkness, silence and sound, form and colour. This ability to recognize the natural or divine chaos beyond the false order of civilization is a salient characteristic of the other later artists in the Stolyarova collection and forms a vital link between the mystical abstractions of Charchoune, Lanskoy, and Zak, and the Soviet non-conformists. Yury Kuper’s ‘Frozen Flowers No. 3,’ for example, reminds us of the first botanical forms of life that followed the pristine flux of Genesis, while, in his ‘Reach for the Sky’ (1988), Dmitri Plavinsky reminds us of the gigantic seismic and volcanic shifts that accompanied the creation of the world and of the natu ral time of preh istory and the false time of history. Plavinsky’s powerful compositions seem to register the pathetic traces of our brittle material culture within the shifting sands of eternity. Many of the artists in the Stolyarova collection follow this cosmic trajectory, partaking of its mystery and delineating metaphors that elicit the omnipotence of Alfa and Omega. ‘Composition’ (1965), by Lev Kropivnitsky, and ‘Abstract Composition’ (1960s), by Isaac Pailes, are shining examples of this tendency reminding us that, by and large, the art of the Soviet non-conformists was rarely a mere play of device but an affront on Positivist reality and the scientific data — convenient, strategic, and false — that construct the outer lie of any land. Kropivnitsky, who, like Charchoune, engaged in Buddhism and Oriental

André Lanskoy Composition, 1958

Isaac Pailes

Abstract Composition, 1960s

Looking back to the last years of the Soviet regime and placing the Stolyarova artists within that timeframe, we remember that, however idiosyncratic each creative personality, they were united by an unrelenting resistance to the pre mises of Marxism and Dialectical Materialism. As Soviet citizens their primary misdemeanor lay precisely in their recognition and representation of alterna tives and consequently they were hounded for their contrary commitments. But what is especially striking about this counterpoint is that its composers rarely protested against ideological imposition in a documentary or Realist manner, and instead of maintaining the narrative and didactic function of art (as the Socialist Realists were doing) they tended to express their ideas via the forbidden fruits of non-figurative painting, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and Conceptualism. At the same time few of those early dissidents engaged with alternative media, such as photography, body art, and mail art — a circumspection that continued throughout glasnost and perestroika and that to this day can still be associated, for example, with the powerful visual commentaries of Natasha Arendt (‘Chicken God,’ 2012) and Maxim Kantor (‘Dirty Sheet,’ 2001). True, some artists — such as Rimma, Valerii Gerlovin, and Andrei Monastyrsky — did investigate found art, land art, and visual poetry, helping to establish a vivacious Moscow Conceptualism, even if, at that time, they rarely used that rubric to describe their actions. Incidentally, not all painters and poets back then considered the intervals of détente and perestroika to be propitious or potential, assuming that the new alliance between the Soviet and Western political systems was temporary and unreliable, nourished, perhaps, more by dreams of commercial opportunity than by mutual understanding of philoso phical ideologies. Three decades later a new wave of artists has come forth who disregard and discount that interval, wheeling and dealing in the limelight of the brave new Russian Capitalism and eager to experiment with performance, electronic media, installations, and many other forms of expression. In the late 1950s and 1960s, on the threshold of the dissident movement, ‘isms’ — such as Abstract Expressionism — constituted an artistic limbo banned, or at least suspended, from Soviet cultural discourse, and to explore such styles was to enter into conflict with the aesthetic canon. Aware of the political consequences of such action these prodigal sons put their professional lives on the line in order to solicit the right to personal choice. Some, such as Oscar Rabin, were forced into exile (cf. ‘London-3’, 1962). Some, such as Boris Sveshnikov, were imprisoned (cf. his ‘The Thunder’ of 1974 and ‘View from a Window’, 1970). Some, such as Vladimir Yakovlev, were incarcerated in mental hospitals. Some, such as Rukhin, died under mysterious circumstances. Some fell silent. Very few compromised. 17

Pierre Dmitrienko La Route, 1957

Oscar Rabin

London-3, 1962

was never a single and isolated block: By the time Brezhnev assumed power in 1964 Socialist Realism had lost much of the rigorous protocol formulated at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934; whereby the artist had been obliged to “depict reality in its revolutionary development... and create works with a high level of craftsmanship, with high ideological and artistic content” (2).

Surely it was dedication to the creative process and the private Muse, rather than outright political protest, which provided the non-conformist movement with its strength and resilience. It was, after all, a movement of artists who still believed inexorably in the sacred power of the work of art, supporting the Romantic idea that the artist was elected and preordained to pursue his special calling. Artists such as Nemukhin were totally committed to the artistic process — persuaded of their manifest destiny and of the rightness of their visions; an idealist attitude, by the way, which, in emigration, clashed violently with the pragmatism of the Western art market and often led to isolation and disillusionment. True, Nemukhin has never compromised (even if he has lived abroad for a long time) and has continued to paint his pictures of playing cards (‘Starfire’), as if to declare that art and life are a game of chance — a trick of fate — and that the real instruments of progress or regress are coinci dence, risk, and sleight of hand — irrespective of ideological, religious, or even individual persuasions. The wide repertoire of styles in the visual culture of the 1960s–1980s, identi fiable with the microcosm of the Stolyarova collection, contrasts sharply with the autocratic conventions of Soviet culture under Leonid Brezhnev. During that era the oil painting and the monumental sculpture, like the epic novel and the symphony, were the accepted media, each work informed by pre-estab lished canons — an omnipresent hierarchy, which might explain why some of the early non-conformists also resorted to the same media in order to broadcast their messages. So, if alternative sources of information were difficult to come by, how did the dissident artists promote other states of mind — old and new, Western and Russian — including abstract painting, Pop Art, Sots Art, Samizdat Art, and Conceptualism, especially if Socialist Realism dominated the aesthetic menu? In order to answer that question we should recall that the Brezhnev era was not altogether impervious to alien ideas. Obviously, the practices of Soviet art, literature, and music were informed and manipulated by the doctrine of Socialist Realism, although modern Soviet culture — even under Brezhnev —

Vladimir Nemukhin Starfire, 1992

Boris Sveshnikov

View from a Window, 1970

In the 1960s–1980s the premise of Socialist Realism had assumed an elasticity and an indeterminateness that, on the one hand, diluted interpretations, although, on the other, led to the invention of a dense rhetoric verbiage, still bearing the ideological references to Marx, Engels, and Lenin but hardly rein forcing the relevance of Socialist Realism to contemporary culture. All this is to say that there were philosophical and aesthetic nuances and deviations, gestures of adjustment and compromise, weird alliances between conservative and liberal and not one radical faction but many just as there had not been one Russian avant-garde in the 1910s but several. Furthermore, some of the artists who today are acknowledged as heroes of Soviet non-conformism such as Erik Bulatov, Il’ia Kabakov, Ernst Neizvestny, Nemukhin, Edward Steinberg, and Vladimir Yankilevsky had been members of the Union of Artists of the USSR participating in official exhibitions and sometimes even fulfilling government commissions. Bulatov and Kabakov, for example, were frequent illustrators of Soviet children’s books, while Francisco Infante-Arana and Lev Nusberg, members of the Movement group, worked as designers for trade fairs and political festivals. Il’ia Glazunov, once a bold illustrator of Fedor Dostoevsky and apologist of the Orthodox Church in the 1950s, is now a venerable, archconservative and xenophobic protagonist of tradition, with his own art school and museum in Moscow. If, essentially, the Soviet cultural mechanism was dictatorial, albeit with varying degrees of duress and rigor — depending on the regime (Nikita Khrushchev’s political thaw, for example, facilitated a cultural easement, culminating in the ‘Exhibition of American Art’ in 1959, showing works by Jackson Pollock, and the

Edward Steinberg

scholarly conferences did promote the avant-garde — even during the bleakest years of zastoi. For example, the Picture Gallery of the Siberian Department of the USSR Academy of Arts in Novosibirsk organized an exhibition of Pavel Filonov in 1967; radical names and artworks were offered to the public under the rubrics of ‘design’ or of ‘propaganda’ and ‘agitational’ art, and essays on the avant-garde in Czech, East German, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish, and Estonian books and periodicals were readily available in Russia (3). There were also ‘legal’ channels of distribution of ‘illegal’ images; such as official condemnations of Western art in Soviet publications, which often carried reproductions of the objects of abuse (4). Furthermore, it was at the apex of Brezhnev’s reign that the pioneering exhibitions of Russian and French Modernism, ‘Paris-Moscou’ (1979, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), and then ‘Moscow-Paris’ (1981, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), were staged — so that, on the one hand, abstract art now enjoyed a glamorous public reception with the display of mas ter works by Kandinsky, Malevich, and Rodchenko, — while, on the other hand, it was still being condemned by the Academy of Arts and the Union of Artists of the USSR — one of the many cultural paradoxes of that era.

Composition, 1972

Perhaps, after all, the strongest merit of the Stolyarova collection lies in the concentration on abstract painters whose techniques, essentially, can be divided into two kinds or categories: the work of art as a loose configuration of diaphanous, interfusing, colored forms — identifiable with the paintings of Kropivnitsky, Masterkova, and Jules Pascin, and the work of art as a measured, innate structure — a metaphor for the absolute geometry of the firmament — identifiable with the artifacts of William Brui (‘Unified Fields,’ 1972), Infante (‘The Beginning of Unease,’ 1965, and ‘White on White,’ 1965), Pivovarov (‘Blue Composition,’ 1974), and Steinberg (‘Composition,’ 1972), in particular. The more Romantic tendency pays homage to what Kandinsky described as the ‘Spiritual in Art,’ while the more geometric one recalls the linear reductions of Suprematism and Constructivism, although some artists, such as Rukhin, with his collages reminiscent of Jasper Johns (cf. Composition with Containers, Icons and Red Line, 1975), or Oleg Tselkov (cf. ‘Wrapped,’ 1979), resist either category.

Manège ‘XXX Years of the Moscow Union of Artists’ of 1962, and showing works by Neizvestny, whereas Brezhnev called for greater watchfulness) — there was still an influential interchange of ideas — even though limited and distorted —by sporadic encounters with contemporary Western culture: through exhibitions of contemporary American and European art in Moscow, meetings with Western diplomats, journalists and scholars, surreptitious access to Western art magazines, the slow but sure rediscovery of the avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, and the activities of enlightened collectors such as George Costakis and Leonid Talochkin, art historians such as Dmitrii Sarab’ianov, and scientists such as Abram Chudnovsky. Indeed, scientists and cyberneticists often patro nized solo and group exhibitions: Mikhail Grobman (at the Moscow Energy Institute in 1965), the Movement group (at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in 1966) and Kropivnitsky, Nemukhin, Plavinsky, Rabin, and Sveshnikov (at the Institute of World Economics and International Relations in 1969). This tendency to link scientific experiment with artistic deviation continued throughout the 1970s–1980s. As late as 1989 the Moscow House of Artists organized the exhibition ‘Scientific and Technological Progress and the Visual Arts,’ which included works by Infante, and, as a matter of fact, selections from the Costakis collection were first shown publicly at the House of Culture of the Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow in 1972. In any case, before entering the humanistic disciplines, a number of the dissident artists trained as scien tists — especially in geology — such as, for example, Rukhin in Leningrad. However complex these conditions they informed much of the dissident output, especially the various schools of abstract art to which many dissidents turned as a means of expression, often in response to the earlier avant-garde such as Kandinsky, Malevich, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. The general assumption today is that under Soviet rule the public was denied access to the work of such artists, and that, as ‘idealist reactionaries,’ Kandinsky and Malevich, for example, had been removed from Soviet cultural history. To a considerable extent this was so, but it is not the whole story, because numerous exhibitions, publications, and

Francisco Infante-Arana

The Beginning of Unease, 1965

Francisco Infante-Arana White on White, 1965

As a primary champion of the Constructivist or geometric tradition Infante de serves particular commendation, even though, unlike El Lissitzky or Rodchenko, his work is still indebted to the mystical or celestial dimension and to a reverence for the natural world. In his paintings and installations Infante undermines the conventional notions of ‘here’ and ‘there,’ or ‘beginning’ and ‘end,’ establishing a discourse between the natural landscape, the artist, and the spectator, which treats the entire issue of ambiguity, veracity, and artificiality. For Infante, the artist is mediator between nature and the artifact, between the ‘geometric object in troduced and the natural environment’ (5) — affirming at once that nature has no boundaries and that elemental, artificial forms in paint, metal, and photography can also assume a natural character. Infante often uses the spiral, conventional symbol of the infinite, as a metaphor for this boundlessness. Yankilevksy, on the other hand, traces boundaries and perimeters as he mani pulates written and spoken language, for his principal aim is to locate a more intimate coincidence between external denotation and the inner resonance of things. As he illustrates in his genetic reconstitutions; such as ‘Composition’ from the series ‘Space and Experience’ (1981), Yankilevsky is contending that the “function of objects does not coincide with their titles... In a certain sense, my Mutants are ‘demons’ and their language is ‘neo-speak’ “(6). As if applying an X-ray device, Yankilevsky traces a more permanent structure below the surface; so that while retaining the contours of outward appearances he enters a more essential and visceral condition. His course of action, incidentally, brings to mind the tense and searing gestures of Nikolay Vechtomov’s often Apocalyptic painting, the heroes of his ‘The Road’ (1983), for example, inhabiting a cosmic, not calendar, time. The artists in the Stolyarova collection, disparate in aesthetic solutions, are united in their resistance to conformity, and in choosing different vocabularies

Evgeny Rukhin

Composition with Containers, Icons and Red Line, 1975

to voice their responses offer commentaries on the universal questions of political infliction, cultural identity, and existential loneliness. Their paintings, spanning many decades, many styles and many subjects, now constitute a noble monument, not only to the supreme power of individual creative expression but also to the victory of artistic eternity over ideological transience.

1. From an untitled poem by Vsevolod Nekrasov: beginning “nado tebe byt” (1964) in L. Talochkin et al.: Drugoe iskusstvo. Moscow: Moskovskaia kollektsiia, 1991, Vol. 1, p. 271. 2. From Andrei Zhdanov’s speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Moscow, 1934. English translation in J. Bowlt, ed.: Russian Art of the Avant-Garde. Theory and Criticism, 1902-34, London: Thames and Hudson, 1988, pp. 292, 293. 3. See, for example, J. Kříž: “Pavel Nikolajevič Filonov” in Vỷtvarná pracé, Prague, 1963, No. III; Vỷtvarné uméni, Prague, 1967, No. 8–9 (entire issue devoted to the Russian avant-garde); G. Karginov: Rodcsenko, Budapest: Corvina, 1975; L. Shadowa: Suche und Experiment. Russische und sowjetische Kunst 1910 bis 1930. Dresden: VEB Kunst, 1978. 4. See, for example, V. Kemenov: Protiv abstraktsionizma v sporakh o realizme, Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1969, which carries numerous reproductions of abstract and “decadent” art; and N. Malakhov: Sotsialisticheskii realizm i modernizm, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970, which carries the reproduction of a Malevich Suprematist painting between pp. 192–93. As late as 1985 Valentina Kriuchkova maintained the same arguments in her book Antiiskusstvo. Teoriia i praktika avangardistskikh dvizhenii, Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1985. 5. F. Infante: ‘Nature and Art’ in The Structurist, Saskatoon, 1983-84, No. 23–24, p. 95. 6. V. Yankilevsky: untitled statement in Talochkin, Drugoe iskusstvo, Vol. 1, p. 189.

Collection of Irina Stolyarova Alexander Borovsky

Collections of Russian or Russian-born artists from the second half of the last century and the beginning of this one (and I had the pleasure to describe at least a dozen such) have already developed a fully formed typology. There are several mega-collections that aim to embrace the entire range of important names and significant events. Here, advisers play an important role, although their advice is focused not so much on the art market but rather on historical and cultural context; they do not help the collector to navigate through the world of auctions and collections, but rather direct their attention to the artistic process as such. There are more specialised collections that concentrate let’s say, on Sots Art or pre-war Socialist Realism. Then there are collections with still narrower focuses, for example the Moscow scene of the 1960s (sometimes they too cannot do without consultants, as within each of these groups or movements there is its own system of conventional tenets with a hi erarchy of names that one is not allowed to violate). Finally there are collections where their owners are a kind of auteur: He or she is involved from the very outset, and the works are selected according to his or her personal taste and personal choice. These collections, as such, intrinsically represent, among other things, the identity of the collector. Every collection, of course, has its representational identity; it is, after all, an expression of its time — the ‘time of the collector,’ the ‘time of the artist’ — and of the global trends that influence both individual and shared creative directions and, for cer tain, artistic identity — yes, one could adumbrate so much more... But it is the individual vision that makes the individual collector and the focusing power of such a vision especially strong in the above mentioned type of personal collection. Precisely as such — with strong individual vision, relatively new but fast-growing, and with huge po tential for development — I see the collection of Irina Stolyarova. Many collectors evolve along with their collections; they start with names that can be said to be somewhat conventional and already well known in the world of art. Then they might move towards forming their own vision of the collection and even their own concept (although it is quite often the case that a collection does not evolve but is built in a haphazard and casual way that can almost be changed at will). It seems to me that Irina Stolyarova, from the very outset and her first steps as a collector, had fully formed ideas about what her collection would be: The items would not be chosen for their ‘importance’ or their conventional values, but because, more than anything, they appealed to her soul; they touched her aesthetic sense and evoked an emotional response. Above all and equally important there was something else; a word that nowadays is not so popular — poetics. And therefore the first works that laid the foundation of the collection remain very much in tune with the latest acquisitions. The circumstances and the opportunities might have changed: Preferences and priorities stayed the same. So the Stolyarova collection has been focused on the work of Russian artists of several generations living both in the home country and in the West, and on the first émigrés generation associated with the School of Paris. The émigré artists in the collection include those who worked in the early post-war decades, when many of them were expressing their individuality in an entirely different way. Irina Stolyarova however — and it is important to say — is completely indifferent to the political aspects of the artist’s residence. For her an artist is ‘Russian’ in the broadest sense — to be viewed within a European cultural context. At least in choosing her artists she is referencing this European paradigm. I would further say that Irina Stolyarova is not concerned with a conceptual, and even less so with a narrative, content of a work. The primary object of her interest is painting as a material substance. Detail: William Brui, Unified Fields, 1972

She is interested in painting as such in its entire gamut — all the way from figurative representation to abstract. Her forte is navigating in this material substance of painting; moving from ‘representational density’ (the concept of art theorist Yury Tynyanov) to the free-spirited expressions of various forms of abstraction. This approach must have been present — albeit, perhaps, unconsciously — from those very first steps that Irina Stolyarova took as a collector. She acquires, for example, a work by William Brui from the mid-1970s series ‘Unified Fields.’ It’s a great piece: through a field of black field (critic Grigory Kapelyan called it ‘black earth’), barely glimmers, then appears more actively, then opposes the black with equal force — white. This massive darkness forms certain structures — latticework and grids. The painting ‘keeps you at a distance,’ and forming as they do, this mass of darkness, the latticework and grids interact in their own special way with the eye’s retina, creating their own stable connections. The artist seems to be able to control the way in which we look at the picture; the distance he ‘keeps’ is meaningful. The interpenetration and interplay of black and white is seen as the spontaneous meta physical auto-genesis of light. How apt then that, in recent years after exhibitions at the Russian Museum and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Brui is coming back into fashion. As it happened, back in the ‘70s, he was one of the first artists of his generation whose works could be found in the collections of MOMA in New York and the Metropolitan, but then Brui, not overly anxious about self-publicity and PR, for quite some time rather dropped out of sight of the critics and gallery owners. It was Irina Stolyarova who drew attention to him during this period, thereby demonstrating both the need and the courage to go her own way. The School of Paris, within its strict chronological boundaries, is represented by the work of Jules Pascin, classical in its dreamlike voluptuousness. In actual fact Pascin was born in Bulgaria. The logic of this collection, however, has not been violated, for as it has already been said, ‘Russianness’ of the collection is not a limiting factor but rather an articulation of a kind of unifying artistic criteria guiding the collector’s choice. This work is a kind of tuning fork that tunes in to an emotional pictorial wave. Thanks to Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast,’ and Ilya Ehrenburg’s memoirs, the artist’s name, which in Soviet times was generally transcribed as Paskhin, was — at least for my generation — absolutely familiar: a sort of a pass into the then forbidden world of free art. Serge Charchoune also belongs to the older generation of the ‘Russian element’ of the School of Paris; he had been involved in the Moscow avant garde of the early twentieth century. In his European period he consistently pays tribute to Magical Realism and Purism but, more impor tantly, was almost the only Russian-born artist who was a part of the Dadaism movement since its outset. In the post-war decades, Charchoune, who had for a long time been engaged in literary activities, experiences a new creative upsurge. In fact, this is his deeply original individual version of a meditative natural philosophical abstraction in which there is still a place for artistic representa tion: motifs of running water and the externalisation of a musical phrase. The collection has two very different works by Charchoune. The first, with allusions to the experiences of Magical Realism, is built on the magic lantern effect (reminding us of Akhmatova: ‘But the source of light is mysteri ously hidden’). The second is an interesting example of Charchoune’s late philosophical intentions. Here the pictorial representation alludes to a micro-world; the ambience of this painting is akin to protoplasm with some kinds of micro-bodies floating around. Charchoune’s interests are of course far from cytology; he is creating a beautiful metaphor — the transience of an intermediate state of representation: no longer an abstraction, but not yet ‘objectified.’ Léon Zak also has a Russian background — including education; in Paris he led an active exhibition life as a member of the Neo-humanists (crossing paths in gallery exhibitions with Pavel Tchelitchev). In the post-war years he turned to abstraction. The work represented in the Stolyarova collection, with its plant motif, chimes with the above mentioned Charchoune canvas. This is not about stylistic analogies but a shared approach (almost literally): Zak, we can see, of course, is not aiming for the optical ana logue of a micro-zoom, but maximum tactility — as close as possible in colour, form, and body to the epidermis of the leaf. It appears not so much as an image of the plant, rather a navigation across its surface. Here too there is a balance of post-object and pre-abstract. At one time Anatoly Efros rightly found direct links between abstract art and the School of Paris’s emphasis on colour: Objective art was being reborn following on from the period of non-objectivity. Let me say once more: Perhaps her interest in art as something ever transitory, and endlessly changeable, is what motivated Irina Stolyarova as a collector. Her selection of works by the School of Paris reveals this guiding principle to have been quite consistent. Take André Lanskoy, a man with a biography full of upheaval, a student at the Imperial Corps des Pages, who fought in the Civil

War, who did not emigrate and was evacuated with the remnants of the White Army. He was at the heart of all the new initiatives of Parisian artistic life. He was friends with Yury Annenkov and exhibited works in the Fauvist manner displaying Primitivist tendencies. He exhibited a great deal, working with the leading galleries and collectors. At the beginning of the 1940s, influenced by Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, he turned to various forms of abstraction. The collection contains a very serious and complex work by this master: a dynamic abstraction with descending coloured spots. Its fragments materialise, thereby acquiring an independent ‘tactile life,’ which literally dreams up objectivity, seemingly long destroyed and left behind. And what objectivity this is! It is not depicted, it is tangibly felt, it is anticipated and relished. What is this? Reminiscences of Synthetic Cubism with its fondness of collage intrusions from the real world — pieces of wallpaper, texture, and even objects (fragments of musical instruments, etc.)? Or a premonition of readymades? (Jackson Pollock, that great classic of abstract art, experienced something similar in his work ‘Shadow.’) Pierre Dmitrienko belongs to the next generation of Russian Parisians. The collection has three of his works that I would classify as dramatic abstraction: They all represent complex states of conscious ness. Particularly significant, in my opinion, is ‘La Route;’ it has some connection with external reality, although somewhat indirect. As a result, despite the fact that the work is abstract, it is not without a narrative dimension. It creates an existential image of the dramatic path of life — of a road that has been cut through in both dimensions: in the rock formations of the outer world, as well as deep within of the subconscious. The Stolyarova collection contains a large body of works of the so-called ‘Sixties generation’: Oleg Tselkov, Eduard Steinberg, Vladimir Nemukhin, Lev Kropivnitsky, Lydia Masterkova, Dmitry Plavinsky, Victor Pivovarov, Evgeny Rukhin, Yuri Kuper… Historical and cultural circumstances, including the di chotomy between official and unofficial art, which existed until the late 1980s, mean that the concept of modern art in Russia extends over a large period of time. Not only collectors but also museums in their exhibitions use the work of this generation to demarcate the beginning of Russian ‘modern’ art. It is understandable: The Sixties generation is indeed still creatively active. But on the other hand the very presence of ‘heavyweights’ who came out of the underground, whose merits are conven tionally recognized, is validated by private and museum collections. Irina Stolyarova, however, is not interested in the underground heroics of these artists of the Sixties who spoke out against Soviet officialdom. Her choice of artists is her own: She is less interested in Conceptualists and Sots artists than artists focused on the material, painterly, or plastic expression. The collection includes a very significant work by Vladimir Yankilevsky ‘Composition’ from his ‘Space and Experience’ (1981) series. In his letter to the collector the artist described this work as one of his best. The artist at that time had already moved beyond those signature steps in his evolution that I would call his anthropomorphic and techno periods. In this particular work there are still traces of the ‘techno’: signs, arrows, and symbols — the painter’s own transcript of global energies. There are also anthropomorphic reflections: all sorts of entrances and exits, and — most importantly — the proportionality of certain images of the human form. But especially important is his painterly realisation: exceptionally deep, harmoniously developing light brown and light green tones, with fragments of dark ochre. The feeling of a plain surface however is preserved: The colours move or flow, not in waves but in sequences, frame by frame. Yankilevsky is always thinking in global terms; therefore his articulation of an ‘aesthetic’ has quite a reflexive fo cus: The emotional state of the artist, the state of the matter, and the matter of the painting, if not harmonised, at least tend to be somewhat coordinated. There is a substantial body of works representing the Sixties generation. The poetics of Oleg Tselkov with the aggression of endlessly mutating anthropomorphic images is wonderfully expressed in his work within the collection. Since the times when the Soviet official art and underground were opposed to each other there has been a tradition of seeing Tselkov’s works in a political context: a result of a certain anthropological counter-revolution. Their grotesque ugliness was explained as a result of the negative selection that Russia had been going through since the October Revolution. One could dig even deeper in to Gogol’s tradition of evil spirits’ reincarnation, which in its turn was based on folk tales. And indeed, Tselkov’s mature works refer rather to Gogol’s bodily image (‘God-stomach’) than to direct anti-Soviet implications. The artist himself in his interviews and in the many conversations I had with him always denied any social or even literary connotations. But when we look at his work in Stolyarova’s collection there’s no getting away from connotations — at least ontological. An amorphous body — a clot of biomass — is tied up with ropes like a straightjacket. This must be the most transparent — the most obvious — image in Tselkov’s work of the constrained, swathed but still resistant being.

Oscar Rabin’s landscape, with his painterly structures growing dramatically from dark to glowing and gradually regaining some symbolic self-sufficiency, is quite recognizable.

the drawn shade — weight. But mirage remains a mirage, objectivity fades away, and the image again gravitates towards flatness.

‘The Trailblazer’ — that’s how I once called my foreword to Dmitri Plavinsky’s album. And indeed, Plavinsky is an artist of the trail: a master of an incredible sensitivity to tactile, audio, and visual manifestations of the erstwhile. This said, the artist explores the old trail not just for the sake of some archaeological academic trophies. Alexander Pushkin in his famous poem ‘What’s in My Name to You?’ talks about ‘a dead trace,’ which is like ‘someone’s epitaphic line/in some unfathomable tongue.’ But that is followed with a remarkable emotional turn: In light of a lyrical feeling the ‘dead trace’ turns out to be alive and cordial. Material trails in Plavinsky’s works have lyrical and metaphysical, but by no means a documentary, dimension. The artist developed a signature technique that represents a ‘trail poetics’: It’s a palimpsest, where in the pictorial power brings up to the surface traces of several obje ctified visual layers of mundane reality. Irina Stolyarova has managed to select a very characteristic work where the past has been materialised, or in other words represented, as real printed ephemera (some page proofs or real newspaper clippings). The texture and the colours become a poetic prism that refracts concrete and general, into individual and personal.

In Yury Kuper’s works mirage refers not to the geometry but to the plant life: A colouristic setting in its foreign artlessness resembles a basement wall; it gradually ‘thickens,’ showing exquisite colourtonal nuances of the three images of flowers.

The collection also reflects Stolyarova’s special interest in Lydia Masterkova and Nikolay Vechtomov who are represented here with a few objects. These respected artists of the Sixties generation unfortunately very rarely attract collectors. Even though quite distant from each other in their crea tive intentions their works do seem to have something common: Or at least their juxtaposition within the collection gives a reason to reflect on this commonness. Both artists in their abstractions reveal certain architectural and structural images of our consciousness that is forever burdened with the weight of existential associations. Especially distinctive are political associations in Vechtomov’s early work (painting on silk) which reflect social feelings within certain groups of the underground. I would like to reiterate again that not all ‘unofficial artists’ tried to express a political message. The late Soviet regime was suspicious of the themes and subjects that had within themselves a direct challenge. A ‘negative’ political content could equally be found in purely formal — that is institutional — or even communicative instances: the choice of style or a form of expression, alternative exhibition practices, Western connections, etc. Vechtomov’s ‘The Road’ (1983) in this sense is a work of a very unambig uous political slant: typical for Vechtomov is orange and black colour range, vertical lines stretching all the way towards and behind the horizon (what are they? Some mysterious columns? Or prison camp poles for the barbed wire?), low-set sun, puddles (oil?). It is no wonder this work was used as a cover for the seminal dissident novel by philosopher and writer Alexander Zinoviev. Vechtomov, how ever, is better known as an artist ‘from another world’ (not the Soviet one). He’s a fantasist visualiser of the unknown and unthinkable, creator of the famous ‘black suns’ and outer space constructions. Lev Kropivnitsky, Vechtomov’s fellow underground artist and his neighbour in Lianosovo outside Moscow, wrote once that Vechtomov was ‘not a naturalist who was reconstructing interplanetary travel. He gives a sentiment, the environment of the worlds, existing or non-existing, and he does it very convincingly.’ Well in this case he gives the ‘sentiment’ of a world — existing and joyless. I believe it is important to stress how the collection manages to ‘draw’ new subjects and new stories out of too well-known and overfamiliar works equal in terms of representational art; a process described by the collector as ‘picturesque in its various forms.’ There is for instance a significant work by Victor Pivovarov, one of the fathers of Moscow Conceptualism. The work seems to be slightly out of place here, taking into account the collection’s general anti-conceptual and anti-cerebral orientation. But in the context of this collection we suddenly feel that the artist with all his symbiosis of the metaphysical and the conceptual is in essence showing a pictorial story. In the foreground we see huge pieces of cloth (they could be screens or theatre curtains, but most likely just hanging laundry); similar pieces of cloth, visually diminishing, fly off to the zenith. The ones in the foreground conceal (reveal?) some ordinary everyday life: the human figure, landscape. All the images have very clear out lines. The colours are laid on (looks like they were sprayed) with an almost mechanical evenness; the technique itself — nitro enamel paint — does not allow any subtlety or nuances. And yet this work, as I see it, with its melancholy and hidden narrative, is quite pictorial — even aesthetically picturesque in its austerity. I find it not only the most painterly in this mid-’70s series but in Pivovarov’s entire output. Another interesting subplot of the collection is painterly-optical. The source of the story, I would say, is in the work of Edward Steinberg. Almost monochrome in that quite recognisable Steinberg pale yellow tone, this work is about a certain optical mirage-like fluidity; thanks to the finest nu ances of colour and luminosity the geometric shape acquires objectivity and flesh, and then, thanks again to the broken colour planes, a three-dimensional quality, and in the end, thanks to

Natasha Arendt, the artist of a different generation, continues this exquisite line of aestheticising the profane. Maxim Kantor, who also emerged on the art scene in the mid-’80s and has grown today into a significant painter, is represented here with a work (white cloth on red), which shows an appetite for the beautifully textured, as objectified in the form and even in the gravity of the depicted. Most interesting colour-spatial subjects are offered by Vladimir Nemukhin in his work. The array of objects in his still-lives look most common: playing cards, books, parcels, etc. Usually Nemukhin suggests the possibility of several ways of looking at things. He is, so to speak, interested in positioning — active, ‘biographical,’ implying actual interest in the ‘game’ — hence the activation of an objective plane (texture and even stereotypical objectivity). Spatial traveling can be dynamised when the viewer feels at the mercy of the diagonal, the wavy, the jet-propelled, or any other type of kinetics that Nemukhin favours. The work from 1992 included in this collection demonstrates rarely even for this artist’s objectivity. Nevertheless it does possess a solid, if a little sparse, evenly luminous colouring: The feel of ‘old optics powdered with the dust of time.’ But because of this forced objectiv ity it reminds us of the good old genre of trompe l’oeil (this is where the ‘old optics’ work their effect). Thus the pictorial and optical intrigue of this still-life has a tactile-navigational character. Boris Sveshnikov has, over the last several years, turned into one of the most sought after artists; nevertheless he remains largely misunderstood. The collection has two of his most significant works. The first of them, ‘The Thunder,’ is a vision of dreams, breakages, and symbolic epiphanies. Ekaterina Bobrinskya, in her book, ‘The Aliens?’, about the Soviet unofficial art, found a very good definition for the art of several artists (pariahs, wanderers, bearers of romantic and modernist myths); she called their art ‘the ideology of the outcast.’ In this context she described the phenomenon of the resonance between the outcast and the decadence: ‘the “decadent,” museum-centred, sometimes ex pressly theatrical, concept of art turned out to be one of the first stylistic alternatives to the Soviet art.’ Sveshnikov’s female image — a phantasm not devoid of trashy overtones — is within the same ten dency; it’s a challenge to prosaic savoir vivre precision, not so much of the moth-eaten officialdom but of the ‘cultured’ traditionalist liberal trend of the official art. In his second work, in my opinion, lies a layer deeper than a purely aesthetic challenge. This is characteristically Sveshnikov’s world, which is brittle, fragile, almost sickly, but at the same time it’s a world of wholeness and integrity. Here everything is contradictory. A space behind the window, which by definition should be vibrantly alive (this vitality is emphasised by pulsating pointillist brushwork) is deadened by giant flies stuck to the glass surface. The other (our) side of the glass is dominated by the clinical squalor of hospital life: dull, dismal tiles on the floor, a figure in the distance. And next to it all a strange, broken, aestheticized, stylized gesture: thin fingers exaggeratingly clutching a flower. Perhaps this is an item, more than any other in the collection, full of literary associations. And at the same time the narrative and the optical, very much in the spirit of Sveshnikov’s poetics, coexist here in a most complex relationship, surpassing the everyday logic. As I have already mentioned, the core of the collection represents the tastes and interests of the collector: the life and the existence of the painterly, diverse, and existing in different contexts, from the purely colouristic to literary and associative. Irina Stolyarova, however, is not going to limit herself. She understands that things objectively important, and at the same time close to her aesthetically, lend the collection with the desired stereoscopy of vision. Thus Evgeny Rukhin is represented by serious, not accidental works. The Saint Petersburg pioneer of Pop Art, with all his legendary status, remained not only in mythology but also has a place in the real history of our art. Or take Francisco Infante whose iconic pieces fill the gap in our art of, for example, group ZERO with its reduction of the natural and its focus on elements such as pure light, monochrome, and vibration. Irina Stolyarova’s collection keeps growing. It is full of promise of new discoveries and new collect ing stories.

Private Collecting in the Third Millennium and Irina Stolyarova’s Collection Alexander Rappaport

Irina Stolyarova’s collection is one of many, and it would be hard to understand its specifics by mere juxtaposition and comparison. The first thing that strikes you when looking at her paintings is what we call taste — you will find no derivative imitations or obvious failures here. Everything’s up to the highest possible criteria, even though those criteria themselves seem to have been long lost: major museums and galleries live in the corporate world; they abide by the rules we do not really know but strongly feel. One of the most obvious things here is the integral connection between taste and the art she has chosen to collect — the abstract art of the late 20th century. The other obvious thing is the artists themselves — most of them are of dual nationality and therefore belong equally to Russian and French cultures. But what can be said of all this? What is the logic behind the collection? The questions posed relate not only to this particular collection, not even to the stylistic similarity of its paintings, but to the general situation in the contemporary artistic and critical discourse. Distinguished art critic Boris Groys recently published a book throughout 400 pages of which we will hardly find an attempt to describe a work of art. Art for Groys is an object of innovative trans formations influenced by radical changes in the infrastructure of contemporary culture: new media technologies, commercialised art and art criticism, development of a new vision, and a new system of ontological orientation for understanding and analysing art objects. With all these new media and new meanings around mid and late 20th century abstract paintings look confusingly classic and reverentially academic. What are we supposed to make of them in this new context? Groys’s book is dedicated to an area of art activity that could be defined as post-painting: conceptualism, installation, and various new media technologies. For this area, according to Groys, the process of selection and exhibition becomes especially important. Curators play increasingly significant roles, and their roles, Groys suggests, become as important (if not more important) as those of artists. I would agree with this suggestion, but I would enhance it with a notion of scale that makes the exhibiting environment significantly different. Groys focuses on a large scale where large galleries, museums, and major international events — like art fairs and festivals — become increasingly more important. For a century, since the mid 1800s, large museums remained academic institutions nurturing art history and art theory research. Intellectual level, as well as the historic and geographical scope of the research, turned museum curators and researchers into oracles of the art world and philosophical regulators of the art life. One of these oracles and opinion makers was Clement Grinberg, a passion ate advocate of abstract painting that he saw as a quintessence of the art of painting. His influence is strongly felt in Irina Stolyarova’s collection. After World War II the emphasis has been shifting towards exhibitions. They became not only indicators but also trendsetters of the art world. Grinberg’s ideology as a result stayed behind and his favourite artists moved to art collections. Major exhibitions, like Moscow-Paris in 1979, with their huge scale and pomposity, felt like a Com munist Party Congress. The works exhibited created a new framework for understanding art’s social and political role as well as new criteria for the art market. Large art museums and exhibitions were like industrial or natural history Expos where shining new cars and ancient mammoth skeletons told stories of a type of object — newest or fossil — rather than of a specific car or skeleton. Detail: Léon Zak, Composition, 1950s

This educational and to an extent market-orientated intellectualism introduced relativism into the art world, and since then a work of art has been looked at as a species of its class rather than an individual entity. I see at least three aspects that put a small private collection in an advantageous position vis-à-vis large scale projects and institutions. The first one concerns precisely the new critical numbness in front of a work of art. In different instances the reasons for this silence could be different, but the silence itself seems very symptomatic. In the case of private collections this silence is incongruous: We do not have here a deafening silence that accompanies portentous suggestiveness of major events; here we have individual voices that we want to listen to. The second aspect is a friendly party-like atmosphere that brings together people without any conceptual programme or ritual. Every painting is surrounded by others; they all seem to be close to each other in spirit, and the feeling is that people attracted by these paintings should also form a union of the like-minded rather than remain an accidental crowd. Browsing through these paintings I recalled a chance encounter I had with the artist Léon Zak in the house of the famous St. Petersburg organist Isiah Braudo, and endless conversations with the artist Edik (Edward) Steinberg, and friend ly meetings with Francisco Infante, and visits to the studios of Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov and Vladimir Veisberg and the legendary art collector Lyonya (Leonid) Talochkin. All these people sud denly surfaced in my memory as if they were all sitting around the table. A wonderful phenomenon, not unlike déjà vu.

collections. Unlike museums where art works are placed next to each other in accordance with aca demic requirements of artistic periods and styles: Individual contacts between art objects are lost; they cannot maintain a conversation with each other. Private collections are good precisely because of this atmosphere of a private party, a friendly gathering, and the viewer is not an unfamiliar visitor from the outside; he belongs here. This friendly casualness, in contrast to the imperial etiquette of a palatial museum or blandness of a shopping mall or international airport, makes them so attractive. I have a feeling that private collections, temporarily removed from the epicentre of art life by their gigantic brethren, will soon gain revenge; they will leave the Louvre and the Hermitage to school children and tourists and will form a club society of connoisseurs and fans for whom an intimate meeting with an artist is the main condition of enjoying art. Irina Stolyarova’s collection is a painting community that demonstrates a new way of life for artworks. The 20th century was a time for imperial and state museums’ collections: The 21st century looks like the time for private collections. That is not to say that large collections will lose their significance and their value: no, they’ve got nothing to fear. But having acquired a dominant monopolistic role in the art world and the art market they necessarily enter the domain of mass culture and inevitably be come trivialized. Their fate is akin to the fate of other large institutions — huge supermarkets, famous hotels, fashionable resorts, and the like. Universal fame and the accessibility of major museums make them by definition commonplace and trivial — in spite of all the unrivalled masterpieces within their walls.

And the third aspect is about an institutional future of these seemingly accidental collections which become an increasingly significant element of contemporary art life and an increasingly significant counter-balance to major museums, galleries and festivals. In other words — I see them as sprouts of a new, relatively independent, and elitist art milieu.

And on the contrary, small provincial museums, private collections, and little-known artists become new heroes; a new environment for sudden discoveries, hidden from media and advertising. These col lections are even more interesting through the collector’s individual taste that reveals the individualities of the artists in the collection.

Silence of the critical community facing the art in Stolyarova’s collection is a special one. At a first glance these works need no comment. Boris Groys, in one of his articles, compared a painting with a naked woman whose nudity calls for a veil of critical commentary. This witty remark brings up a weird erotic analogy. Some bodies, or their photographs, are so good that they require no further commentary. There is a certain paradox in the whole idea of complementing a painting with words. It contradicts a well known maxim: A picture is worth a thousand words; even though contemporary art has long refuted the old truism.

The apparent incidental nature of these collections imparts them with the appeal of the unexpected (unlike in the Tate, MOMA, or the Russian Museum); the viewer here feels like a trailblazer. This feeling is hard to simulate or substitute with anything in a large museum. As a result small private collec tions become original contributors into the overall art life and atmosphere. Losing in numbers and sometimes even in the quality of their works they win over large museums in their own game on well-trodden paths.

Abstract paintings in Irina Stolyarova’s collection are admiringly self-contained, and even though one can talk of them ad infinitum, there’s not really any need to. The works, nevertheless, provoke a conversation, a conversation that is very different from a museum guide’s explanation or a philosoph ical treatise; it’s a conversation where a painting is seen not in the context of a historic era, but in the context of the individual life of the artist as well as the viewer. At the same time you could say about every single work in the collection that abstraction here is expressed not through an alienated colour and shape logics, but through a concrete light and texture experience. But if we were to describe different concrete experiences of different artists we would drown in speculations about French and Russian still lives and landscapes, about the feel of the material world, and the uniqueness of lives behind and in front of every painting. Unlike a one-artist show, a critic at a group exhibition cannot get fully submerged into each artist’s individual world. There is a chance, however, to exchange a few words and understanding glances. The only thing one can say confidently is that this meeting, intentional or accidental but predeter mined by the collector’s choice, is an event. And the meaning of this event, elusive as it is, is different for every viewer. A meeting of artists in a private collection is like a meeting of different people. Its unpredictability, its accidental nature, does not call for an academic treatise; it invokes quiet astonishment and indistinct murmur of thoughts and words, forever emerging, disappearing and re-emerging again. Now, nevertheless, we have to pay homage to theory and its universals: I mean the capability of paintings to be exhibited next to and together with each other — their friendly disposition to each other. In that sense painting is akin to architecture, sculpture, or graphics. There’s nothing of the kind in music, theatre, or cinema. You can’t listen to two symphonies at a time, or simultaneously watch two theatre productions evolving on two stages. Paintings not only allow this, even more so, sometimes they’re hung without any space between them, like tapestries. Private collections in this respect are close in their nature to the painting itself: its ability to hang next to another painting. And in this proximity lie the beauty and the charm of small galleries and private

Great early 20th century collectors Schukin and Morozov proved that private collectors’ initiatives and enterprises can win over the initiatives of state and academic institutions. Of course the time of Morozovs, Schukins and Tretyakovs is well behind us, but small private collections of the 21st century do not even try to compete with the mighty rivals. The era of major discoveries is passé, and the level of individualism in art has risen significantly. Art in the 20th century has gone through a number of revolutions; their destructive impact eventually being much bigger than their creative potential. In this respect private collecting looks like a promis ing initiative. Art revolutions were started by individuals within small enthusiastic circles and rebelled against major institutions that had owned and dominated the art world. Within those circles there were artists, critics, art theorists, curators, and art patrons. But with recognition and legitimisation they moved closer and closer towards major academic and commercial institutions with their destructive impact. Now we’re entering a new millennium with the scale of radical changes most likely greatly exceeding anything we experienced in the last century. The range of extremes may however not be as drastic as previously. We already see symptoms of new life in small private institutions, initiatives and groups, heaved or washed away by revolutionary cataclysms. The World Wide Web has definitely been the biggest and most revolutionary change of the previous era. Local institutions of the new millennium are not as yet as visible. But private collections promise to become a significant, if not main, source of creative and critical activity. The collections and collec tors become that middle layer of art enthusiasts that is set against the mass society with its tourist flows and indiscriminate tastes. Major museums live exclusively by historic epochs — they observe, sometimes initiate, new events — even revolutionary breakthroughs — but mostly reconstruct great phenomena of the past in our memory. Small circles of enthusiasts perceive art differently; here every work of art, with its individual life, often dissolved or even erased in a larger scale, is relished and treasured. The Bolshevik slogan, “Art belongs to people,” implied eliminating individual contact between artist and viewer. The viewer in this social programme became the ‘owner’ of the art, but the artist was reduced to being a representative of a style. This relationship left no room for an individual contact between the viewer and the artwork. Especially ignored was the physical aspect of visual arts including painting. The physical image of the work was completely replaced by its symbolic function.

The advantage of small collections, and the way they’re exhibited, is precisely in the space and time allowed for this physical contact. The whole gamut of the work’s meaning acquires individual charm. This is felt strongly in Irina Stolyarova’s collection because late abstract expressionism is interesting primarily for the force of its physical presence. This presence was receding in conceptualism, or, one could say, it was turning into a symbol rather than an area of meaningful expansion. In the late 20th century, installations reduced the phenomenon of individual physical presence even further: perception was subordinate to the dramatic score of the installation’s spatial environment. Erosion of physical presence in painting seemed irreversible, but in small collections like Irina Stolyarova’s it returns to the forefront. Corporality of a painting is almost fully erased when its image is transferred electronically. Therefore ‘internet collecting,’ close as it is to the real one in its individualised meaning, inevitably reduces this corporality. To really appreciate the collection one needs to be in direct physical contact with it, which raises the problem of travel: either the viewer or the collection need to move towards each other. Another important issue arises from the nature of the collection as a focal point — a centre of gravity for a group of people: connoisseurs, historians, writers, or just friends. They all bring life — a new corporal breath of life — into the system of aesthetic and philosophical categories replacing in fact the living presence of the artist. Taken all together they make what once used to be called ‘Salon.’ With time the term Salon acquired negative connotations as something snobbish and superficial as opposed to sincere and ingenuous. I believe that in the future the gala shows of London, Paris, Moscow, and New York will lose at least part of their significance, while Salon, shedding its snobbish image, will return to the times of Diderot and reinvent itself as a place for a positive and meaningful conversation amongst the initiated about life and art. By initiated I do not necessarily mean adherents of the same style, movement, or local art group, and not necessarily like-minded people, but people who are capable of communicating on the level of individual tastes and ideas — on the level of a physical presence and vibrant corporality. Much talked about ‘death of art’ is today caused by the exhaustion of this particular area of individual communication with and about a painting. The art world and the art market function within more general categories where the world is divided into zones with predetermined ideas and experiences to the detriment of an individual contact with an artwork. The object here, like it was with Plato, is reduced to a shadow of an idea, and no matter how post-structuralist philosophy struggles over the re turn to the object, the road to this coveted return is peppered with ever emerging new categorical and notional obstacles. These obstacles look like portals or triumphal arches, but they lead to something virtually inaccessible. Individual collections, like people, cannot deny themselves a right to use thinking, but they should not forget the remarkable words of Russian poet Evgeny Baratynsky: Just thought and thought! Poor artist of the word! High priest of thought! You cannot flee; The word holds all: the world and man, Death, life, and ever-unveiled truth. Brush, chisel, organ! Lucky is the man Who’s sensitive to them, and does not go beyond them! He may indulge himself in worldly feasts! Yet mortal life is pale beneath your cutting rays, Before your naked sword, O Thought! The world of private collections becomes a part of the world of individual entities. Corporate institu tions of the 20th century tried to subjugate this world into subordination and toeing the general line — common, partisan, rigid and… historically restricted. Irina Stolyarova’s is one of these collections.

Translated by Alexander Kan

Detail: Isaac Pailes, Abstract Composition, 1960s

Jules Pascin Lucy, 1928 Oil on canvas: 130 x 97 Provenance: From the collection of Tom Krohg Exhibited: “Paris-Tunis, peintres en mouvements” Sidi Jmour International Centre of Art and Culture, Tunis, 2010

LĂŠon Zak Composition, 1950s Oil on canvas: 88.5 x 130 Signed: LĂŠon Zak Provenance: Private collection, France

LĂŠon Zak Composition, 1973 Oil on canvas: 81 x 100 Signed: LĂŠon Zak 73 Provenance: Private collection, London

Serge Charchoune Zénith du Zen, 1951 Oil on canvas: 113.5 x 162 Signed: Charchoune V 51 Provenance: Private collection, France Published: Creuze, Raymond, Charchoune, catalogue raisonné, Vol. II, n°638. Paris: 1976 Guénégan, Pierre, Charchoune, catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Vol. IV: 1951-1960: Lanwell and Leeds, 2011

Serge Charchoune Temple Mystique, 1950 Oil on canvas: 80 x 115 Signed: Charchoune 50 Provenance: Our Artists Gallery Exhibited: Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1971 Published: Creuze, Raymond, Charchoune, catalogue raisonné, Vol. II, n°626. Paris: 1976

Pierre Dmitrienko The Garden of Gethsemane, 1956 Oil on canvas: 161.5 Ń&#x2026; 130 Signed: P. Dmitrienko Provenance: Galerie le Minotaure, Paris Published: Pierre Dmitrienko, St Petersburg: State Russian Museum, Palace Editions, 2009

Pierre Dmitrienko La Route, 1957 Oil on canvas: 129 x 162 Signed: P. Dmitrienko Provenance: Galerie le Minotaure, Paris Published: Pierre Dmitrienko, St Petersburg: State Russian Museum, Palace Editions, 2009

Pierre Dmitrienko Dives-sur-Mer, 1954 Oil on canvas: 81 x 100 Signed: P. Dmitrienko Provenance: Private collection, Belgium; Galerie Interart, Geneva

Isaac Pailes Abstract Composition, 1960s Oil on canvas: 115.5 x 80.5 Signed: I. Pailes Provenance: Private collection, London

André Lanskoy Composition, 1961 Oil on canvas: 195 x 97 Signed: Lanskoy Provenance: Private collection, London Exhibited: “André Lanskoy 1902-1976”, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, 2006 Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, USA, 1961 Published: André Lanskoy 1902-1976, Moscow: Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Palace Editions, 2006

André Lanskoy Composition, 1958 Oil on canvas: 195 x 96.5 Signed: Lanskoy Provenance: Sotheby’s

André Lanskoy Gogol. Le Journal d’un fou, 1976 Coloured lithographs: 94 x 65, № 20 of 100 Provenance: Private collection, London

Detail: Vladimir Yankilevsky, Composition from the series Space and Experience, 1981

Lev Kropivnitsky Composition, 1965 Oil on canvas: 104.5 x 91.5 Provenance: Artcurial

Yury Zlotnikov Mediterranean Suite, dedicated to Marc Chagall, 1985 Oil on canvas: 66.5 Ń&#x2026; 62.5 Signed: Zlotnikov Y.S. Provenance: private collection, London

Lydia Masterkova Composition, 1970 Oil on canvas: 107.5 x 98.5 Signed: L. Masterkova 70 Provenance: Private collection

Lydia Masterkova Composition, 1965 Oil on canvas, collage with fabrics: 79.5 x 99 Signed: L. Masterkova 65 Provenance: Private collection, Moscow Exhibited: “Works by Twenty Artists” Friendship Club, 1967 ‘Bulldozer’ Moscow, 1974 “Progressive Tendencies in Moscow 1957-70”, Museum of Bochum, Germany, 1974

Oscar Rabin London-3, 1962 Oil on canvas: 79.5 x 110 Signed: Rabin 62 Provenance: Private collection, France; Aktis Gallery, London

Boris Sveshnikov View from a Window, 1970 Oil on canvas: 89.5 x 79 Signed: Monogram SB Provenance: Private collection, Italy Exhibited: “La Nuova arte sovietica: Una prospettiva non ufﬁciale”, La Biennale di Venezia, Palazzetto dello Sport all’Arsenale, Venice, 1977 “Rassegna sul dissenso culturale nell’Est europeo”, Bellinzona, Switzerland, 1978 Published: “La Nuova arte sovietica: Una prospettiva non ufﬁciale”, Venice, Marseilles: 1977 “Rassegna sul dissenso culturale nell’Est europeo, Bellinzona, Arti Visive Incontri Mass-media”, 1978

Boris Sveshnikov The Thunder, 1974 Oil on canvas: 99.5 x 80 Signed: Monogram SB 75 Provenance: Sothebyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Dmitri Plavinsky Reach for the Sky, 1988 Oil on canvas, collage: 122 x 122 Signed: P 78 Provenance: From the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio

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Evgeny Rukhin Composition with Four Clothes Pegs, 1975 Canvas, mixed media, collage: 68.5 x 68 Signed: E.Rukhin 75 Provenance: Rukhin Foundation Published: Darsalia, Svetlana (ed.), Rukhin, Lev (ed.), Evgeny Rukhin from the series Avant-garde on the Neva: Avant-garde, 2009 Vickery, Joanna (ed.) Frozen Dreams: Contemporary Art from Russia, London: Thames and Hudson, 2011

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Evgeny Rukhin Composition with Containers, Icons and Red Line, 1975 Canvas, mixed media, collage: 68.5 x 65 Signed: E.Rukhin 75 Provenance: From the collection of James Butterwick

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Evgeny Rukhin Composition with Latin Figures and Corners, 1975 Canvas, mixed media, collage: 68.5 x 65 Signed: E. Rukhin 75 Provenance: Rukhin Foundation Published: Darsalia, Svetlana (ed.) Rukhin, Lev (ed.), Evgeny Rukhin from the series Avant-garde on the Neva:Avant-garde, 2009

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Edward Steinberg Composition, 1972 Oil on canvas: 89 x 89 Signed: ES 72 Provenance: From the collection of Alexander Gleizer Exhibited: “Russian avant-garde from Moscow-73” Galerie Dina Vierny, Paris, 1973 “Progressive Tendencies in Moscow 1957-70”, Museum of Bochum, Germany, 1974 ‘Bulldozer’, Moscow, 1974 Published: Freedom is Freedom: Nonconformist Art, 1953-1974: Art – XXI Century, 2008 Unofﬁcial Art from the Soviet Union, Igor Golomshtock (ed.), Alexander Glezer (ed.), London: Secker & Warburg, 1977

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Victor Pivovarov Blue Composition, 1974 Plywood, enamel: 169 x 130 Signed: On reverse Provenance: Private collection, Switzerland

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Vladimir Nemukhin Starfire, 1992 Canvas, acrylic, collage: 130 x 118 Signed: Vl.Nemukhin 92 Provenance: ABA Gallery

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Francisco Infante-Arana White on White, 1965

Paper, tempera: 101.5 x 49.5 Signed: Infante 1965 Provenance: Private collection, Switzerland Published: Infante, Francisco. Artefact. Retrospective, Moscow: State Centre of Modern Art, Moscow, 2004 Francisco Infante Monograph, Moscow: State Centre of Modern Art, Moscow, 1999

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Francisco Infante-Arana

The Beginning of Unease, 1965 Paper, tempera: 101.5 x 49 Signed: Infante 1965 Provenance: Private collection, Switzerland Published: Infante, Francisco. Artefact. Retrospective, Moscow: State Centre of Modern Art, Moscow, 2004 Francisco Infante Monograph, Moscow: State Centre of Modern Art, Moscow, 1999

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Andrei Grosizky The Wheel, 1985 Oil on canvas: 110 Ń&#x2026; 90 Provenance: Sandmann Gallery, Berlin Published: Labyrinth: Neue Kunst aus Moskau, Hamburg: Cocon, 1989 Hauswedell & Nolte Auction catalogue, 1989

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Nikolay Vechtomov The Road, 1983 Oil on canvas: 123.5 x 189.5 Provenance: From the collection of Igor Tsukanov Published: Kuskov, Sergey “Nikolay Vechtomov”, Paris-Moscow-New York: Third Wave, 1998

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Oleg Tselkov Wrapped, 1979 Oil on canvas: 236 х 100.5 Signed: On reverse Provenance: From the collection of Nika Hulton, USA; Aktis Gallery, London Exhibited: Salon des Artistes Français 1980 Published: Aleshkovsky Y., Bosquet A., Tselkov O., Milan: Le Grandi Monografie, Pittori d’Oggi, 1988

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Vladimir Yankilevsky Through Time II, 1994 Paper, pastel, gouaches, pencil, collage: 49.5 x 194 Signed: V.Yankilevsky 94 Provenance: Vladimir Yankilevsky, Aktis Gallery, London Published: Yankilevsky, Vladimir (ed.), Aktis Gallery (ed.), Anatomy of Taste, Paris: Somogy Ă&#x2030;ditions dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Art, 2009

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Vladimir Yankilevsky Composition from the series Space and Experience, 1981 Oil on canvas: 94.5 x 127.5 Provenance: From the collection of Alexandr Reznikov Published: Moscow Underground: Abstract paintings of the 60s from the collection of Alexandr Reznikov, Moscow: 2012

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William Brui Unified Fields, 1972 Paper on canvas, acrylic: 109 x 75.5 Signed: William Brui Provenance: Private collection, London

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Detail: Semyon Faibisovich, Grating and its shadow, from the series My Yard, 2012

Natasha Arendt Chicken God, 2012 Oil on canvas: 66.5 x 62.5 Signed: N Arendt Koktebel 2012 Provenance: Gift of the artist

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Natasha Arendt Composition, 2011 Wood, oil, mixed media, collage: 121.5 x 76 Signed: N.Arendt 2011 Provenance: Gift of the artist

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Yury Kuper Frozen Flowers No.3 Oil on canvas, painting on glass: 89 x 113 Signed: Y.Kuper Provenance: Our Artists Gallery Published: Vickery, Joanna (ed.) Frozen Dreams: Contemporary Art from Russia, London: Thames and Hudson, 2011

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Maxim Kantor Dirty Sheet, 2001 Oil on canvas: 125 x 206 Signed: Maxim Provenance: Gift of the artist Published: Maxim Kantor New Empire, Bramsche: Rasch Verlag, 2006

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Semyon Faibisovich Cupboard from the series My Yard, 2012 Oil on canvas, mixed media: 205 x 145 Signed: SF 12 Provenance: Regina Gallery

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Semyon Faibisovich Grating and its shadow from the series My Yard, 2012 Oil on canvas, mixed media: 202 x 150 Signed: SF12 Provenance: Regina Gallery

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I would like to thank the following for their invaluable help and support during the bookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creation, Sergei Stolyarov Polina Stolyarova Mikhail Alshibaya Alexander Borovsky Alexander Rappaport Sasha Gusov John E. Bowlt Yana Kobeleva Igor and Natalya Tsukanov Natasha Arendt William Brui Alexander Kan Natasha Kurnikova Semyon Faibisovich Nadegda Totskaya Vladimir Ovcharenko Natasha Louis Victor Pivovarov Vladimir Yankilevsky Sergei Aleksandrov Maxim Kantor ...and everyone else who I have forgotten to mention; without their help this book would not have come into light.

Flying in the Wake of Light Irina Stolyarova Collection ISBN 978-0-9566939-2-1 ÂŠ Irina Stolyarova, 2014 London All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without any permission of Irina Stolyarova. All artwork dimensions specified in cm. General Editor: John E. Bowlt Sub-Editor: Alexander Kan Text: John E. Bowlt, Alexander Borovsky, Alexander Rappaport English Translation: Alexander Kan Design: Design Devision, Polina Pakhomova and Regina Souli Fine Art Photography and Colour Correction: Roy Fox Photography: Sasha Gusov (p.4) Printed in Italy: EBS, Verona