EVA DI STEFANO

PETER’S GARDEN

A mountainside in eastern Spain is studded with hundreds of vibrant sculptures that reflect their maker’s profound relationship with the land

JO FARB HERNÁNDEZ

left: Head with a Dream, stones, paint, ceramic and terracotta tiles, over a structure of steel rods and wire-mesh (an infrastructure the artist used for many of his works)

opposite: a figure of painted concrete decorated with broken tiles and topped with a terracotta jug

all photos: © Jo Farb Hernández

Peter Buch was born in Frankfurt in September, 1938, as the Nazis consolidated their power over Germany. Soon, his leftist family, once relatively well-off, lost their wealth and social standing. Young Buch started school in the grim post-war years, but he was not a gifted student and quit by the age of 14 to work as a gardener. However, he was always interested in art and, a few years later, he enrolled in an art academy in Stuttgart to study painting. It did not go well, however; one teacher, demanding strict attention and self-restraint from his students, threw Buch out of the classroom due to his perceived lack of discipline, while a second insisted that the young artist should concentrate on acquiring technical skills rather than thinking creatively. By 21, Buch had had enough of art rules, and abandoned formal education for good.

Heading for Paris to become a “famous artist” – a goal that he has long since abandoned – he took a variety of menial jobs that neither provided economic security nor served as an outlet for his creativity. He moved in with a girlfriend, worked as a house painter, did some travelling, and by the mid-1960s had fallen in love with the Spanish island of Formentera. The couple moved there in 1970.

During this period, Buch painted for pleasure. He also built and carved the frames for his art, perhaps a precursor to an interest in sculpture. After a 1982 visit to California, which he later said inspired him to conjoin his life and art, he began experimenting with concrete, making sculptures of animals and figures. However, the response to this work was disappointing and he recalls selling just one piece during his time on the island.

By 1985, once again single, Buch travelled to the mainland planning to buy property – land speculation on the islands had caused property prices to rise steeply, and those without large inheritances or steady incomes were being squeezed out. In the picturesque mountain village of Pobla de Benifassà, in the eastern sierras of Valencia’s Castelló province, he bought and then extensively renovated a house. He affixed

The figure (above) and two creatures (below, left and right) are examples of the whimsical, fantasy characters that populate Buch’s Garden

The diverse scales and heights of the buildings and sculptures lead the visitor’s eye on a fascinating journey

bas-relief and tiled works to the walls and floors and installed sculptures and paintings, altering the property so radically that he challenged his neighbours’ ideas about what a living space could be. Buch also purchased an eight-acre parcel of hilly land outside of town, planning to garden among its scrub forests and abandoned grape and almond fields. However, for the next 19 years, he alternated his time between Formentera and Paris, only visiting Pobla de Benifassà occasionally, until 2007, when he moved there for good.

Although aware of the mainstream contemporary art world, Buch pays it little heed, and is not up-to-date with trends and genres. He saw the architecture of Antoni Gaudí during an early visit to Barcelona, but at the time still considered himself a painter so was not inspired to work with similar materials. Instead, he credits his California trip with the redirection of his artistic endeavours, and now freely references not only Gaudí, but Ferdinand Cheval (Le Palais Idéal, France), Raymond Isidore (La Maison Picassiette, France), the gardens of Niki de Saint-Phalle (such as the Giardino del Tarocchi, Italy, and Queen Califa’s Magic Circle, California), and the sixteenth-century Sacred Forest of Bomarzo, Italy. But the rocky landscape of Pobla became his true inspiration, and from 1991 he began to boldly transform the space with colour, form and texture.

Buch finds much of his raw material on site, and uses the distinct properties of the different stones to create a diverse range of both purely aesthetic and aesthetically functional works. Integrating his artistic expression with the land’s topography, he started to create sculptures and buildings using the fantastic, imagistic vocabulary he had developed as a painter. Always improvising, he used simple shovels, picks and trowels to build up walls with rocks, adding earth and stones to set them and smooth out the shapes. He then covered the structures with concrete, ornamenting the surfaces with pieces of broken tiles that he found or that friends brought him. When the first building or two collapsed, he learned to add metal supports and chicken wire within the walls and roofs to improve durability and stability; newer works show no cracks or movement. Now, the artist buys big bundles of ceramic tiles and pallets of concrete blocks and terracotta bricks, as the rapid pace of his work requires much more material than he could find or scrounge. However, when possible, he purchases overstocks or seconds to reduce costs.

The sculptor stresses that he never plans anything out: “That would be too boring,” he says. He prefers to work spontaneously, exploring a vague kernel of an

THE AMATEUR AND THE UNDERGROUND

Discredited by the state for anti-Soviet activity, a group of dissenting artists in the 1960s channelled their creative energy into the growth of Russian naïve art

JAMES YOUNG and TATYANA SINELNIKOVA

In the decade following Stalin’s death in March 1953, a gradual cultural relaxation occurred in Russia, a brief period of artistic freedom. Of course, this in no way resembled the freedom available to Western artists who were at liberty to explore the personal and political within the psyche of the post-war period. Nonetheless, there seemed to be a softening of the autocratic structures that constrained Russian society, a culture where individual thought and expression had been comprehensively and ruthlessly suppressed.

After the 1917 revolution, there was an intense push to create a new art for a new ideal society. The Socialist idea that personal leisure was an opportunity for people’s creativity was explored. It was the period of the avant garde, and this experimentalism extended to self-taught artists. Among the artistic intelligentsia there was great enthusiasm for the vivid and nonWesternised traditions of peasant culture. Many, like Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, believed the new proletarian art should be built on its foundations.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the idea of art education by correspondence emerged. Russia is vast and there were not enough artists to produce propaganda art for the decoration of public spaces. At the Russian State House of Folk Art, correspondence courses in painting and graphics were devised. At first, no-one thought painting could be taught by correspondence but the initiative was a success. All sorts of people – workers, housewives, prisoners, from all over the country – received training.

However, by 1934 – when the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution ‘On the restructuring of literary and artistic organisations’ – Socialist Realism became the only permissible ideological approach. Amateur artists were expected to conform to the subject matter and technique of professional artists who obeyed strict codes laid down by committee. Amateurism was not a means of self-expression as might be understood in the West, but part of an apparatus to create a new kind of human being, one whose consciousness had been ignited by communist ideals. Amateur art was strictly supervised. Titles of works by correspondence course graduates might include: A Working Group is Studying the Stalin Constitution; Young Lenin Listens to his Mother’s Piano; Comrade Stalin among Collective Farmers.

After Stalin’s death, his successor Nikita Khruschev famously denounced the personality cult surrounding the dictator. Fissures seemed to be appearing in the cultural deep freeze. The “Thaw” had begun. By 1960, the correspondence courses for amateurs had become part of a new independent organisation: The People’s Free University of the Arts by Correspondence (ZNUI).

In 1962, a group of avant-garde artists, believing the time to be right, put on an exhibition of contemporary painting exploring subject matter outside of the prevailing Soviet orthodoxy. When Khruschev saw “The New Reality” exhibition, he was appalled. He said to the artists: “Are you pederasts? ... What is hung here belongs in urinals ... It’s amoral ... Dog shit ... Art should ennoble the individual ... This is simply anti-Soviet.” Calling them “parasites”, he declared, “We are declaring war on you.” (Encounter magazine, London, April 1963).

After such devastating criticism, the “New Reality” artists could not promote their work. A criminal law was passed against “parasitism”. They resorted to exhibiting in secret, perhaps for one afternoon in an apartment, and then disappearing. An underground movement had begun. In order to maintain some pretence of adherence to Soviet precepts, a few of the artists became teachers at ZNUI. And so a strange union of the underground and the amateur, the forbidden and the marginalised, gave birth to Russian naïve art.

These art teachers did not want to tame the selftaught – on the contrary, they wanted to protect the amateurs’ individual vision. They believed that in every person there is a natural artist and that it was their job to help the students realise their capabilities. Education, in their opinion, could not be a systematic, step-by-step academic progression because intuitive, authentic creative integrity must not be dismembered.

The teachers abandoned traditional exercises such as drawing geometric volumes and plaster

left: Ivan Egorovich Selivanov, Lion, 1957, watercolour, pencil and whitewash on paper, 13 x 16 in. / 34 x 41 cm, courtesy: Moscow Museum of Modern Art

below, left: Pavel Petrovich Leonov, At the Factory, 1970s, oil on cardboard, 28 x 40.5 in. / 72 x 103 cm, courtesy: Moscow Museum of Modern Art

below: Vasily Tikhonovich Romanenkov, The Birth of the World, 2004, pencil and felt-tip pen on cardboard, 18 x 30 in. / 46 x 76 cm, courtesy: Collection Bogemskaia – Turchin

cast anatomy. They believed that mechanical copying achieved nothing, deprived the subject of its soul and negatively affected the artists’ subsequent work. They told students to compose still-lifes from their everyday environment – mugs, spoons, pots, cereals – items that would later become the main subject matter of many of the non-conformist artists who founded Sots Art (often called Soviet Pop Art). The underground teachers were proud of their method, however it was not widely adopted as it contradicted the entire system of Soviet education which was based on the principle of adherence to a single programme.

Although many ZNUI students made unexceptional work, some – frequently social outsiders – possessed a