KOLLEKTSIA! – THE FINAL VIEW

Our International Editor Simon Hewitt has been reporting on Russian Contemporary Art since 2007, travelling from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok in the process. Here he delivers his judgment on the juggernaut Pompidou Centre exhibition Kollektsia! Contemporary Art in the USSR & Russia 1950-2000 that has just closed in Paris after a six-month run.

The opening of the Kollektsia! exhibition in Paris on 13 September 2016 was one of those blockbuster social events in which the Russian art fraternity delights. Many of its seventy featured artists jetted in from Moscow. It was a good time to renew old acquaintances, less so for viewing works of art. I returned five months later for a quieter look, just after the original 250-work exhibition had received a further 100 pieces.

Kollektsia! was assembled under the auspices of the Potanin Foundation, launched in 1999 to support culture and education by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest men. In 2001 he became a Trustee of the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2003 he was made Chairman of Trustees at the St Petersburg Hermitage. In 2007 he was created an Officer of the Order of Arts & Literature by the French Ministry of Culture.

There were high hopes that a show at one of Europe’s top museums, with such a major backer, would snap Western art-lovers out of their indifference to Russian contemporary art. But the exhibition’s very title suggested that might be tough.

‘Kollektsia’ (Collection) would sound fatuously banal were it not accompanied by a self- important exclamation-mark, borrowed from the RUSSIA! exhibition held at the New York and Bilbao Guggenheims in 2005/6 (with Vladimir Potanin as Co-Chairman of the ‘Leadership Committee’).

RUSSIA! justified its exclamation-mark with some of the finest works by 130 Russian artists down the centuries. Kollektsia! featured the work of about 70 artists – hardly any of them represented by their finest work.

This was no ‘collection’ in the usual sense of the word, lovingly amassed over a number of years – but an array of works hurriedly acquired on a shoestring budget, and beefed up by donations from artists and collectors. The reason? The Pompidou Centre claimed to have no space for a lending exhibition before 2020, whereas an exhibition of works donated to the museum could be swiftly slotted in.

The subtitle Contemporary Art in the USSR & Russia 1950-2000 was equally misleading, and not just because the word ‘contemporary’ is superfluous when dates are specified.

Referring to the USSR wrongly suggested the exhibition included works from territories not part of today’s Russian Federation; it was, in fact, obsessed with artists from Moscow. (The celebrated Norton Dodge Collection of Russian Post-War Art, in contrast, includes numerous works from Soviet Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine.)

Then, it is barmy for the word ‘contemporary’ to include 1950 but not 2016. The 2000 cut- off point was bizarre (and often ignored). It exuded self-censorship, chosen to avoid any political controversy capable of displeasing the leadership of Russia in place since the start of the millennium.

Yet Russian art has long been heavily political. The story of Russian contemporary art is not complete without reference to the headline-grabbing Piotr Pavlensky and Pussy Riot; the irreverence of Vasily Slonov, which helped get Marat Guelman kicked out of Perm; or the satirical textiles of Gluklya, widely admired at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

To balance the spurious end-point of 2000, the organizers had to settle on an equally rounded starting-point – hence the choice of 1950. But this wrongly implied the exhibition would feature works painted during Stalin’s reign, when Alexander Deneika was still going strong; in fact, the earliest works on show came from 1957. It is worth noting that the earliest works in the great Dodge and Ludwig collections of Soviet Art date from 1956 and 1958 respectively.

SNAKING THROUGH THE GALLERIES

Kollektsia! was held on the fourth floor of the Pompidou Centre, part of which was boarded up due to a massive renovation programme marking the building’s 40 th anniversary. Visitors were greeted by a grimacing 1989 Lenin by Dmitry Vrubel & Victoria Timofeyeva. Lenin’s Mausoleum , playfully made of dominoes by Yuri Avvakumov in 2008, occupied the ‘high altar’ position at the far end of the 60-yard corridor that ran the length of the show. There was even a 2005 Blue Noses video of an actor impersonating Lenin Turning In His Coffin (a cardboard-box) for 9 minutes 25 seconds.

Kollektsia’s approach to political art, then, was embodied by a man who died over ninety years ago, with all reference to Russia’s current leaders eschewed. That was misleading and depressing. This persistent Lenin fixation is one reason why Russian contemporary art arouses so little interest around the globe.

Despite its specific dateline, the exhibition made no attempt to place works in their historical or political context. There was scant logic as to their presentation, which occupied twenty or so halls of varying sizes – some numbered, others not (with the numbers running bafflingly from 2 to 33). The wall of one side of the main corridor was left mainly blank and topped by plastic sheeting. The ugliness was reinforced by the murky lighting generated by cheap neon tubes dangling high above the works. Such abject display conditions would have embarrassed a small-town museum in La France Profonde : it felt like something between a building-site and a morgue.

One particularly arid room near the start was dominated by 36 photographs from Komar & Melamid’s 1977 Catalogue of Super-Objects , shown in Paris by Benoît Sapiro in 2007. Opposite lurked the Blue Noses, a tandem who originate from western Siberia but have long integrated the Moscow mainstream. Their irreverent sixth-form humour has its Pythonesque moments, although its status as art is a matter of taste. Their videos and photos included their elaborately staged Era Of Mercy photograph of two Russian soldiers embracing in the snow surrounded by silver birch trees, taken in 2005 but here in a 2017 reprint that made further mockery of the exhibition dateline. This iconic homosexual image was the nearest Kollektsia! came to challenging the prurient diktats of the Motherland.

Several halls were devoted to Dmitry Prigov (1940-2007), one of the most versatile Moscow Conceptualists. I was fortunate to meet him shortly before his death; he chatted to me in a modest, matter-of-fact way about his incarceration in a mental hospital under Gorbachov. Prigov was a witty wordsmith with an aesthetic approach to lettering all his own. This was apparent in his large Glasnost corner installation of paint and newspapers, but – with the exception of a Bouquet of flowers made from rolled up paper and tape – Kollektsia’s earnest, archival display had none of the visual panache generated by Katya Degot in her superb Prigov retrospective at the MMoMA (Moscow Museum of Modern Art) in 2008.

The exhibition then shifted zanily back to the 1960s, with an early Roginsky, beneath 1970s wooden reliefs by Shelkovsky, opposite 1990s abstractions by Zlotnikov and, around the corner, a host of paintings by the neo-Suprematist Edik Steinberg, dating from 1963 to 2010 (sic) . There were too many of them for a city that has been weened for years on the copious helpings of Steinberg dished out by his gallerist Claude Bernard.

Another artist was showcased even more spectacularly: Vladimir Yankilevsky – who not only had a room all to himself, but some spotlights to go with it, ensuring this was the only part of Kollektsia! to be properly lit. The room included four 1963 male portraits where one would have sufficed, as well as a giant 2013 triptych that should have been time-barred.

A tasteful section next door featured drawings, photographs and a 1962 kinetic sculpture by the elegantly inventive Francisco-Infante, accompanied by understated abstract drawings from the late 1950s: some psychedelic – by Mikhnov-Voitenko; others monochrome – three drawings by Turetsky acquired from Igor Markin.

The exhibition then lurched into another room starring Komar & Melamid, this time associated with Sots Art companions Boris Orlov and Grisha Bruskin (to be featured at this year’s Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale), who had donated seven plaster figures from his 1985 series Birth of a Hero .... one of them brandishing a portrait of Lenin.

The irreverent Moscow groups Mukhomor (‘Toadstool’) and Medical Hermeneutics Inspectorate were generously granted rooms of their own. Of greater historic interest was a work by the youthful Mikhail Fedorov-Roshal, salvaged from the legendary open- air exhibition at Belyayevo, bulldozed by the KGB in 1974.

The relentless emphasis on Moscow was interrupted by a small, boldly coloured array of works from Leningrad acquired from Paris collector Paquita Escofet-Miro, who worked in Russia in the 1980s and was on intimate terms with most of the artists concerned. Many of these works feature in the delightful 2013 catalogue of her collection, Underground , and were shown at the splendid exhibition she organized at Door Studios in Paris in 2010. That, and the Glasnost show at London’s Haunch of Venison the same year, showed the cheerful, provocative, whimsical, eye-pleasing nature of so much Russian contemporary art – qualities also in evidence at the excellent shows staged by the Ekaterina Foundation in 2011 and Igor Tsukanov at the Saatchi Gallery in 2012... yet in short supply amidst the drab, plodding self-importance of Kollektsia!

With typical generosity, Paquita also donated four works to Kollektsia! for free, including a giant 3 x 4m theatre curtain designed by Konstantin Latyshev in 1988. She had been thinking for a while about parting with works from her collection, and the London auction-house which turned her down a couple of years ago – on the lines that ‘no one is interested in this sort of thing’ – must be kicking themselves.

An adjacent gallery featured works by three of the biggest names in Russian art today: Valery Koshlyakov, Sasha Ponomaryov and AES+F. All deserved better. Koshlyakov, whose skill and creativity in a vast range of media is unsurpassed since Picasso, was represented by his 1995 tempera-on-cardboard view of the Moscow Ministry of Foreign Affairs – a politically correct choice if ever there was one. But not, I suspect, the choice of the rebellious Koshlyakov himself, whose interest in high-rise buildings is underpinned by an encyclopaedic knowledge of architectural history.

Ponomaryov, who recently launched himself into the South Seas as team walrus of the unlikely Antarctic Biennale, first wowed Paris a decade ego by plopping a psychedelic submarine into a fountain in the Tuileries Gardens; it later turned up in the Grand Canal in Venice. He is a man at ease with giant installations: surely the Pompidou Centre could have arranged for him to join Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle in the adjacent Stravinsky Fountain for a few months, instead of restricting him to some tiny submarine drawings?

AES+F also shot to fame a decade ago, when they featured alongside Ponomaryov at the 2007 Venice Biennale in the Russian Pavilion curated – like Kollektsia! – by Olga Sviblova, founder of Moscow’s magnificent Multimedia Art Museum. AES+F revolutionized video art and, for a number of years, were the hottest Russian property on the international art market. To find them represented at Kollektsia! not by a video but by their 1997 Suspect series – 14 photographs of teenage girls, seven of them murderesses – was a huge let- down, especially as, to achieve optimum impact, the series requires circular not rectangular walls.

Its February revamp saw Kollektsia! gain an extra room – promptly devoted to 1980s ‘Paper Architecture.’ Whether or not this theme was chosen to enable gifted self- publicist Yuri Avvakumov to get himself into a third room at the show, Paper Architecture was a curiously Russian phenomenon that has its place in any survey of Russian post-war art. But it is misleading to cite its leading exponent, Alexander Brodsky, without referring to his three-dimensional works – most effectively displayed at Marat Guelman’s stupendous Pусское Бедное (Russian Arte Povere ) show in 2007 – an object lesson in how to create an intriguing and eye-pleasing exhibition from largely monochrome works.

There was no discernible theme or coherency to the lengthy corridor running the length of the exhibition. Sergei Mironenko was afforded more importance than he deserved, Viktor Pivovarov less. There was a wonderful 1962 abstraction by Masterkova and an all- white 1975composition by Alexander Yulikov that suggested an intriguing connection to Zero Art. Kabakov was timidly represented, Eric Bulatov by Slava KPSS, with its glimpse of blue sky barred by blood-red block capitals declaiming ‘Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’

OK, this was a slightly smaller 2005 copy of Bulatov’s 1975 original that sold for £1.08m at Phillips in 2008. But still. A Big Bulatov. Surely it merited better than hovering aimlessly along a bleak stretch of corridor wall? Opposite was I Bite America – a sharply-contrasted, black-and-white 1997 photograph of a naked, dog-impersonating Oleg Kulik chained up in a cage. It cried out for juxtaposition with Bulatov’s caged-in view of the sky.

Thought-provoking juxtapositions at Kollektsia! were in short supply. The exhibition virtually drowned in the Pompidou’s oceans of white wallspace – better suited to the monumental scale of Socialist Realism than the intimate dimensions of Non-Conformist works, which often had to be stored under the bed and, when occasionally displayed, crammed next to one another on the walls of a tiny flat.

Kollektsia! was sadly lacking a Degot, a Gelman, a Borovsky or a Bown to throw a bit of flair and lateral-thinking into its presentational mix. Inexperienced co-curator Nicolas Liucci-Gutnikov, a protégé of Pompidou boss Bernard Blistène, had few obvious credentials for the job. Olga Sviblova’s considerable expertise lies in photography and video, and is best showcased in single-artist exhibitions. Much of her energy was channelled into cajoling artists and collectors into donating works or selling them at friendly prices, though few seem to have parted with anything important.

You would have expected the Potanin Foundation – not short of a billion bob or two – to fill in the gaps and ensure the ensemble was of international museum quality. Not a bit of it. The entire exhibition was reportedly insured for €6m – about the value of a quarter of one of the Kandinskys featured in the RUSSIA! show. The gaps in Kollektsia! were so glaring they made you wince.

A LACK OF JOIE DE VIVRE

French-born, Moscow-based collector Pierre Brochet, who donated the Kulik photo to Kollektsia! and sold its organizers Pavel Pepperstein’s 2005 Joan of Arc , was up in arms at the exhibition’s failure to include Dubosarsky & Vinogradov – the duo whose kitschy, humorous, candy-toned canvases were the toast of tussovka Moscow from the mid- 1990s until 2008.

The organizers, he explained, ‘wanted to show that Russian contemporary art is underground and conceptual.’ As a result, he felt, the show was ‘very boring.’

‘When I arrived in Moscow in 1989, Russian art was full of colour and joie de vivre ’ he added. ‘This fun side has completely disappeared in Kollektsia! ’

Dubosarsky & Vinogradov were among the 21 artists in the New Rules collection that Brochet assembled and, with no little entrepreneurial flair, took on a tour of the Russian provinces in 2008. The collection was later sold to Roman Abramovich – who, says Brochet, has never been reticent about lending works to exhibitions when asked, but whose non-involvement in Kollektsia! was easy to understand: ‘Potanin couldn’t buy from Abramovich, and Abramovich didn’t want to be second to Potanin.’

There were far more shocking absences from Kollektsia! than Dubosarsky & Vinogradov, mind you: Oleg Tselkov, Dmitry Plavinsky, Oleg Vasiliev, Semyon Faibisovich, Alexei Sundukov, Vladimir Weisberg and Gely Korzhev, to name but seven.

Oleg Tselkov has lived in Paris since the late 1970s. He is one of the most unusual and overpowering artists the world has seen. His works routinely lord it over Christie’s Russian Sale previews and his Last Supper is Russia’s greatest post-war painting. Igor Tsukanov owns numerous fine Tselkovs; Vladimir Seminikhin’s Ekaterina Foundation staged a sumptuous Tselkov show in 2013. Both men had the taste and means to ensure Tselkov was present at Kollektsia! , but appear to have thought the best person to stump up a Tselkov was Tselkov himself.

Olga Schmitt, Tselkov’s stepdaughter and agent, was having none of it. ‘We were told to give – not sell, give – some of Oleg’s major paintings from the 1960s and 1970s’ she informed me. ‘We have no reason to make such a gift! The show at Pompidou is n’importe quoi – a real salade russe !’

After likening Kollektsia! to a ‘hold-up’ she added, in apparent reference to Tsukanov, Seminikhin and others: ‘No collectors agreed to give any of Oleg’s paintings, saying they wanted to keep them, which is nice.’

I have a hunch that the many of the modest artists in Kollektsia! , and possibly its timid curators, will have been happy to escape the shadow of the mighty Tselkov.

His Last Supper starred at Benoît Sapiro’s groundbreaking Second Avant-Garde show in Paris in 2007, and has twice been shown by Igor Tsukanov at the Saatchi. Tsukanov strove to convince Tate Modern to acquire the work, without success (what people at the Tate know about East European art could be written on the back of a postage- stamp).

Vladimir Potanin’s failure to ensure Tselkov’s presence in the Pompidou Centre is equally deplorable, and deprived Kollektsia! of artistic credibility.

Pretty much the same could be said about the absence of Erik Bulatov’s long-time colleague and stylistic soul-mate, Oleg Vasiliev.

And where were the rebellious giants from the early days of Non-Conformism, like Ely Belyutin, Anatoly Zverev or Mikhail Grobman?

How could Kollektsia! ignore Alexander Tyshler (1898-1980), a Non-Conformist long before the term was coined, whose quietly subversive artistic output spanned almost the entire Communist era?

There was no place in Kollektsia’s bleak, earnest, self-conscious world for lyrical Figurative artists like Sitnikov, Sveshnikov, Kharitonov, Basyrov or Kropivnitskaya.

There was no place for the Abstract art of Dybsky, Vechtomov, Vulokh or Chubarov.

There was no place for the great tradition of Soviet collage, espoused and wittily transformed by Anatoly Brusilovsky and Piotr Belyonok.

There was no place for the Surrealist fun of Igor Novikov, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Leonid Purygin or Mikhail Shemyakin.

There was no place for the Still Lifes of Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, no place for the Draughtsmanship of Dmitri Lion, no place for the Videos of Blue Soup, no place for the Sculpture of Alexander Ney, no place for an Installation by Alexander Konstantinov, and no place for the Pop Art of Lev Nussberg or Sergei Shutov.

There was no place for Aidan, Badanina, Batynkov, Gorokhovsky, Kuper, Mylnikov, Nasyodkin, Osmolovsky, Putilin, Shablavin, Spindler, Tabenkin, Zatulovskaya, Nikolai Ovchinnikov or Avdei Ter-Oganyan.

There was no place, in the single room assigned to St Petersburg, for Evgeny Rukhin – yet how do you evoke Leningrad art without him? And there was no mention here of Assa , of Kino or of Viktor Tsoy....

There was no place for the provinces. No place for Estonia’s Ülo Sooster. No place for Stravropol’s Piotr Gorban. No place for Buryatia’s Zorikto Dorzhiev. No place for Alexander Pyrkov from Vladivostok, Russia’s greatest living Abstract artist. And no place for Vitaly Drozdov from Khabarovsk, Russia’s greatest living Figurative artist.

And, of course, no place – not even for the sake of completeness – for the period’s most popular artists: Ilya Glazunov and Zurab Tsereteli, like them or not.

Not helped by the absence of catalogue – due to be published only in mid-April, long after the Lord Mayor’s Show – Kollektsia! made no attempt to place the art it showed in historic context. There was nothing about Sotheby’s Perestroika auction in Moscow in July 1988, which changed the lives and mood of the city’s artistic life for ever, or about Khruschov’s visit to the Manezh in 1962, when he lambasted contemporary art in an epic slanging-match with sculptor Ernst Neizvestny.

Neizvestny died only last August. Needless to say, he was not featured in Kollektsia!

GIVEAWAYS

Ira Waldron, the Paris-based Russian artist represented in the Tretyakov and the Russian Museum, offered me a thoughtful appraisal of Kollektsia!

Although she believed it ‘can only be a good thing that a major museum is taking an interest in Russian art,’ she found the exhibition ‘disappointing in several respects,’ adding:

‘A normal Pompidou show would include top-quality works lent from all over the place, whereas here they only showed their own acquisitions – many obtained through gifts rather than through purchases by the museum itself. Several major artists were totally neglected. For the artists who were exhibited, there were not many masterpieces. I was pleased to learn that they had acquired works from many of my friends but, for an artist, it is far preferable to sell works to a museum than to give them away.’

Russian contemporary art remains ignored and under-priced on the international market, and Kollektsia! is unlikely to kickstart interest. ‘What is most needed is more domestic support’ says William MacDougall, Co-Director of MacDougall Auctions.

With characteristic generosity, William called Kollektsia! ‘exciting,’ but deemed the Triennale held at the Garage in Moscow this Spring ‘probably more important for the Russian Contemporary Art market.’

CONFRONTING THE NEW ESTABLISHMENT

It is perceived wisdom among the Moscow artistic élite that Non-Conformist art is so self-evidently superior to ‘official’ art that they are mutually exclusive and cannot be shown together.

This view is intolerant nonsense – designed to promote a misleading, and dishonest, art historical narrative that suits the egos, careers and commercial interests of those who propagate it. (Such an approach, incidentally, has never been shared in St Petersburg.)

There is one Russian post-war artist who is not a Non-Conformist but whose best works (invariably sold privately rather than at auction or in gallery shows) cost nearly as much as Kabakov’s: Geli Khorzev (1925-2012).

Because Khorzhev worked in a Figurative style that is dismissed in curatorial circles as old-fashioned, his work is virtually unknown to the Western public. But – like Deneika from the inter-war period – Korzhev offers post-war proof that it was not impossible for a Soviet artist to be both mainstream and a genius.

Khorzev was the stand-out figure from a group of artists whose Realism was more Courbet than Socialist and who, in the 1960s, under the epithet Суровый Cтиль (‘Severe Style’), rebelled against State aesthetics in a less provocative but equally powerful way as the Non-Conformists.

Korzhev was the best of these artists, ahead of Viktor Ivanov, Dmitry Zhilinsky, Tair Salakov and Viktor Popkov. They have returned to the spotlight since 2011 at Moscow’s admirable Institute of Russian Realist Art. It would have been right and proper to find them at the Pompidou Centre.

The first curator to confront ‘Conformist’ and Non-Conformist art on a meaningful scale was Poland’s Piotr Nowicki in Summer 1994, in an exhibition wittily entitled NO! and the Conformists that opened at the National Museum in Warsaw before moving to the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. A show with similar intent was staged at the Russian Museum in 2006, called Times of Change: Art in the Soviet Union 1960-85 . It was sponsored by Vladimir Seminikin’s Ekaterina Foundation, and featured works of higher quality.

The catalogues of both exhibitions are essential reference works for anyone seeking a rounded history of Russian contemporary art. Curator Evgenia Petrova wrote in her 2006 catalogue introduction that ‘the bitter confrontations between the conservatives and the radicals have now disappeared into the past.’ The nature of Kollektsia! suggests that was wishful thinking – although the rôles have been reversed. Yesterday’s radicals now form Russia’s artistic establishment.

The quirky New Angelarium show at the MMoMA in 2007, when 150 artists were invited to submit works with an angel theme, is the nearest Moscow has come to simultaneously presenting works spanning the full range of the artistic spectrum.

A couple of books also refuse to tow the line about the insuperable Official /Non- Conformist divide. Germany’s Peter Ludwig, one of the greatest collectors of art from the USSR, did not confine his purchases solely to Non-Conformists – as (Non)Conform: Russian & Soviet Art 1958-1995 , a meaty tome published in 2007, makes lavishly clear.

The best work on the subject in Russia was published in 2012 by the inevitable Russian Museum. Its title – No Barriers: Russian Art 1985-2000 – was equally pointed. Works owned by Igor Tuskanov and Vladimir Seminikhin were among those featured. These most active and influential collectors of Russian contemporary art were also cited among the leading supporters of Kollektsia! , even though the exhibition seemed closer to the tastes of, say, Stella Kesaeva than their own.

In fact, Kollektsia! featured so few of their major works that I reckon Igor and Vladimir must have kept themselves at arm’s length from the project, proffering just enough of their hallmark munificence to earn the gratitude of the French government.

At a ceremony at the French Embassy in Moscow on March 23, they joined Vladimir Potanin and Olga Sviblova as recipients of the Légion d’Honneur – for enabling the Pompidou Centre to become, in the words of Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, ‘Europe’s greatest depository of Russian contemporary art.’

IGOR TSUKANOV – OLGA SVIBLOVA – VLADIMIR SEMINIKHIN – VLADIMIR POTANIN

Ten days later, on April 2, Kollektsia! closed without a whimper – or, alas (the Pompidou Centre being on strike), a visitor.

There is talk of further acquisitions. Unless these are made with greater means and discernment, giving more balance and integrity to this purported survey of Russian contemporary art, the ‘depository’ is where Kollektsia! deserves to remain – consigned to the dustbin of art history. 

ANDREI FILIPPOV : LAST SUPPER (1989)