Yakov Chernikhov 1889-1951 The Soviet Piranesi A Major Collection of 47 Works Yakov Chernikhov 1889-1951 JAMES BUTTERWICK Alon Zakaim RUSSIAN AND EUROPEAN FINE ARTS Fine Art 34 Ravenscourt Rd. London W6 0UG 5-7 Dover St. London W1S 4LD +44 (0)20 8748 7320 +44 (0)20 7287 7750 [email protected] [email protected] www.jamesbutterwick.com www.alonzakaim.com 1 Front cover: from the series, Fundamentals of Modern Architecture (p. 48) Inside cover: detail, from the series, Pantheons of the Great Patriotic War (p. 32) Back inside cover: detail, from the series, Pantheons of the Great Patriotic War (p. 34) Current page: detail, from the series, Industrial Tales (p. 24) First published in London, 2018 by James Butterwick and Alon Zakaim Fine Art www.jamesbutterwick.com www.alonzakaim.com 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, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and the publishers. All images in this catalogue are protected by copyright and should not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. © 2018 James Butterwick and Alon Zakaim Fine Art Design by Maggie Williams Printed by C3 Imaging Published on the occasion of Yakov Chernikhov 1889-1951: The Soviet Piranesi, a selling exhibition of works by James Butterwick and Alon Zakaim Fine Art at Alon Zakaim Fine Art, 5-7 Dover St. London W1S 4LD from Wednesday 5 December 2018 until Monday 21 January 2019 2 Contents 4 Introduction James Butterwick 6 From Construction to Fantasy: The Architectural Drawings of Yakov Chernikhov in Context Alla Rosenfeld, Ph.D 22 Industrial Tales 28 Pantheons of the Great Patriotic War 36 Fundamentals of Modern Architecture 52 The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms 66 Aristografiya 106 The Course of Dimensional Art 128 Index 130 Further Reading 3 Introduction James Butterwick To find a cache of forty seven high quality works In the 1920s Chernikhov organised his own on paper by any Soviet avant-garde artist of Research and Experimental Laboratory of the 1920s must be considered a stroke of good Architectural Forms and methods of Graphic fortune. However, to find work by an artist with Art where he sought to teach a “lighter method the reputation and international standing of of the teaching of drawing and its laws”. The aim Yakov Chernikhov must be classed as a minor of this was not just to teach students the art of miracle. To give an idea of context, Yakov drawing but to strengthen their independence Chernikhov 1889-1951: The Soviet Piranesi is the of thought, a concept that ran contrary to Soviet first personal exhibition by any Russian avant- discipline and led to problems for the artist. garde artist in London for well over fifteen years. It is this independence of thought that marked Whilst Yakov Chernikhov (1889-1951) is, out the Russian avant-garde as a movement first and foremost, an architect, he is also a unique for its time. Chernikhov, the ‘architect- theoretician and the majority of this exhibition, composer’ believed that art could free the most nineteen works, come from the Aristografiya limited of minds – we hope that this exhibition series, showing this more theoretical side. provides a reminder of the glory of Russian art Chernikhov had his own system of teaching in the early years of the twentieth century and which he described as Eksprimatika (‘the best that visitors appreciate the breadth of talent of form of graphic expression’) and consisted of Yakov Chernikhov. working out the new principles of drawing based on symmetry, the rhythm and relationship between component parts, constructions and colours. These vignettes, icons for their time, highlight a brief period of artistic flowering in Soviet Russia before the onset of repression. 4 Yakov Chernikhov at the biological laboratory in the institute of the Red Army, Leningrad, 1924 5 I immersed myself in the most secret regions of invention and imagination, and discovered unknown treasures of images never seen.1 - Yakov Chernikhov 6 From Construction to Fantasy: The Architectural Drawings of Yakov Chernikhov in Context Alla Rosenfeld, Ph.D Yakov Chernikhov (1889-1951), one of the As Andrei Chernikhov, his grandson and greatest formal innovators of the Russian himself a noted architect pointed out, on the avant-garde2, epitomizes the many different one hand Yakov Chernikhov’s achievement was societal roles of an architect with his visionary a cosmopolitan one but on the other, he was architectural drawings, prolific writing on inherently a phenomenon of post-revolutionary architectural design theory and teaching. Russia.6 This essay will place the work of Chernikhov within the broader context of the In the 1920s and 30s, Chernikhov designed political and cultural conditions of Soviet Russia about fifty public and industrial projects across of the 1920s-30s. It will also situate him within the USSR. A talented graphic artist, who created the movement of Constructivism - one of the numerous drawings of utopian architecture, he most influential avant-garde developments in published six books between 1927 and 1933, the new Soviet State. which he illustrated himself, systematizing the rules of geometrical drawings and developing What is remarkable about the creative career of his own teaching program.3 Yakov Chernikhov is that his work maintained the experimental nature of avant-garde art As Chernikhov stated, he was trying “to establish within the context of strictly traditional the clear and precise basis for constructive architecture. Chernikhov was one of the very concepts and principles, and to elucidate their few professional architects in those years essence, their logic, their rules and their laws.”4 who openly declared that innovation was not Visual material published in Chernikhov’s a, “bonfire of the old culture.”7 Chernikhov books as well as his architectural drawings are rejected the Constructivist assertion that, “the unique in their aesthetic diversity and formal artistic heritage of the past is unacceptable.”8 As inventiveness. Many decades after his death, the Constructivist architect Aleksei Gan (1893- Chernikhov is now recognized as one of the 1942) stated in his 1922 book Constructivism: major Russian writers of architectural design “Without art, but by means of intellectual- theory of the period, despite his often being material production, the constructivist joins the severely criticized in the Soviet Press.5 proletarian order in the struggle with the past and the conquest of the future.”9 7 Yakov Chernikhov (centre) with classmates, Odessa School of Art, c.1910 Chernikhov had all the benefits of a solid Russian Artists. Excelling in realist landscapes, educational background with an artistic portraits, and genre scenes, they taught their development deeply rooted in the Symbolist students, including Chernikhov, to paint in movement. Chernikhov received his first art a representational manner, studying strict lessons from M.I. Sapozhnikov in the school of directives of composition and experimentation the city of Pavlograd, Ekaterinoslavl Province with painting techniques. In 1914, Chernikhov in Ukraine. Sapozhnikov painted symbolist moved to Petrograd and continued his studies works and was a devotee of the Swiss Symbolist at the Painting Department of the Petrograd painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), whose Academy of Art whilst, at the same time, pictures portray mythological, fantastical figures enrolling in the Pedagogical Institute. In 1916, along with classical architecture. Later in his Chernikhov transferred from the Academy’s career, in his Architectural Fantasies of the Painting to Architecture Department and from 1930s, Chernikhov established himself as an 1916 to 1926, he successfully combined military accomplished “artist-architect,” and symbolist service with teaching calligraphy and technical motifs can be found in his various graphic series, drawing in various schools in the Petrograd area. including his fantasies on historical themes. In 1922, Chernikhov resumed his formal In 1907, Chernikhov entered the Odessa School art education by entering the Architecture of Art, one of the best in the Russian Empire. Department at the Petrograd VKhUTEMAS Among his teachers were two important, (The Higher State Artistic-Technical realist artists of the South-Russian School, Workshops), as the Petrograd Academy of Kiriak Kostandi (1852- 1921) and Gennadii Arts was re-named.10 While at VKhUTEMAS, Ladyzhensky (1853-1916). In 1890, both became Chernikhov studied with Professor Leontii founding members of the Association of South Benua (1856-1928), one of the major architects 8 Yakov Chernikhov (second from right), Kiriak Kostandi (centre) and classmates, Odessa School of Art, c.1910 in St. Petersburg/Petrograd at the crux of the In post-Revolutionary years, many radical 19th/20th centuries, and a real connoisseur of the ideas on architectural design were related to an various architectural styles of the past.11 Benua already thriving modernist movement in the exerted the greatest influence on the young visual arts. Although in the 1920s Chernikhov Chernikhov who kept an autographed photo of declared himself neither a Constructivist nor his mentor in his office throughout his life. Even a Suprematist, it was undoubtedly Kazimir after the rise of the avant-garde, architectural Malevich’s experiments with non-objective studies under Benua’s direction remained forms that