Mr. Sveshnikov (1927-1998) returned to Moscow in the 1950s, where he became a book illustrator and painter. He is represented in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union, made up of work by artists who did not practice or endorse the state-sanctioned
Socialist Realism. A selection of his art is currently on view alongside that of another nonconformist artist, Vladimir Nemukhin, in “Embodied Dreams: The Later Work of Boris Sveshnikov” and “Vladimir Nemukhin: Works on Paper” at the Jane Voorhees
Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick.
Mr. Sveshnikov’s work is morbid and haunting. Graveyards, gravestones, skeletons, ghosts and barbed-wire fences populate his ink-on-paper drawings. The work retains a strong quality of draftsmanship; the spooky illustrations of the American artist
Edward Gorey come to mind, except that Mr. Sveshnikov’s visions presumably originate in real, rather than imagined, horrors.
In “Dead Road,” from 1982, an attenuated, skeletal figure stands next to what looks like an old log road — except, instead of logs, the road is lined with human bodies. An untitled drawing from 1981 features a walled courtyard and a spotlighted figure — maybe a shadow, maybe a ghost. On the other side of the wall is a ramshackle graveyard.
Paintings created with divisionist dots, like those of the Post-Impressionist
Georges Seurat, have the same illustrative quality, and their palette is limited to a wan mixture of lavender, blue and sickly yellow-green. Gaunt faces loom from landscapes; twisted metal bed frames are stacked like ad hoc sculpture — or torture devices.
An exhibition of Mr. Sveshnikov’s earlier work, from the 1940s through the 1960s, was mounted at the Zimmerli in 2008. You can see in the catalog for the earlier show, which is displayed alongside books by authors sentenced to the Gulag (
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”; Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales”; and an earlier prison narrative,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Memoirs from the House of the Dead”) how Mr. Sveshnikov moved from a folksy Surrealism informed by old masters like
Albrecht Dürer and
Hieronymous Bosch into darker, more morose territory.
Vladimir Nemukhin’s biography and work are somewhat less dramatic (and less depressing). Born in Moscow in 1925, he worked in a factory and studied with Piotr Sokolov, an assistant to
Kasimir Malevich, the famed Russian avant-garde painter. In the 1950s, when repression and censorship eased during Khrushchev’s thaw, he was exposed to the work of
Jasper Johns and
Robert Rauschenberg. Later he was involved with the Lianozovo Group, which mounted an exhibition in Moscow in 1967 that was shut down by the K.G.B. after two hours and denounced in the press as “ideological sabotage.”
Mr. Nemukhin’s works on paper, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, traffic heavily in the idiom of Abstract Expressionism, while also borrowing from Rauschenberg’s collage elements. “Playing Old Maid at the Beach” from 1966 includes both an actual playing card glued to the paper and painted card-fragments lined up along the shoreline. Earlier works, like a small graphite drawing from around 1946 to 1947, “Still Life with Fish,” owe a heavy debt to Cubism, while a gouache and watercolor from 1970, “Done in Sorrow on Hearing of the Death of J.F.K.,” conjures socio-political questions. (For instance, when exactly did Mr. Nemukhin hear about Kennedy’s death?)
Neither Mr. Sveshnikov’s nor Mr. Nemukhin’s paintings and drawings look particularly radical to contemporary eyes. They must be placed in their proper context, which is the large — more than 20,000 works — collection of nonconformist art donated to the museum in 1991 by the Dodges, from which these exhibitions are drawn. A timeline leading into the galleries details the activities of nonconformist artists, who exhibited in private apartments or had their exhibitions shut down by the government. For instance, the “Bulldozer Exhibition” in 1974 — the show’s actual title was the “First Fall Open-Air Show of Paintings” — gives you an accurate idea of its ultimate fate.
One also senses a bit of Cold War ideology at work in the makeup of the Dodge Collection. After all, Europeans in the 1950s and 1960s accused the United States of also having a state-sponsored aesthetic, in the form of Abstract Expressionism, and later Pop Art. After the upheavals of the 1960s, in which mediums like video and performance were embraced, America had its own breed of nonconformist artists: they were called painters.
Mr. Sveshnikov and Mr. Nemukhin are but two voices within the din of 20th-century art and politics. Their work is provocative and psychologically probing, but it also shows how much these ideas depend on history and back story. Without the knowledge of Mr. Sveshnikov’s harrowing, youthful travails, his work might seem like more sullen, self-involved expressionism. And without knowing that Mr. Nemukhin was a nonconformist who confronted bulldozers, his works on paper might simply register as competent, mildly existential midcentury abstractions.
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