Dissident art, anyone?

Having dabbled in some Russian avant-garde and non-conformists, and patchily followed news on recently censored art defaming institutions like the Church and Army, I was itching to explore first-hand the Russian dissidence in the visual arts. Hence my hunt for some dissident artists, the first unlikely stop for which was the Samara Regional Art Museum. Doubtful of finding anything dissident, I nevertheless decided to pursue it as the first point of reference, and tried to sniff out if any of the old lady curators would know a thing or two about Samara’s underground art tremors. The Regional Art Museum turned out an imposing institution with three-story Doric pillars, its exterior grandeur continuing indoors as I stepped into a polished marble hallway with arched Romanesque ceilings. I passed underneath a defunct metal detector and presented my bag to a security officer, who lazily rummaged in it with a stick. When I moved towards the X-ray scanner, he told me not to bother – it didn’t work. I concluded that all this airport security equipment must have been set out for special occasions. What if the President himself paid a sudden visit, completely unannounced? One must be always at their weapons. Unlike Moscow, Samara’s tourist attractions didn’t seem to have special rip-off prices for foreigners. If they had, the cashier didn’t consider me foreign enough to demand them, and I ended up paying the regular admission price of just over a dollar. Upon purchasing my ticket I encountered a bizarre commoditization of the museum experience where everything, although prohibited, was for sale. Photography was prohibited, but for fifteen rubles (about fifty cents) I could surely buy permission to photograph with flash. I bought the permission to photograph, which looked like a bureaucratic “vedomost” form on recycled gray paper, and diligently presented it to staff in every exhibit room. Alas, my efforts weren’t adequately visible as a passing tour guide demanded it in a haughty tone, “Young woman, do you have permission to photograph?!” Her inquiring voice rang through the gallery while her face tensed, ochre painted eyebrows arched in suspicious questioning and two ice blue eyes piercing me. I walked over and presented her with my permission, which she subjected to careful scrutiny, her tour group as witness, “You may go, you’re fine.” I rummaged about my bag for a safety pin and stuck the form to my shirt, turning into a complete doofus tourist.

The museum’s permanent collection began on the second floor where elderly staff, dressed in colorful summer robes, gossiped on shiny leather couches, occasionally glancing at rare visitors. I explored the exhibit in chronological order, beginning with stuffy 17th century artifacts and Russian gentry portraits, none from Samara. A plump woman with dyed hair cropped in short waves like my grandmother’s, informed me that Feodor Rokotov, the most famous and well-known portraitist of the 18th century, painted the dark immobile faces before me. Unimpressed with Rokotov’s opulence, I gravitated towards an unknown painting of a teen aristocrat tucked away in the corner. With its light color palette this portrait breathed freshness into the staid contemporary style, creating a fragile and awkward displacement of youth in the court setting. A bejeweled gray wig topped off by a delicate veil sat above the girl’s round face, which hadn’t lost its childhood plumpness. The court make-up of painted eyebrows, rouge cheeks and red lipstick was a somewhat grotesque contrast to her puffy eyelids and pouting lips. Heavy precious jewels weighed down her small juicy ear-lobes, while the too-large pearl choker constricted her stodgy neck that had yet to take on swan-like maiden contours. The girl’s slight frame of drooping shoulders and undeveloped chest were stuffed into a corseted blue dress with intricate white lacing and a large pink bow that unsuccessfully attempted to cover up its flatness. This flirty get-up reminded once again of her displacement into the grown-up world, endowing her with awkwardness and unease, which could also be felt in her gaze. She looked at me with her gray blue eyes, her mouth slightly pursed in reproach for this court mockery into which she was uncomfortably thrust. Her awkwardness was expressive, a refreshing breath of color amidst the dark opulent nobles around her.

In the early 19th century room I stumbled upon European pastorals painted by foreign artists, one of them named “Kiss” by Moller. The friendly staff lady explained that Moller was brought to the Emperor’s court, and marveled at the commercialization of art even in times of the “Kiss,” “This oeuvre here is painted by a very famous Italian artist who served in the imperial court. It was so popular among his patrons that Moller painted it over and over for different people. Now it hangs in many other museums!” The woman laughed, questioning the originality of art. Russian life was beginning to creep into these Western styles with Gagarin’s Portrait of Arnautovs becoming a perfect Russian play on the British genre of outdoors gentry portraits, where picturesque forests, houses and greyhounds were not artistic flimsy, but thought-through symbols of ownership and status. Gagarin’s patriarch was dressed in opulent furs, the first Russian status of wealth, and flanked by his wife in a red dress and massive agglomerations of jewelry akin to those earlier seen on some beach-side party girls. The wife’s nanny was also a part of the sitting, her sole function to hold up their son as Gagarin’s status symbols multiplied and the family heir became an integral part of the work, a precious human possession. A sprawling oak protectively spread over the family whose eyes lay on Arnautov’s servant. Back turned towards the spectator, the faceless servant pointed toward the source of their wealth, a wooden oil well dug out by village serfs, his only function to direct the viewer’s gaze. The servant also divided Arnautov’s space from that of the serfs, separating them from the clay servant hut on the other side. An infant boy stood on his mother’s lap on a mud step, stretching his arms toward his returning father. As the father lovingly bent over to pick him up, obedience and harmony permeated the serf clan – this owner had happy well-fed serfs. Through the Arnautovs, Gagarin made the British portrait style his own, creating a fascinating Russification of the West within the formal art medium.

The French Romantic Realist movement had also found its local adaptation in drab images of serfs with creases of worry and want in their expressionless faces and Repin’s dismal “Volga” scenes. However, the most arresting commoner study was another unknown of a dark Rembrandtesque woman. The woman’s navy headdress and shawl morphed into her black background, from which her face emerged a disparate paleness, drawing to its expression – an astonishingly modern rendition of the worried look seen on many a creased face on the street. The face formed a mask of habitual anger, showing full muscular plasticity frozen by constant exercise of the angry look. Arched brows squiggled into a side-ways S becoming its most prominent feature. At first glance it seems as though she curled them in anger, but a second look confirmed that they were permanently affixed in this position with the help of deep arching wrinkles. A flaring nose ran between two cold blue eyes that stared with indifferent equanimity. Yet another reminder of tempestuous flair, the nose was also stabilized by wrinkles on each side. The woman’s mouth was the only non-threatening feature of her face, but even here unease slithered into the tense stretching of her lips, which seemed forcibly turned upward at the corners in an attempt at likeability. A certain degree of self-consciousness revealed itself in this faint attempt at a smile, and her eyes no longer seemed severe. But harshness had been permanently stamped on her face by habit and time – a harshness I passed by many times on the streets, perhaps born with creases of worry for an alcoholic husband or son.

At last, painting technique liberated itself from precise draftsmanship through bold dramatic brushstrokes, bringing about the beginning of the color paradigm in art. Nikolai Ge’s evocative brush-work in “Tsar Boris and Tsaritsa Marfa” harkened back to Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus.” A smudge of crimson table cloth separated Boris from Marfa, from whom Boris recoiled with hatred and terror. The Tsar’s haunted face was thrown onto the canvas with powerful brushstrokes that delineated his raised eyebrows and continued carving out his ravaged features, chipping away at hollow cheeks. A Tatar with origins traced back to the Horde, Godunov served Russia’s first Tsar, Ivan the Terrible, as an advisor, and married his sister Irina to Tsarevitch Feodor. Godunov allegedly murdered the Tsar after Ivan’s attempted rape of Irina, and proceeded to govern the state through Feodor’s council of regents. Legend has it that Godunov also ordered the murder of Ivan’s illegitimate heir, Tsarevitch Dmitry, to ensure his power. When Feodor died heir-less, the throne was offered to Feodor Romanov, the nephew of Tsar Ivan’s poisoned first wife, Anastasia Romanova. Feodor declined and was exiled into monastic life together with his wife, Ksenia. Tsaritsa Marfa in Ge’s painting was thus Ksenia Romanova clad in black monastic dress, whose son, Mikhail, would end the Times of Troubles as the first Romanov Tsar. Ge’s brooding painting set the mood for those struggles over the Russian throne, while mad dashes of color gave it dramatic feel, perhaps in reference to Mussogorsky’s Boris Godunov, a controversial opera contemporary to Ge’s time.

Ge’s dramatic buds of color bloomed into full-blown Russian-style impressionism as I moved toward 20th century Russian art. Russia’s most ubiquitous impressionist, Konstantin Korovin, had captured the full warmth of the hospitable spirit in “Hostess,” an effusive snapshot of a plump Georgian woman offering wine. Thwarting the traditional back/fore-ground relationship, the hostess was under the cool shade of her house, her back towards her sun-flooded rose garden. Her brick-red skirt playfully intermingled with the red roses of her blouse and the garden behind. A straw wine cooler nested between her legs. The woman was holding up a large glass cask with one hand, and offering her glass of wine in the other. The transparent glass morphed into green foliage, and burgundy wine flowered in her hand into a scarlet rose. As the hostess offered up her crimson flower, her soft round face parted in a genial smile, drawing us into the warm Georgian summer – a hearty invitation into her garden for a leisurely Georgian toast. The Georgians, of course, are famous for their craftily-spun toasts, weaving present day values and morals into old-age traditional tales. One of my favorite Soviet films “Kavkazkaya Plennitsa” (Prisoner of the Caucasus) opened with the Georgian-Soviet version of the Icarus tale on a bird’s fall from flying toward the sun and away from its flock, the dissident under-tone thinly disguised in the protagonist’s drunken tear of pity for the bird.

The museum’s permanent collection ended on this warm sunny note, leaving out Socialist Realism. A temporary avant-garde show tucked away in a long-forgotten wing was the closest resemblance to 20th century art. The old lady supervising the wing informed me that I was holding up her lunch hour. When I inquired if someone would replace her during the break, she answered that the museum was short-staffed and the wing must be locked when not under supervision. I promised that I would take just a few minutes and scurried through a long, creaky corridor lined with Popov’s sketches on new technologies of photography and film. Broken into flat geometrical shapes, Popov’s subjects dissolved into angular reflections of shadow and light, shattering into disjointed assemblages of light refractions and cinematic afterthoughts. Inside the wing, fragments of my past dabbling appeared in three tiny rooms: Lissitzky, Goncharova, and even one Malevich. The pre-suprematist Malevich was a cubist man in top-hat holding a rectangular object. An amalgam of blue, white and gray, the man’s ambivalent contours dissolved into shadow behind the triangular rays of a street lamp. A play on Picasso’s newspaper collages hid in the margins – “osti”, a scrap of “novosti” (news). Concerns with new media and flatness pervaded the exhibit, ranging from cubist explorations to geometric De Stijl experiments, while sand, gravel and ready-made objects had also found their way onto the canvas. Russian humor didn’t fail here either in colloquial jargon of “Ne vysovyvatsia!” (No Leaning Out!) on Menkov’s cubist “Tram #6,” a homely adaptation of cubism into post-Revolutionary mayhem from which the Soviet system was just starting to emerge.

Once again the most charming piece of work in this gallery was a wooden relief of a female nude, her creator unknown. Delicately hung from the ceiling by two metal wires, the roughly fashioned nude was small, yet her drooping belly and breasts, masculine arms, and thick neck were impregnated with heaviness, and the entire figure gravitated toward the ground. A red-painted metal shred weighed her down further, encircling the round abdomen, passing underneath the left breast, and running up the arm to cross a rough clavicle. Another shred dropped down her thigh, balancing on one foot like a metal kite and nailing her to the ground. As metal sheets boxed this drooping weight into relief, the supple female form transformed into a choppy demoiselle. The only feature unaffected by this heavy gravitational pull was her face, which tilted up as though awaiting deliverance. Set wide apart by a broad flattened nose, the woman’s eyes were two crescent-shaped chinks behind round cheeks. Musingly, they looked up at the sky, while thick “vareniki” (dumpling) lips set on a heavy jaw-line benevolently opened in half-smile. Had she received deliverance?.

Unfortunately, this avant-garde dialogue was the end of my quest for dissident art. Hoping for some clues to under-ground art circles from the museum staff, I asked the ladies if they knew any Samara artists not involved in Socialist Realism, but received negative answers paired with thick-painted eyebrows raised up in puzzlement, “No, we don’t have any famous Samara artists. Everything you find here comes from Moscow and St. Petersbourg. We don’t have any artists in Samara.” I found the latter quite hard to believe, concluding that perhaps the state museum wasn’t the best place to look for dissident art even if it had since accepted the avant-garde. I ventured into a temporary wielder exhibit in the basement that turned out a decorative mix of furniture, none of it appealing to Neizvestny’s powerful sculptures seen in New York. My colleagues were equally puzzled and told me that Samara was more known for its beach rather than art. Eventually, I fished out two artists selling washed out Volga landscapes on Leningradskaia, but they were so pickled in booze that I decided not to touch them. In throes of desperation, I cast about the internet, finding a web-gallery of local Samara art, and sent them a desperate plea, but received mute silence in response. Were there really no dissident artists in Samara, or were they just hidden far away in the underground, the links to which I, a newcomer, didn’t possess?