The Russians Have Come

The Russians are indeed coming, in droves, as a result of the cultural exchange agreement signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in Geneva three years ago. The Brandywine River Museum sent Moscow’s Pushkin and Leningrad’s Hermitage three generations of Wyeths, and you can go out to Chadds Ford to see three artists the U.S.S.R. has sent in exchange.
 
I don’t know how to put this diplomatically, but the three are decidedly underwhelming. (To see the leading edge of contemporary Russian art, paradoxically, you have to go to Jersey City, N.J., where a Wall Street stock broker did a mitzvah starting in 1979 by giving Russian émigré artists a brownstone to show their art in.
 
What’s the problem? Judging from the press conference, I’d guess that Boris Ugarov, president of the Academy of the Arts of the U.S.S.R. since 1983, is as good a place to hypothesize from as any. He’s (mercifully) no Happy Stakhovanite or a tractor-type Socialist Realist.
 
Indeed, his themes and styles (plural) remind you of second-rank American Impressionists after the movement had lost its verve. His oil, “Spring: The End of April,” (1965) has the spritz of Milton Avery’s palette, and “Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter and Grandson” (1986) could be Mary Cassatt, if they had showed nursing babies and bare breasts in her Mainline time. When I asked him through an interpreter which American painters influenced Russian art, he cited Wyeth, Cassatt and John Singer Sargent.
 
But Ugarov’s “style” is all over the lot. There’s no firm signature; he even has a clone of N.C. Wyeth dated 1957, too early to be a copy. In short, if the Sabbath were honored in the Soviet Union, I’d characterize him as being a whisker above a Sunday painter.
 
Judging from the press conference, he’s a schmoozer—witty, vague, full of bromides. In short, he’s the quintessential apparatchik, parlaying his hero of the Siege of Leningrad status into the top art post in the country. Even Socialist Realism can be a controversial row to hoe, given the ups and downs, ins and outs of the Soviet aesthetic line over time. But genial landscapes and Pushkin pushing are perfectly safe.
 
Ugarov’s the head man, so he used his droit de seigneur to bring himself the two 60ish cronies along for the ride. He should be ashamed. You need only look at the invitation card reproduction from Oleg Tselkov’s recent show in Manhattan to know why Joseph Brodsky calls him “the most remarkable Russian painter of the postwar period” (beside whom Ugarov is a congenial nothing—accent on the “con”).
 
His colleagues are not much better. Tair Salakhov is a little more substantial. At first I was struck by how much he recalls the American Precisionists—ones of the second rank like Niles Spencer and Ralston Crawford—until I read in a caption that Rockwell Kent was his role model!
 
But there is a certain agreeable exoticism in the imagery of this native of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. “Old Bath House, Aspheron” (1978) reminded me of my visit to the southern Islamic republics in the summer of 1981, a sand storm diversion that I endured as a price of getting to Moscow to see the only exhibition of their revolutionary avant garde since 1930.
 
His painterly sculptural surfaces are a neat objective correlative of those sand-blown precincts. But when he attempts the Empire State Building or Chicago, you see how minor-league he is.
 
Unless you’re booted out of the Soviet Union, like the Jersey City refuse-niks, you get to travel a lot—a perk of self-subjugation.
 
The third artist is interesting and skillful enough to make the trip to Brandywine a good investment of time. Dmitri Bisti is a 63-year-old book illustrator born in Sebastopol. His woodcuts for Homer’s Iliad (1978) are superbly quirky, sort of a meld of the long-ago suppressed constructivists and the recently booted-out Surrealists.
 
His illustration for Irving Stone’s Lust for Life (1961) teeters on the brink of Socialist Realist bathos, but it works. On a fourth or fifth perusal, however, his stuff begins to lose its fizz. One paradox of Russian totalitarian culture is that translators and illustrators live in a no man’s land where politics doesn’t pinch.
 
You render a work out of another language—someone else’s ideas—or you illustrate classics or contemporary best sellers that someone else has risked putting into print. There’s a certain impunity that shows in his freedom to develop a firm signature, something neither of the other two has.
 
Should we quit and go home? Of course not. No one ever said exchanging anything with the Russians would be easy. Until glasnost unleashes the talented to create great art, we’ll probably be stuck with the hacks who kept themselves out of the gulag. Just as we’ll, doubtless, send them nonentities that have been templated out of our museum / industrial / art school / gallery complex. Heh, ars longa, vita brevis, baby.
 
So it looks to me that the first inning for the Russkies delivered us one hit (Bisti), one almost run (Salakhov) and one error (Urgarov). Come to think of it, that’s about the same way I’d score the Wyeths we sent them: Andrew, Jamie and N.C.
 
Spend an afternoon at Brandywine (its physical ambience is perhaps the most delicious in all of North America), but save a weekend for ogling the Russians in Jersey City and at any of Manhattan refugee art dealer Nakhamin’s five U.S. galleries (three in New York as well as outposts in L.A. and San Francisco).
 
And read, image by image, word by word, the catalog for the 1981 George Costakis’s collection of avant garde Russian art at the Guggenheim, or the one for the very show that enticed me to Moscow, the Centre Pompidou’s Paris-Moscow.
 
I was pestered throughout my visits to the Pushkin by Russians who weren’t permitted to buy a catalog; indeed, so hungry are Russian for truths, my Intourist guide in Leningrad stayed up all night reading my copy. That’s the kind of crap Ugarov had to compromise with to get to his own personal summit
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, March 30, 1988