The Art of the Unknown

Ernst Neizvestny, one of Russia’s greatest living artists, staged a landmark exhibition this year in Moscow. Christina Ling tells his story, and provides insight into some of the work that most Russians are seeing for the first time.

The 1962 exhibition of contemporary art at the Manezh gallery in Moscow was nothing short of a sensation. One reason was the fact that it offered an official public forum for abstractionists, for the first time since Stalin’s reign of terror.

However, it has gone down in history as the exhibition at which Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union’s rural-born General Secretary, lost his temper at the artists, using some of the most colorful language ever recorded from the lips of a world leader.

Ernst Neizvestny, now one of Russia’s most famous living artists, was among those whose work was on display in the exhibition hall when the General Secretary swept in on a surprise visit with his entourage in tow. His exchange with Khrushchev has since become legendary.

“What do you mean Neizvestny (the name means ‘unknown’ in Russian)?” quipped  the jovial Soviet leader, “we know all about you!”

Asked where he got the bronze for his sculptures, Neizvestny replied that he found it on rubbish dumps. When the indignant leader said there was no bronze on rubbish dumps, the artist coolly replied to the effect that Comrade Khrushchev had probably never visited a rubbish dump to find out.

It has been well over a quarter of a century since Neizvestny’s clash with the Soviet authorities, and the now world-famous artist has spent most of it outside Russia. So it was a historic moment when the master arrived at the small but prestigious Dom Nashchokina art gallery in Moscow at the end of March to attend the opening of the first solo exhibition of his career in his home country.

Born in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1926, Neizvestny was recognized as a talent in childhood. He was admitted to a special school for artistically gifted children at the age of 13.

In 1942, only three years later, he signed up as a volunteer in the Soviet Army. He was wounded and left for dead on the battlefield in Austria. Having been ‘posthumously’ awarded the Order of the Red Star for heroism, Neizvestny made a miraculous recovery and went on to study at the Surikov Institute of Arts, simultaneously enrolling in the philosophy faculty of Moscow State University.

From the Surikov Institute he went from success to success, winning competitions for young artists and, in 1959, a national competition to design a World War Two victory commemoration monument. But while enjoying success in the official sphere, Neizvestny retained his independent artistic vision, working on such projects as the Tree of Life sculpture, a monument to human achievement in the spheres of art, science and technology and, more significantly, on illustrations for Dante’s The Inferno and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

“He was an avant-gardist,” comments Dom Nashchokina director Natalya Ryurikova. “His line, his form — none of it was Soviet. His art was the art of allusion — something strange, incomprehensible, and therefore threatening to the authorities.”

In fact, Neizvestny had fewer exhibitions at home during those years than he did abroad. The Vatican Museum bought his Large Crucifix, and later he presented the sculpture Heart of Christ to Pope John Paul II.

Emigration to the West, first to Zurich and then to the United States as artist, lecturer and publicist, brought Neizvestny not the artistic death and oblivion which befell many of his contemporaries, but fame as great as he had enjoyed at home. The Kennedy Center in New York commissioned a bust of the great and enigmatic Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich; Neizvestny’s writings on art and philosophy were published for the first time after a 20-year delay; he was invited to lecture on art and philosophy at Harvard and Columbia Universities.

The artist’s return to his homeland, therefore, has proved a major event in the Russian Arts year.

“This is a priceless event for Russia,” said his wife and manager, Anna Neizvestnaya at the opening. “This is the very first solo exhibition in Ernst’s whole creative life that has taken place in Russia.”

Neizvestny himself, however, a plump and rather shy figure, took the entire event in his stride, never batting an eyelash as precious sculptures and paintings came perilously close to destruction at the hands of newshounds and admirers straining to get closer to the artist. He gamely fielded questions on everything from his political forecast for Russia to how he planned to celebrate his 70th birthday, which fell during the exhibition’s run.

“I don’t plan to celebrate it at all,” he said with restrained humor. “I don’t like birthdays and I never celebrate them. My mother is ninety years old and I don’t remember ever celebrating her birthday either,” he added as an afterthought. “It must run in the family.” Neizvestny has clearly retained his irreverent sense of humor from those heady days of 1962.

The Moscow exhibition was staged as a unique retrospective, featuring a widely representative selection of his works, many of which had never been seen in Russia before. Ex-President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev is the subject of one painting, completed in 1989 during the heyday of perestroika and glasnost. Projecting dynamically out of the canvas against a profile of a featureless head which could be either screaming in anguish or shouting for joy, Gorbachev’s face is an enigmatic mix of wide-eyed naivete and calculating reflection.

One work which made it into the catalogue but not into the display was a striking bust of President Boris Yeltsin, his bronze head rising square and strong out of a construction of geometrically shaped chunks of metal and irregular pieces of precious stones.

Completed earlier this year as a commission by the Yeltsin family for the President’s 65th birthday, the bust depicts the burly Siberian leader as a determined builder, piecing the fragments of Russian society back together, but with an expression of something approaching cynicism, even cruelty, on his smiling face. The family, according to Ryurikova, preferred not to put the piece on show.

Politics, however, is incidental to Neizvestny’s inspiration. Rather, the interaction of man, machine and nature is the overriding theme throughout the body of his work.

“The central image of his art is the centaur, a mythical creature that conjoins man and horse to create a new expressive synthesis,” writes Albert Leong, professor of Slavic Languages at the University of Oregon. “For Neizvestny, the peoples of East and West now live in a civilization of centaurs ... [where] high technology in the form of computers, robots, and spacecraft has become a second nature  that interacts with, and complements, Mother Nature herself.”

Neizvestny’s centaurs, which in mythology have a fearsome superhuman strength, are a varied collection — noble, ingenious, strong and triumphant. However, their very strength is horrifying when it serves implacable fury and violence, as in the case of the painting, entitled Centaurs, depicting a rape scene in violent red colors.

The violence of the strong against the weak is also the subject of a painting entitled Holocaust, where the abuse of strength is no longer personal but institutional. Nor are centaurs the only mythical creatures  to capture Neizvestny’s interest. A painting entitled Cyclops (Hear the Scream) is also striking, depicting an anguished, distorted face.

Indeed, distortion is a common motif of Neizvestny’s creations. In a painting from a series entitled Beckett, twisted masks and hands convey existential anguish, while in one of his illustrations to Dante’s Vita Nova, the human body is split down the middle and asymmetrically distorted.

In all his work, from his bust of Dmitry Shostakovich — where the outer bronze layer is half stripped away to reveal the inner self — to his illustrations to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Neizvestny’s philosophical training makes itself felt. His Heart of Christ shows the Savior not so much hanging on the cross as determinedly holding back the jaws of death, or even the very gates of hell, his fists clenched and his body taut with the effort.

Neizvestny has himself written a number of philosophical tracts on art, acknowledging his debt  to the masters of the Russian avant garde and the art of Kandinsky, Malevich and the Cubo-Futurists in particular. As Leong writes, one of Kandinsky’s greatest visions was of an art of monumental synthesis  uniting all the branches of art into a single work.

The quest for synthesis forms the central current of Neizvestny’s art, too, and one which he perhaps comes closest to achieving in his Tree of Life sculpture. But Neizvestny developed the concepts of the avant garde in his own unique way, and was the first modern Russian master to apply the avant-gardists’ love of deformation to sculpture, as the Tree of Life is witness.

It is not often that an artist achieves fame in his or her own lifetime. But despite the irony of his surname, Neizvestny is one of the exceptional few. His work was prized by Pablo Picasso and exhibited in London with that of Marc Chagall in 1965. He has created monuments in countries as far flung as Latvia, Egypt, Ukraine and Italy.

His work can be found in the private collections of Boris Yeltsin, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the Mitterand family, as well as in the Vatican Museum. He is also the author of a striking monument to Khrushchev, commissioned by the leader’s family and raised above his tomb in the Novodevichy cemetery in 1972, exactly 10 years after the historic quarrel between the two men (In one of those weird ironies of history, it was Khrushchev who attacked Neizvestny in March of 1963 with the Russian folk proverb, “Only the grave straightens out the hunchback.”)

In recent years, Neizvestny has been in heavy demand as a monumentalist in Russia, creating works such as The Golden Child in Odessa, Exodus and Return in Kalmykia (taking as its subject Stalin’s internal exile of the Kalmyk nation), and a memorial to victims of the repression in the northern city of Vorkuta.

Perhaps as a result of his fascination with the modern world and the interaction of man and machine, Neizvestny designed the golden statuettes awarded to the winners of the recently introduced annual TEFI television awards.

Monuments all over Russia notwithstanding, Neizvestny had until this exhibition been a visiting artist in his old country. Only now, it seems, has he truly come home.