Daily Journal:

Everyone has the right to promote their own concept, including the development of an art school, as Father Mikhail Maleev does. However, at the same time, professional foundations must remain unshakable, without which it is impossible to become a master. Teachers and students of the Moscow Art School named after. Serov is outraged not by the priest’s way of thinking, but by the fact that Orthodox popular print patriotism overnight became official, that it is being propagated as a matter necessary for the salvation of the soul and the country. Therefore, the academic school is declared unnecessary, and the “New Russian concept” turns out to be necessary.

Meanwhile, Archpriest Mikhail Maleev is a talented artist who graduated from Stroganov and became a priest. He is the successor of the priestly family of the Belorossov-Maleevs, the heir of the new martyr Mikhail Belorossov, who served in Tutaevo, Vladimir region. Moreover, Father Mikhail is an Honored Artist of Russia, an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, who works hard and fruitfully; he periodically hosts exhibitions. In his parish, Father Mikhail organized a children's icon painting school. But all this does not give him the right to declare unnecessary everything that lies beyond his interests.

The work of Father Mikhail is based on the glorification of medieval Rus'; on his canvases there are symbolic images of Russian princes and heroes, holy elders and ascetics. He also has a painting “Primates of Russia” with the image of Patriarch Alexy, and he already has a painting with the image of Patriarch Kirill. The faces of the saints and patriarchs are stern, georoic, these are the warriors of Holy Rus', which, as Father Mikhail noted in his interviews, lives and exists to this day. In his patriotic intensity, glorification of the Russian national character and mixture of the most diverse, but very transparent and sometimes primitive images and allegories, Father Mikhail resembles Glazunov, only in a cassock.

An obsession with the complex of patriotism and saving the fatherland makes an ideologist out of an artist. And he is trying to instill this ideology in the school. The ideologization of a subject turns any symbol into a popular print, and the obligatory “New Russian” patriotism into a ridicule. Alas, Orthodox Christians sometimes turn into caricatures of themselves. So indignant teachers and parents of students are protesting.