From school after a thunderstorm

From October 24 to January 21, the first in Russia exhibition of painting Khanim Sutin 1 (1893–1943) is held in the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum - the event is exceptional against the background of all museum retrospective and modern exhibitions of recent years. Exceptional, because it leads away from the habitually complicated, fractally branched author’s and curatorial reflection and poses before the most basic, naive questions: “Why do you need painting? What can she from what music or philosophy cannot? " etc.

The first bewilderment, which happens with the “ordinary” viewer, both the viewer-artist and the viewer-art: why is Sutin so disharmonically and as if really ineptly deform the drawing with perfect validity and “organicity” of all picturesque solutions? Such bewilderment should either rejection - or, over time, Sutin becomes the most beloved artist.

He had the power of purely picturesque intuition as an absolute hearing, and love of art (that is, including gratitude to art for the truth about man and peace) allowed him to perceive the whole art of all centuries: his painting speaks the same language and Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt and Goya. The contemporary of Picasso, the closest friend of Modigliani, Sutin, at first glance, ignored the “analytical painting” of the XIX - XX centuries - pointerism, analytical cubism, color planes of Matisse, did not come close to abstraction; In reality, he made a revolution within the revolution - especially in the fact that in his paintings it refers to the field of drawing and that at first he is so puzzling.

In the same extent, in which contemporary art is busy reducing the meaning and is close to philosophy, analytical painting 100-150 years ago was busy reducing the form and was approaching the tasks and by the type of influence to music. Her achievements arose like mystical revelations or scientific discoveries: new opportunities were found in the vision of the world, new connections in the world itself, and the innovator was “nothing to cry about,” because he believed: something valuable and clarifying was brought into the world. When one of Matisse's friends fell ill, he led a sick friend to a large bright room to treat with his paintings. Indeed, in such painting there is a very accurately captured and responsibly worked out universality of forms: the same lines that a beautiful calm girl is drawn, one could make a beautiful calm car, or a juicer, or a ball in the summer air. The lines of the drawing of Sutin are not suitable for such a thing, they are suitable for killed hares or nervous hungry people, burning out from undesirable love, who had just begun to live and have already torn; Even self-propelled rich is tortured with something. These lines are curved and blocked at such unexpected and reliable points that they can not be rebuilt either in a triangular angel with an oval head, nor a poster about a red wedge, nor in the fascist athlete: only new dead hares or people can be made of them, whose life borders on the disease or final despair, whose internal power is for some reason.

It seems that everyone has already said that Sutin created the gallery of the most historically, psychologically and “typologically” accurate portraits of European Jews of the first half of the twentieth century - the “seal of trouble” was best seen and as immortalized everyone. The twentieth century is a century of great artistic discoveries, but in general he did not give so many paintings that would not be out of place at all - and Sutin was so complete that he was not only outdated as art, but also did not expire as a medicine.

Vasily Borodin

1 Haim - Sephardic pronunciation, Háim - Ashkenaz. In French, the stress falls on the last syllable, so after the emigration of the artist they called essence. - Ed.