The presence of the master

The book and exhibition reminded us of the artist Fyodor Semenov-Amursky

Probably, this text should have been titled with official pathos - “The Return of the Master.” However, specialists are well aware of the creativity of the hidden avant-garde artist of a typical destiny. Study at VKHUTEMAS (VKHUTEIN in the 20s), accusations of formalism in 1946 (he was transferred from a member of the Moscow Union of Artists to a candidate, and this is still luck!), several apartment exhibitions, a couple of official ones in places not intended for them, death in July 1980, unnoticed due to the Moscow Olympics. And there was a belated interest in the artist already during the years of perestroika. But the interest was modest, existing only in a professional environment.

And it is unlikely that Semenov-Amursky’s stakes will be greatly raised by his album released at the end of last year by Agey Tomesh in the “New History of Art” series (as luxurious as it is, just as meaningless - a four-page introductory “dark” text by Sasha Balashov, and then just reproductions) and The exhibition has just opened in the Svyatoslav Richter Memorial Apartment on Bolshaya Bronnaya. The book is too expensive, and Richter’s apartments, although they have museum status, being a branch of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin, did not become a tourist attraction. And the exhibition was made not by the museum workers themselves, but by Semenov-Amursky’s student, the artist Igor Shelkovsky, who brought from France (Shelkovsky emigrated in 1977) two dozen works by the teacher from his collection.

Maybe it’s even better that he initiated the exhibition - rich in color, dynamic, compositionally “broken” sheets of Semenov-Amursky (who, out of poverty, painted in oil on paper) are tucked into white “bumpy” frames. Invented and made by Shelkovsky, they echo the artist’s constructive geometrized objects, preserving the memory of the Russian avant-garde and, at the same time, the utopian technicism of the NTR era. The lyrical emotionality of the painting here is balanced by the conceptual rigor of the framing - and this makes the entire exhibition, despite the fact that it is spread across several rooms, a surprisingly integral artifact.

Meanwhile, Semenov-Amursky’s works themselves hardly require any tricks from the arsenal of modern art. (And Igor Shelkovsky, despite his declared conservatism, is without a doubt a star of Russian contemporary art, a friend and colleague of Dmitry Prigov and Boris Orlov, in the 70s and 80s, already in France, publisher of the magazine about unofficial Russian art “A- I”, is still an invaluable source of information.) Paintings by Semenov-Amursky - with their extremely conventional subjects (“Two friends on the path”, “Yellow Forest”, “Mountain landscape with a horseman”, etc.), philosophical abstraction from natural authenticity (“Nature for me is not a model, but a hint,” the artist used to say), a passion, first of all, for sharp and nervous rhythms of color, which sometimes enter into the most unexpected and dramatic relationships (“Forget about everything and draw subconsciously. As much as possible “capricious accidents” - another thesis) - these paintings exist as if outside of time, in another space, above the flow of everyday life, even though it is everyday triviality that is depicted in them.

But how? One of the favorite motifs is the so-called “types”, faces against the background of a landscape or interior, and very often the sculptor’s workshop with his works is chosen as the latter. However, these “type” heads themselves are unusually sculptural, they seem to have been roughly cut out of a wooden block with an ax, they look like some kind of pagan idols. Mystical archaism breathes in the paintings of Semenov-Amursky, but this is not Hellenistic harmony, but primitive chaos. Despite the amazing attractive beauty of these small but bright sheets.

So it is this isolation of the artist from today’s reality that prevents him from uttering platitudes like “The Return of the Master.” Linear movements in time are alien to this strange, original poetics. Semenov-Amursky went nowhere only to return. And the fact that until now only professionals monitor its presence in our culture - so what?! It has long been said that we are lazy and incurious.

Fedor ROMER