Translated material
Splendor shattered
Exhibition of graphics by Mikhail Vrubel and Viktor Borisov-Musatov
The exhibition opening today in the main building of the Tretyakov Gallery amazes with its finest arabesque pattern of themes, ideas and meanings. The theme of “lost opportunities” suddenly became poignant and very authentic to the Silver Age. Alexander Benois spoke of Vrubel like this: “All are just sketches, hints... scraps, shreds... his true enormity... can be judged by putting together in his head everything that he saw from this scattered and broken splendor.” Early 20th century essayist Pal Palych Muratov wrote almost the same words about the work of Viktor Borisov-Musatov, who died at thirty-five.To the credit of the curators, Tretyakov Gallery employees Evgenia Ilyukhina and Irina Shumanova, the “broken splendor” is presented in its most complex configuration - as the result of the wanderings of a soul excited by a transcendental obsession. At the exhibition you are convinced that there is some kind of feedback between the huge number of unrealized projects remaining only on paper and the fanatical, manic devotion of both artists to just one, once found image. For Vrubel it is “Demon”, for Borisov-Musatov it is “Eternal Femininity”. Today, demonic obsession, as well as the search for the ideal Muse, formatted by Rodriguez and Tarantino, evokes a sarcastic grin. At that time, images and literary tropes had not yet been expropriated by mass culture and were not sold at dumping prices, and obsession with them could drive one crazy (as in the case of Vrubel). The visions that tormented both artists can be discerned in most of the graphic works of the two masters. Even in landscapes, interiors, portraits. After all, graphics cannot pretend and the painful points of consciousness - left by pastels, pencils, and brushes of cardiograms - are broadcast directly from a white sheet of screen.
It is obvious at the exhibition that the filter through which both masters looked at the world, trying to articulate the theme that bothered them, was the fresco painting of the Italian Renaissance. Neither Vrubel nor Borisov-Musatov were stylized in the 16th century. Their works are precisely Platonic anamnesis, the genetic memory of Renaissance form-creation, saturating our visual sensitivity to the fullness of perfection.
The curators' aerobatics are to conclude the exhibition with a section in which the last two cycles of artists' works - studies of shells by Vrubel and a series of views of Tarusa by Borisov-Musatov - turn out to be a wonderful mirror in which both masters look and recognize each other. But in life we have never met! In both cases, the obsession with form becomes some kind of absolutely amazing laboratory experience in terms of the purity of its design and implementation. Both artists were limited in their ability to obtain new emotions and impressions. Both were prisoners of the same space. As Evgenia Ilyukhina said, the sick Vrubel finds himself confined to the walls of his room and amuses himself only by drawing an ashtray made from a mother-of-pearl shell that was given to him. The study of the inner shell of the shell using first watercolor, then charcoal and Italian pencil, as one can predict, culminates in the creation of an entire Universe. In the last year (1905) of his life, Borisov-Musatov lived with his wife and little daughter at the Tsvetaevs’ dacha in Tarusa. And time after time, using different techniques - watercolors, watercolors mixed with pastels - he paints a panorama of the Oka River, opening from the upper terrace of a country house. Evgenia Ilyukhina very accurately in both cases likened the process of testing nature to recreating a pearl from a mother-of-pearl shell. A piece of the universe falls inside the enclosed space - literally a mote - the same decoy for the eye that torments the artistic will. And forced to react to this piece, the artist envelops it with new and new layers of visual impressions. And it all ends with the creation of a “pearl” - a masterpiece. Only those maestros whose perfectionism was akin to madness (or beyond it) could endure such a test of nature. Geniuses.
The presentation of the full cycle of Vrubel shells and all Musatov’s species of Tarusa became possible thanks to participation in the exhibition of the Russian Museum. For the first time, graphic works by both artists, stored in private collections, are also displayed at a large exhibition. A CD-ROM with the full version of the catalog of the wonderful exhibition will soon be available in Tretyakov Gallery stores. In particular, there will be an opportunity to see a unique reconstruction of Vrubel’s unrealized paintings of the Vladimir Church in Kyiv.