Dadaist from the Russian hinterland

Exhibition of Sergei Sharshun at the Museum of Personal Collections of the Pushkin Museum

Sergei Sharshun, whose first personal exhibition in Russia opened at the MLK (60 works from French private collections), was not like any native of Russia who lived and worked in Europe in the first half and mid-twentieth century. We can say that he managed to make his own destiny into a unique work of art.

Born in 1888 in the distant Russian town of Buguruslan, Sharshun managed to study in the Moscow studio of Ilya Mashkov and get acquainted with the collections of the latest French artists in the houses of Shchukin and Morozov. Not wanting to work as a clerk in his father’s store, Sergei entered military service, but soon left the country and went straight to Paris. Here he plunged headlong into the whirlpool of the most daring artistic experiments and became close to the most radical groups of avant-garde artists who gathered around the local “academies”-ateliers. With the outbreak of the World War, Sharshun went to Spain, to Barcelona, ​​where in 1916 he first met those who called themselves Dadaists. Having developed his own individual version of non-objectivity under the influence of Spanish-Moorish ornament - “ornamental cubism” - and having tried to experiment with film animation, Charshun returned to Paris. He enlisted in the Russian expeditionary force in France and spent almost two years with it. Upon his return to Paris in 1919, Charchoun resumed his meetings with the Dadaists. He regularly appeared at Dadaist exhibitions and attended their events - in Salle Gaveau and the Russian store of Jan Povolotsky. During these years, the artist constantly communicated with Dada leaders Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Philippe Soupault, Jean Cocteau, Andre Breton; At the same time, he met Marcel Duchamp, who treated him, according to Charshun, “kindly,” as well as Max Ernst, who came to his own exhibition from Berlin.

Together with Ilya Zdanevich, Sharshun took part in organizing absurdist Dadaist events. One of these events was Sharshun’s author’s evening at the Chameleon cafe on December 21, 1921, organized by the Chamber of Poets, where the reading of absurd texts was interspersed with no less absurdist artistic performances, which was supposed to recall the atmosphere of the birth of Dada in the Voltaire cabaret in Zurich . The action was not particularly successful, which was partly the reason for Sharshun's disappointment in Dadaism.

Meetings with the Dadaists were important for Sharshun not only as an artist who was interested in new paths in creativity, but also as an aspiring writer. Charshun was a member of the Montparnasse groups "Chamber of Poets" and "Gotarapak", founded respectively by Valentin Parnach and David Knuth in 1920. As was customary in those years, poets organized their own “benefit performances” from time to time. Sharshun called his poetry evening in 1922 “Dada-lir-kan” (tweeting poems in the Dada style), invited his Dadaist friends to participate in it, and even wrote a special brochure about this direction. Paul Eluard took part in the evening, “who recited his words both in the “sound” and in the inverted sense.”

In May 1922, Sharshun found himself in Berlin. He began to visit the favorite meeting places of “Russian Berliners” - both emigrants and those who went to Europe for a short time, on a business trip of the People’s Commissariat for Education, including at meetings of the “House of Arts”. In Berlin, Sharshun continued to search for his artistic style, worked a lot and showed his “ornamental-cubist” canvases at two personal exhibitions. It was then that he first managed to sell two of his paintings. Charchoun's literary work in both the Paris and Berlin periods is much more closely connected with Dadaism than his activity as an artist. However, despite his “dislike for drawing,” Charshun published his drawings in the German Dadaist magazines Mecano and Merz.

“Sharshun aligned himself with the Dadaists, but his Dadaism did not assert an attitude towards protesting irrationalism or obvious anti-aestheticism. Being an initially and naturally gifted artist, he remained stylistically far from producing pseudo-technical, pre-meditative improvisational drawings or meaningless combinations of random objects, lines and colors. With his innate romantic talent, Sharshun could not become a far-fetched mannerist, he simply gravitated, in the most natural way, to the abstract and fantastic, to the melodiousness of wavy linear and color harmonies, the naivety of expressive drawing, the symbolic mystery of motifs and signs...” - wrote about artist essayist and poet Alexis Ranit.

In July 1923, the artist once again returned to Paris. A year and a half in Berlin did not pass without a trace: I wanted to work independently, obeying the internal impulses of my already mature creative nature. Sharshun came to the conclusion that, in general, “Dadaism has fizzled out during this time.” “Picabia and Tzara have exhausted themselves and lost their combat effectiveness. Henri Breton sat on the throne of the newly created surrealism, rewarding all his associates with red tickets,” the artist wrote. “That’s why I didn’t resume relations with all my former friends.” Personal discipline was enough for me. I came into contact with Dadaism only when I was young.”

Nevertheless, Sharshun did not completely break with Dadaist practice, as evidenced mainly by his literary experiences. The magazine “Transport of Dada”, founded by the artist, existed under various names until 1973.

In 1927, Charchoun exhibited a series of his non-figurative “elastic landscapes” in the spirit of Amédée Ozanfant in a Parisian gallery. After which he left for the remote province of Touraine and stopped his painting experiments for a long time, returning to painting only in 1944, when his paintings again found connoisseurs and buyers. Then he began to create “musical” abstractions, born as free plastic fantasies on the shapes of violins and other instruments, and associations on the themes of favorite musical works of Russian and European composers - from Tchaikovsky to Boccherini and Beethoven.

At a very advanced age, shortly before his death, Charshun, who lived almost as a hermit in his small studio apartment on the Parisian outskirts of Vanves, committed an act worthy of his Dadaist past: he took it and went... to the Galapagos Islands. This journey not only colored the master’s latest paintings with new tones, but also gave his fate a certain new meaning - it was not without reason that another of his favorite themes was the sea with its inexhaustible tints of both colors and sounds.

And in history, Sergei Sharshun remained one of the few immigrants from Russia who were involved in radical European innovation in the art of the twentieth century.

Caption under the picture: “Double bass” (1945) Sharshuna is not a distant relative of the violins of Malevich and Picasso

Andrey TOLSTOY