Farewell to a friend

Today the news came about the death after a serious and long illness of Alexander Shatalov, a famous journalist, literary and art critic. For many years he was the constant author of The New Times

Sasha Shatalov, the last selfie,
December 20, 2017

He became widely known thanks to television. In the 1990s, when the TV was still a means of information, Sasha Shatalov led on different channels programs dedicated to books and writers. He was unusually, unusually intellectual, it was impressive no less than the programs themselves - and in them there was a novelty and felt truly encyclopedic education of the author and presenter. In NT, he also came with literature - in our journal his interview (one of the last) with Vasily Aksenov was published. And the fact that he began to regularly be printed in NT, Valery Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya “guilty”, she introduced me to him, at that time, at that time, the editor of the cultural section, and since then he became not just constant, but our author faithful. It is impossible to count how many articles he wrote for the magazine - I believe, several hundred, and in recent years I wrote almost to every number. It so happened that he, a literary person (poet, litcritic, publisher), in NT wrote mainly about artists and exhibitions (he himself was surprised, although what was amazing here - he was a rare connoisseur of Soviet informal art and modern Western painting). He recently wrote to me that he was preparing a book about non-conformist artists, and it will be a significant part of the publications in NT-about Nemukhin, Yakovlev, Rabin, Zverev, Bulatov and other contemporary artists.

He knew everything about the Russian vanguard, about our and Western modernists, about modern photography. Not a single interesting exhibition in Moscow and St. Petersburg passed his attention: was noticed, analyzed, accurately and professionally appreciated. But Shatalov’s articles were not simple reviews: these were an essay about artists and paintings, wide and little -known, written not with the involvement of the Internet than many reviewers are now being produced, but a huge volume of literature.

The last Sashin publication in our magazine was recently, at the end of January, it was a small piece from his last book about artists dedicated to Oscar Rabin, about which (like many others) he shot the film. Those unfairly manage life that talented, efficient, active, humanly incredibly interesting people leave early.

That was our friend and colleague Alexander Shatalov.