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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s • No.115 >>
Letter F (June 1983) – Moscow Towards the end of her scholarship at Moscow University, Catherine Mannick made up her mind to travel back to the United States via China, leaving Moscow on 7 June 1983. Kozlov decided to take the train to Moscow to say farewell to her the day she departed – just a week after they had last seen each other in Leningrad. He announced his coming through a telegram.
ЦЕЛУЮ= ЖЕНЯ-
DEAR KATYA, IF I CAN BUY A TICKET FOR THE 6/6 EVENING, THEN WE WILL MEET ON 7/6 AT 11-00 A.M. AT THE MONUMENT TO PUSHKIN.
 The Monument to Puskhin might not have been the most original place to meet. Put differently, it was a common place to meet, as Pushkin is “nashe vsyo”, is “all the world to us”, as Russians solemnly say, whereas Kozlov, paying tribute to Pushkin’s humour, sometimes refers to him with some affective irony as “Pa-‘pi-po-‘pa-pu-‘Pushkin” – pronouncing it with the metrical foot of a iambus. In any case, for Kozlov, who was not very familiar with Moscow, there was no risk of missing it, as the Monument to Pushkin was located at metro station Pushkinskaya, Telegram texts were always short, as customers paid according to the number of words in the text body. But it was an obvious way of communicating quickly, especially across large distances.
The layout of telegram forms followed international standards, and people filled them in on the spot, at Soviet telegraph (post) offices.[1] The text was then wired to the corresponding telegraph office, where it was printed out (without the address of the expedient) and delivered to the addressee. Other than in capitalist countries, telegrams were still much in use in the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties. As a matter of fact, they were popular even among people living in the same agglomeration since by far not every household, including Kozlov’s, was supplied with a telephone (see Letter E). If my interpretation of the figures displayed on the upper and lower lines is correct, it was sent from Leningrad at 13.24 p.m. and printed in Moscow the same day, 6 June, at 14.04 p.m. When he sent the telegram, Kozlov wasn’t yet sure that he would actually manage to buy a ticket on one of the night trains to Moscow. Just as day trains, night trains took between eight to nine hours to cover the 650 kms between Leningrad and Moscow, which made travelling by night quite popular, because it solved the problem of looking for a place to stay overnight.[2] On page 4-78 of Diary IV, Kozlov noted the train tables of six night trains to Moscow, numbering them according to his preferences (see below). He would have preferred to leave after midnight to arrive just before his meeting, but had to take an earlier train. In fact, Diary IV, page 4-82 offers a fairly precise image of his Moscow schedule:
Фотографии, фонтан у входа. Прощание 13:15 дома 25/VI 13:20 муз. им. А.С.Пушкина После Третьяковская Прогулки по Москве Поезд 0:05
13:15 houses 25/VI [or home 25/VI; the meaning is not clear] 13:20 Pushkin Museum, then Tretyakov Gallery. Strolling around Moscow. Train at 0:05
The diary notes show that his one-day trip to Moscow was split between the meeting with his friend in the late morning – it lasted no more than two hours – and visits to Moscow’s most important picture galleries in the afternoon; after that, there was still some time left before he took the train back to Leningrad shortly after midnight. His meeting with Catherine Mannick included a coffee break at the Intourist, a place for foreigners paying in hard currency, and thus the antipode to Leningrad’s Café Saigon, where they had both met the week earlier (see Letter E). Catherine Mannick remembers:
On the same diary page, above the schedule, are the names of three metro stations relevant for his Moscow visit: Komsomolskaya, next to Moscow’s Leningrad train station, Kropotkinskaya for the Pushkin Museum and Novokuznetskaya for the Tretyakov Gallery. On page 4-79, there appears yet another “art” address for his visit to Moscow: that of Maria Aleksandrovna Spendiarova (Мария Александровна Спендиарова, 1913-1993), as well as a telephone number of her neighbour Tamara.
In her youth, Spendiarova had studied at the Vkhutemas, the legendary “Higher Art and Technical Studios" workshops often compared to Germany’s “Bauhaus”, and she had been familiar with many protagonists of the Soviet avant-garde. It is very likely that Kozlov received her address from Timur Novikov who had made her acquaintance some years earlier, during the preparations for Mikhail Larionov’s 1980 retrospective at the Russian Museum, Leningrad. In his autobiography from 1998, Novikov writes
Commenting on his trip to Moscow, Kozlov says that it is possible that he actually went to see Spendiarova because of her knowledge of those times and because he enjoys Larionov’s primitivism. But he also stresses that he himself paints in a primitivist manner only occasionally, one of the reasons being that primitivism is not suitable for erotic art. The diary has no further information about Kozlov’s visit to the Tretyakov Gallery, but it mentions the solo exhibition of Italian-Armenian painter Gregorio Sciltian, (1900-1985) at the Pushkin Museum with a selection of fifteen paintings (Diary IV, p. 4-83, 4-84). What is more, Evgenij Kozlov not only noted the title and year of each painting, but also shot them with his camera. His black and white prints are still in his archive, supplied with the corresponding information on the reverse. When I first came across these reproductions, I didn't know where and when they were taken. In fact, I had never heard of Sciltian before, and Sciltian’s academic manner of depicting slightly surrealistic still lives and frozen genre scenes were so unlike any of Kozlov’s styles that I couldn’t see what attracted him. The Pushkin Museum’s website displays one of these paintings which is now part of its collection. Kozlov noted the title as Обманка с красной драпировкой 1965 / Decoy with Red Drapery 1965, while the museum’s website presents it as Натюрморт с красной драпировкой / Still-life with Red Drapery. external link >> When asked about these pictures, Kozlov said that he was interested, in the first place, in Sciltian’s realistic depiction of nudes, a subject matter he would hardly have been able to see at an exhibition of contemporary Soviet art.[3]
However, juxtaposing Sciltian’s nudes and Kozlov’s sunbathing ladies from the 1983 Gulf of Finland series reveals a fundamental difference in depicting the female body. With her posture and set of attributes – shoes, waistcloth and exorbitant hat –Sciltian’s “Venus” from 1974/75 provides an example of “staginess”, an impression further intensified by the “props” in the background, reminiscent of de Chirico’s urban landscapes. Kozlov’s figures are much less realistic, yet his beach scenes convey natural eroticism, because the artists keeps a delicate distance from the figures, respecting their intimacy.
A short note about realism in E-E’s early art At the end of 1982, Kozlov created a multi-figure composition called “Tuaregs” (later: “Noli Me Tangere”) which he considered as a breakthrough in his art: figures acquire an almost geometrical volume through a chiaroscuro effect of coloured shades.
With this painting, he started exploring the potential of realistic painting for a new approach to figurative art for the late twentieth century – as one of several styles he was pursuing simultaneously. On page 4-75 of Diary IV, that is, slightly before his trip to Moscow, we find the names of British artist David Hockney, as well as of Richard Estes and Philip Pearlstein, American artists known for their (photo)realist paintings. As the example of Sciltian shows, Kozlov wasn’t interested in copying a particular artist, but in knowing what contemporary art suggested in this respect.[4] In 1983, he began using his own photographs as an inspiration for his portraits and multi-figure compositions, changing or adding a number of details. The paintings often depart from the original source to a considerable degree, and sometimes almost completely, as is the case with the two large “Anna Karenina” paintings from 1988 more >>.
An early example of this new approach to realism is his self-portrait from 1983 titled “VOX HUMANA”. It was first exhibited at Timur Novikov’s “ASSA” Gallery in 1984 more >> and then, in 1985, at The Sixth Exhibition of the Society for Experimental Visual Art (TEII) more >>.
Surrounded by an irregular border of light pastel shades, figure and interior share the same dark tones, which makes the portrait hardly distinguishable from the background. Consequently, the viewer’s attention focuses on a few light spots next to it – on what would normally be considered secondary elements: a young woman in profile, a cut-out from a magazine with another female portrait, and the two letters e-e, which were to become his artist name two decades later. Thus, “VOX HUMANA” inverts the traditional idea of a portrait – without negating the value of realistic portrayal. Hannelore Fobo, 8 May 2023 [1] At Leningrad’s main post-office (glavnyi pochtamt), there were tables and chairs where customers could prepare their mail. They sometimes left partly filled-in telegram forms stained with ink – the quality of the paper was rather poor, and like blotting paper, easily absorbed liquids. In 1987, while standing in line to send off a letter (see introduction), Kozlov took several of these forms and created four graffiti drawings on the reverse (it must have been quite a long queue). In 2018, these drawings were part of his solo exhibition “USA-CCCP-CHINA” more >>.
[2] Since 2009, Siemens-built Sapsan trains, operating during day-time, connect Saint Petersburg and Moscow in about four hours, but in general, Sapsan tickets are more expensive and night trains are still an alternative to save money. [3] Nor of contemporary western art, for that matter: towards the end of May 1983 Kozlov visited a large exhibition of West-German art at Leningrad’s Central Exhibition Hall presenting works by neoexpressionists Baselitz, Kiefer, Lüpertz, Middendorf, and perhaps some other artists (Diary IV, p. 4-68) more >>. [4] Sciltian’s art nevertheless did leave a trace in Kozlov’s art, as I recently found out. In Catherine Mannick’s archive is a digitized colour slide of his collage “Deutschland” from 1984, and its resolution is good enough to discern some details. Among these details is Kozlov’s black and white reproduction of Sciltian’s painting Вечная иллюзия / Eternal illusion from 1967/69.
see also (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Catherine Mannick, and Hannelore Fobo papers, 1979-2022 (inclusive) Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection Harvard University >> | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Published 16 May 2023 |
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