Chapter 2 • New Artists documentation sources and references

Table of Contents >>
to Chapter 3 • The New Artists as an artists’ collective >>

Chapter 2 • New Artists documentation sources and references

To establish the structure of the New Artists’ expansion, I analysed different sources – in the first place, Timur Novikov’s texts, but also pictures and other documents referring to New Artists activities. The latter includes New Artists exhibitions and performances I reconstructed with pictures from (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov‘s large photo archive from the Leningrad 1980s, as well as with pictures by Alexander Savatyugin. Maria Novikova-Savelyeva, Timur Novikov’s daughter, sent me the scans of Novikov’s typescript catalogue of the “Happy New Year” exhibition. Sergey Chubraev allowed me to use documents from his archive relating to New Artists “side projects”, above all the “Friends of Mayakovsky Club” and the “Folk Art Lovers Club”. The New Artists catalogue from 2012, mentioned in the first chapter, includes Ksenia Novikova’s New Artists Chronicle which also comprises the years after the group’s breakup. Some particular features of these sources need to be presented in detail.

Timur Novikov’s texts, written or recorded between 1985 and 2002, are an obvious choice: because of Novikov’s role for the New Artists, his texts are considered to be authoritative. What is more, the earlier texts from 1985/1986 (published under Novikov’s pseudonym Igor Potapov) constitute the only contemporaneous documents on the group.

In order to determine the structure of the New Artists’ evolution, I examined Novikov’s texts with a strictly formal approach: On the basis of Novikov’s articles and speeches accessible through public sources, as well as with material from Sergey Chubraev’s archive, I compiled eleven New Artists lineups or lists. They contain those names Novikov either explicitly or implicitly referred to as New artists. For the sake of simplicity, I will assume that Novikov’s dating of his early texts is correct, although some may be slightly backdated.[1] An overview of these texts follows in Chapter 5, “Timur Novikov’s texts”.

To facilitate a comparative analysis of the lists, I subsequently inserted those names into a table (Table A, Chapter 12>>).

Although I cannot exclude the possibility that I have missed other important texts by Novikov, those eleven texts already lead to an important result: no two lists are congruent. We would, of course, expect the later texts to contain more names than the earlier ones, but in fact such differences are not all that significant. Rather, the texts demonstrate that Novikov assigned to the New Artists different individuals even with regard to one and the same event. A number of discrepancies also appear upon comparing these texts with documentation available through other sources.

There are different assumptions explaining such discrepancies. In some cases Novikov might have simply confounded similar occurrences, as in his lecture from 2001, when he listed American rock musician Joanna Stingray among the musicians of the Pop Mekhanika concert on December 27, 1985, where she is not documented more>>, although she was present and filmed at some other Pop-Mekhanika concerts in 1986 more>>.

In other cases, the mistakes seem to have been made deliberately. We can find an example in the same lecture, where Novikov stated that “Georgy Guryanov presented his paintings” at the Happy New Year exhibition (see Chapter 9). This is contrary to Novikov’s own documentations from 1985 /1986 more>>. My assumption is that he wanted to stress Guryanov’s role for the New Artists. At the same time, it gave him the possibility to enhance the significance of the exhibition, since by the end of the 1990s, Guryanov had become a well-established artist.

Because the information given by Novikov is often detailed and looks accurate at first sight, such discrepancies constitute a problem for researchers: depending on the text or even paragraph we choose for quotations, we may arrive at diverging conclusions. And since other scholars rely on these conclusions, they are quoted as facts, not as hypotheses.

Seeming accuracy also characterises Ksenia Novikova’s New Artists Chronicle, otherwise of great value to start this labyrinthine journey. Yet with regard to (many) events, it needs verification of participants, dates and venues. It is also important to understand that the Chronicle includes events where New artists constituted only a minority of participants, especially if Timur Novikov participated in such an event. This is understandable: Ksenia Novikova, Timur Novikov’s widow, relied on the documents Novikov had collected over the years, and Novikov himself didn’t necessarily distinguish between activities he pursued “outside” his group and those he pursued as a member of his group.

For example, the Chronicle dates the so-called “First concert of the utiugon” to December 1982 (The New Artists, p. 271). This jam session saw the participation of Novikov and Sotnikov with their experimental “utiugon” instrument next to a number of professional musicians, among the German clarinettist Hans Kumpf. With my research “Leningrad Collective Improvisations”, based on Kumpf’s material, I was able to establish the date to August 1983 and extend the list of participants at the jam session from six (Chronicle) to twelve more>>. The Chronicle’s lack of references to sources poses a general problem – we have no possibility to check what caused the error.

Another example concerns the number of New artists at TEII exhibitions (ТЭИИ – Товариществo экспериментального изобразительного искусства / The Society for Experimental Visual Art, 1981-1991): the Chronicle may differ from the TEII’s own lineup. This is the case with the 8^th General TEII exhibition from May 1986. The Chronicle includes eighteen New artists: Kotelnikov, Sotnikov, Novikov, Bugaev, Krisanov, Savchenkov Mertvy, Yufit, Zhigunov, V. Ovchinnikov, Tsoy, Gutsevich, Taratuta, Nikolaev, Kozlov, Krasev, Kozin, Maslov, Shutov (Moscow). However, the TEII list doesn’t mention four of them: Savchenkov, Mertvy (Kurmayartsev), Zhigunov, and Tsoy (Ot Leningrada, 2007, pp. 237-239).

In 1986 (or perhaps earlier), Novikov insisted with the TEII organisers that the New Artists should show their works as a group, that is, together, on the same wall. The Chronicle entry is obviously based on Novikov’s own New Artists lineup of the May 1986 show, published in the Anthology on page 99 and quoted by Andreeva in Brushstroke, p.34. Unfortunately, the New Artists installation view in the TEII catalogue (Ot Leningrada, 2007, p. 244) shows only a fraction of their “special section” more>>.[2] Fragmentary views of their section (if any) also go for the other TEII exhibitions. I still compiled a New Artists scheme on the basis of TEII lineups, relying on my own judgement of who belonged to the group (Table C, Chapter 13).

Photographic documentations of exhibitions and performances indeed help determining who participated in New Artists activities. I had already reconstructed a considerable number of their collective activities earlier, using pictures taken by New artist (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov,[3] which allowed me to generate a “frequency distribution” of artists. For this purpose, I created Table B (Table B, Chapter 12>>). In this way, I was able to follow the group’s expansion and compare the findings with Novikov’s texts.

I considered four New Artists exhibitions: one from 1984 at Novikov’s “ASSA” gallery more>>, two from 1985 – the exhibition of collages at the Club 81[4] (“Erik Goroshevsky Theatre”) more>> and “Happy new Year” at the Leningrad Rock Club more>> – and, from 1988, the above-mentioned exhibition at Leningrad’s Sverdlov House of Culture more>>. They demonstrate an expansion of the lineup from five (1984) to ten (1985, at the Rock Club) to around twenty (1988). This goes along with the expansion of exhibition spaces, from small rooms in flats to public halls. Table B also includes three performances initiated by the New Artists, two “New Theatre” performances at the Club 81 – “Anna Karenina” more>> and “The Ballet of the Three Inseparable Ones more>> – as well their action painting on stage during Sergey Kuryokhin’s Pop-Mekhanika concert at the Leningrad Rock Club more>>. All three are from 1985. Last but not least, Timur Novikov’s type-script catalogue of the “Happy New Year” exhibition more>>, the booklet of the 1989 exhibition “And We Dream of…” (see Chapter 1, footnote 15), and the artists names on the cover of the New Artists MMOMA catalogue 2012 (see Chapter 1, footnote 6) complete the information in Table B.

However, what should be called a New Artists activity is not so obvious before the group was finally allowed to present themselves under their own label – as late as 1988. Paradoxically, this requires that we first establish who was a New artist to be able to identify their actions.

I did not include international New Artists exhibitions, because here, the selection of artists was rather specific. I could show this in a study from 2022, Kulturhuset's New Artists project 1987-1988, where I analysed the genesis of the 1988 Stockholm festival De Nya från Leningrad / The New from Leningrad more>>. The Swedish curators lost control of the selection process to ad-hoc decisions taken by Novikov and some other artists. Surprisingly, the final lineup of artists still came out quite typical, but this was due, in part, to the support of their Swedish friend Sara Akerrén, who completed the exhibits with works from her own collection.

Photographic documentations of other Leningrad New Artists exhibitions remain a desideratum, especially for 1986 to 1987. For this period, the Chronicle lists mostly participations of several New artists in larger group shows, but there are some “personal” group shows, among them Neat Tendencies in the Work of the New at the Znamya Movie Theatre, Leningrad, 1987[5] and The New Artists at the Kolizei Movie Theatre, 1987[6].  Without explicitly referring to the Znamya Movie Theatre exhibition, Andreeva commented on that year, “This was the moment when Novikov abandoned the wild style, proclaiming the advent of ‘neat tendencies in the work of the New Artists.’ He departed from ‘wildness’ under the influence of Kozlov’s strict style” (The New Artists, 2012, p. 44). It would be interesting to know the exhibits, especially Novikov’s and Kozlov’s.

Last but not least, the website of the Archive of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, accessible through the Russian Art Archive Net, RAAN, https://russianartarchive.net, presents numerous documents that were once private archives, among them of members from the New Artists group. 

to Chapter 3 • The New Artists as an artists’ collective >>
Table of Contents >>

© Hannelore Fobo, 2018 / 2025
uploaded 29 October 2018 / revised version uploaded 13 Juli 2025

up.