Paintings by Anatoly Zverev (artist)

At the end of May 2015, a museum of the Russian artist Anatoly Timofeevich Zverev was opened in Moscow. Before this, several large exhibitions devoted to the work of the master were held, at which a lot of works belonging to private collectors were exhibited for the first time.

Despite an unthinkable amount of fakes, Anatoly Zverev's paintings are constantly present at the most prestigious auctions of contemporary painting, albums of reproductions, books, studies of his work and memories of him leave. And any such event is an opening character even for those who have long been interested in Zverev's creativity and this extraordinary personality.

Creation of biography

He lived for 55 years, which he spent almost without a stop in Moscow, a city whose part of history was the legend of an artist - a restless vagabond, a disinterested eccentric, for a glass creating masterpieces, a self-taught genius, an insane alcoholic and a schizophrenic whose hand is led by a god. This myth looks like such a glittering adornment of gray everyday life, that many people participated in its creation - who is from romantic motives, who for the purpose of trivial gain. And the main reason for the appearance of beautiful legends and salty tales is Anatoly Zverev himself, whose paintings are evidence of a fantastic talent invested in an unbridled nature.

Where is the truth?

Understand where the fiction, and where the facts, it becomes increasingly difficult, despite the emergence of an increasing number of memories of contemporaries, the emergence of new books and films. Maybe you do not need to establish the truth, dig up to the smallest detail, presenting how Anatoly Timofeevich lived, - pictures and graphic sheets left to the descendants, in them the main value? Of course, this is so. But Zverev's works are inseparably inseparable from his personality, and his friends and those whom he painted recall the process of creating paintings as a true performance, with the self-worth of an act of art. It would be a shame to have a distorted concept about it or not to have any idea at all.

Fortunately, the cosmic energy of his best creations and the high skill they can distinguish allow us to appreciate the paintings of Anatoly Zverev faithfully, to understand the true scale and versatility of the great talent, the complexity of independent life under the reinforced concrete pressure of one ruling ideology.

Mirror of self-portrait

In works that investigate personality by the name of Anatoly Zverev, the pictures he wrote, one can meet the psychiatric term narcissism, which is allegedly confirmed by the large number of self-portraits that he wrote at various periods of his life. Probably, this quality was inherent in Rembrandt and especially Van Gogh, whose obvious influence is found in Zverev's paintings. He began to look at himself from childhood, from the time when the drawing teacher in high school Nikolai Vasilyevich Sinitsyn acquainted with the technical basics of graphics and painting. The training of the profession was short-lived and unsystematic: vocational school, specialty painter-alfresher, for a short time at the Art and Industrial School . 1905, classes in art studios for adults - this is his whole "academy".

Maybe that's why there have always been many who called Zverev a dilettante, and those who love Anatoly Zverev's paintings see a lack of technical skill only in passing, weak work - the virtuosity of Zverev's manner is obvious. They say that in life he did not take off the carnival mask, turning everything around into a performance. His self-portraits are also a theater, and only the edge of the mask rises, but this is enough to start a dialogue about life, about the essence.

"I will perpetuate you ..."

That's the way he suggested someone write a portrait - he realized his gift, like any genius, and realized that his model will remain in time, will be "immortalized." His work is similar to a sketch, a symbol, a hieroglyph, but only in the accuracy and ease of drawing; The content of the best portraits is striking in volume and depth.

It is believed that there are two periods in the artist's work, and only those paintings by Anatoly Zverev that were written before the end of the 1950s, express the true level of Zverev's genius. One of his true connoisseurs, the famous collector GD Kostaki, believed that after the first exhibitions abroad, Zverev went on about those who wanted to earn money on him, and became a kind of opportunist, having worked out a scheme through which he created his portraits. The artist himself said that he worked for himself until 1959, and then - to others. Degradation was easily explained by drunkenness and mental illness ...

It is hard to believe in this, looking, for example, at the portraits of KM Aseeva, the artist's last love and muse. Of course, unthinkable fruitfulness - the reason for the appearance of a mass of lightweight creations, the sugary female mouth on the portrait "for sale" is liked to be mentioned by well-deserved figures of art criticism. But in the best women's portraits of the late period, it is not sugaryness, but true beauty. In them, what was considered the main quality of Zvereva-man: he is full of good, despite the absurd nature and numerous blows of fate. Paintings by Anatoly Zverev-artist are full of compassion, he does not have any evil caricature, his portraits on which there are "strange people" - portraits of a true humanist.

Churches and Pines

Find an art critic's term, the most suitable Zvereva, have been trying for a long time. The first Russian expressionist - so called him Kostaki. Zverev himself called his best time when he was a "tashist," and assured him that he had invented such a manner, and not some Pollock. Anatoly Zverev's paintings impressed foreign artists with their free pictorial technique when they came to the Moscow Youth Festival in 1957 to teach the dense Soviet painters abstract art.

But to call him a true abstractionist could only those art historians, who formed the artistic views of Khrushchev and his associates. They should take a closer look at Anatoly Zverev's paintings "Pines. Nikolina Gora "(1968) or" Church "(1959) to understand: he is a subtle and masterly master realist. In addition to the strong emotional message, born of a vigorous artistic form, in the master's landscapes amazing accuracy and beauty in the transfer of the moment, light and air, sound and wind - all that is inherent in the best masters of the Russian landscape - II Levitan, AK Savrasov , Whose creativity, by the way, this "ignoramus and hooligan" knew and valued highly.

Beast-animalist

Among the admirers of Zverev's creativity there are a lot of those who put their graphics above everything, and among the drawings there are graphic cycles of animal images. So, a series about the inhabitants of the zoo, created in 1952, became the classic of animal studies.
It was possible to meet "professional" reproach to Zverev: his works are not worthy of attention, because they are lightweight, they have little work. I remember Pushkin's Salieri, who rebuked the heavens, gifted with genius "idler idle". But what if, in order to show the alertness of a leopard or the swiftness of a fallow deer, Zverev needs only one line and a few strokes? His graceful crane looks like a refined letter, and his eyes have a slightly intensified pressure of a pencil, but you can look at them and admire them endlessly.

Impressive pictures of Anatoly Zverev - an artist who believed that dogs take him for his, left a few "portraits" poodle Fili, a Russian greyhound named Ulan and his other "acquaintances." Perhaps, with them, he was getting spiritual communication, which was lacking in the world of people?

Illustrator

And yet, how can he fit into the image of a dense self-taught person if he thoroughly knew the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery, if he recited Eugene Onegin by heart, if one remembers his wit and aphoristic speech? All this can not be imagined without a global connection with the culture of the whole world.

Gogoliaada, illustrations for Andersen's fairy tales, Apuleius' Golden Axel, and one of Don Quixote's favorite images are works that not only make literary characters visible, they have a unique view of the world created by the writer, a fascinating talk on the author's raised Topics.

To reach such a capacity and generalization without long reflection and after a quick acquaintance with the plot of the work is impossible, otherwise it remains to believe in mysticism, in an unearthly origin that has graphics and Zverev's paintings. Anatoly Timofeevich difficult to recognize as a messenger of heaven, too sinful and sinuous was his life, but because of his artistic study of world classics so valuable.

Russian Matisse and the Russian Picasso

To build on a pedestal is a mission that is feasible only for history. Evaluation of Picasso, who called Zverev the best Russian draftsman, too wiped out. To realize its importance, it is worth considering that it was expressed by an expansive genius from the world of abstract art, and it is difficult to hope for a sufficient acquaintance with Russian painting.

But this opinion of the great Spaniard does not seem a strong exaggeration, if you see the graphic images of nudity and the pictures of Zvereva dedicated to her. Anatoly Timofeevich was distinguished by a complex attitude toward women, which can be understood from the memoirs of contemporaries. They have many expressive characteristics and extraordinary actions in relation to the weaker sex. Or is it just a mask again? Each line of Zverev's ny breathes sensual tenderness, honed beauty and the expectation of pleasure, which is equivalent to the highest examples of fine art.

Zverev and abstract art

He had a period of interest in non-figurative painting, a cycle of Suprematist works is known. And how else could they call the artist, who so clearly did not fit into the official art, if not an abstractionist? This was said and lifestyle, and pictures of Zvereva.

Anatoly and in the West were considered a symbol of the Second Russian Avant-garde, its banner. And he considered his interest in pure abstraction to be only temporary, his world could not exist truly without concreteness: people, animals, objects, nature - without this filling, there could not be complete harmony either in life or in art.

Past and future

In Moscow, not so many museums dedicated to a single artist. Now there is also a dedicated person of such a legendary personality as Anatoly Zverev. Pictures, photos, videos - all this will help to discover a new phenomenon for young people, learn new facets of talent and personality for those for whom he is a Moscow legend. Legend of a complex, imperfect, unhappy, weak and all-powerful man with his talent.