A Truly Significant Holiday - Passport magazine

Art History
Nikolai Nikogosyan
Takes Almost a Century’s Evolution
text Olga Slobodkina-von Bromssen
Not every artist gets birthday greetings
from the President of the country. However,
Nikolai Nikogosyan received a telegram
from Dmirty Medvedev when he
was 90 on Dec. 2, 2008 and a birthday
celebration at the Academy of Arts.
Novy Manezh is honoring this accomplished
sculptor and painter with a retrospective
exhibition from February 18
through March 3.
Nikolai Nikogosyan has left traces of
his art throughout Moscow. He created
all the sculptures for the New Building of
Moscow University on Sparrows Hills as far
back as the 1950s. His enormous figures
also grace the Stalin-era skyscraper at
Kudrinskaya Ploshad.
Statue on the skyscraper at Kudrinskaya
ploshad 1948-1954
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March 2009
However, Nokogosyan has a particular
distaste for the statue of Yury
Gagarin that adorns Gagarin Square.
“What kind of composition is that?”
Nikogosyan says, holding his arms out
by his sides in imitation of the clumsy
figure. “The go-to-hell composition.”
It’s no wonder Nikogosyan doesn’t
like the monument. As one of the participants
in a state contest to build it,
he knows how much more graceful
and profound it could have been.
His Gagarin piece is a philosophical
composition balanced on the wing
of Icarus, the Greek mythical character
whose wax wings melted when
he flew too close to the sun.
The horizontal figure of the falling Icarus is
juxtaposed to the vertical figure of the first
man in space, who stands with his hands
raised as if in a take-off position.
“Both Icarus and Gagarin are biblical
characters for me. When Icarus falls Gagarin
soars. The Bible is an eternal book of human
history. It continues to write itself,” the
artist says.
Nikogosyan has created statues for many
cities of the former Soviet Union, including
his native Armenia. In Moscow, apart from
the university building and the so-called
wedding cake at Kudrinskaya Ploshad, he
created many gravestones of important
cultural figures in Novodevichy Cemetery.
Not only were Nikogosyan’s sculptures
sanctioned by the state, but he was declared
a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union
and won a State Prize.
Despite official recognition, Nikogosyan
remains gloriously himself no matter
who or what he has modeled – Lenin,
or outstanding personalities. He never
followed the stiff and saccharine standards
of Socialist Realism, but portrayed
people the way he saw them in all their
complexity.
His lively Russian, spoken with a heavy
Armenian accent, his pronounced, sculpture-like
features and his gentle manner
must have helped him to win the approval
of those who controlled art in the Soviet
Union.
The artist’s creations are not limited to
grand outdoor statues requiring state
sponsorship. He also did busts in the Renaissance
style, combining both smooth
surfaces and textures as well as statuettes
of historical figures. An example of this is
his bust of the Armenian composer Komitas,
who went insane after the 1915 Turkish
genocide of Armenians and spent the last
16 years of his life in an asylum in Paris.
Nikogosyan, who was born in the village
of Nalbandyan in Armenia, did not
always know he would be an artist, and
as a young man attended Yerevan’s ballet
school.
“But my father was against it, so I quit
ballet and went to Leningrad to an art