M O S C O W Interview with Leonid Shishkin - Passport magazine

Art
Soviet Art wasn’t just
Socialist Realism
Why did you move to this hotel?
I would never move to any other hotel. This is the only hotel
I could move to because it is quintessentially Soviet, one of
Stalin’s ‘wedding cakes’. Also, the new owners of the hotel have
made a special point of presenting all 1,400 pieces of their collection
of Soviet paintings and sculptures, which were mostly
created in the 1950s, when the hotel was constructed, thus
raising the etiquette and awareness of this period of culture
in Moscow.
Why do you specialise in Soviet Art?
I used to be a journalist and worked for the magazine, Soviet
Union. The magazine covered a lot of cultural themes, but
it was all the official side, and I hated it. All my friends were
underground painters, such as Nikolay Smirnov, and they
suggested that I stage an exhibition highlighting the underground
art of the time.
I organised my first exhibition in 1987 in Prague, and I exhibited
the work of all my non-conformist artist friends. It was successful.
At about the same time I travelled around Russia, and returned
to my home city Ekaterinburg. When I was living there I brought
a few European landscapes, from one of the most famous artists
of those days, just because I liked them. I came to understand
that there was a huge difference between the artists of the older
generation, who were taught by people who received their education
before the revolution, and the new generation of artists.
I began to understand that their work was of very good quality,
and they were conscientious.
As for my friends, I know most of them were inspired by Polish
art magazines, where they saw contemporary art that was
not really so difficult to produce. I started to buy and collect Soviet
Art. Just at that time, during Perestroika, an Italian antique
dealer, Marco Datrino came to Russia with the idea of exporting
Russian antiques. It was only when he got here did he find out
that it was impossible to take antiques out of the country, and he
wasn’t exactly bowled over by contemporary art. I showed him
some Soviet art of the 1950s. He said: “Oh, I like this.” I sourced
some paintings for his first big exhibition of this kind of art in
12 June 2010
Leonid Shishkin and his gallery are well known to many
foreigners in Moscow who are interested in Soviet art. At the
end of April, he opened a new gallery space in the atrium
of the salubriously redecorated Ukraine Hotel. Paintings by
Zinaida Serebryakova, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Yuri Pimenov and
Alexandre Deineka’s adorn the walls. It is slightly shocking to
see many works by these masters that I had previously seen
only in art text-books hanging right in front of my eyes. But the
everyman approach is misleading, some of these works have
five or six figure (in dollars) price tags. John Harrison talked to
Leonid about his life’s work.
1990 in his gallery in Turin. We organised exhibitions in Turin together
for three years. The first year was successful, the second
was half as successful, and the third year, not successful.
About this time, I made the acquaintance of Dmitry Nalbandyan.
He was a very famous artist in Soviet times, but the intelligentsia
and the artists didn’t like him because he was the only
artist whom Stalin posed for. He also painted Khrushchev and
Brezhnev, so he was a high-class court painter.
During Perestroika, I saw an article in Ogonyok magazine
about him, which associated him with Soviet times and was
pretty negative. I decided to go and see him, something that I
could never have done before, as he was way too high for me.
He son and wife had died, and he was a lonely old man. We had a
long talk. He was a brilliant guy. Nobody liked him because they
accused him of being a conformist during the Soviet Union. He
actually was a foreigner, from Georgia. His attitude was that he
simply wanted to be successful. He wasn’t too concerned about
who was in power.
I started to buy his paintings, which he sold very cheaply. That
is how I got into dealing Soviet art.
Please tell me more about Soviet Art
It is a strange that the Soviet period is only known for one
school of painting: Socialist Realism. In fact there were at least
four different styles. Before the Soviet period, up to about 1920,
the major schools in Russia were classicism as in the peredvizhniki
school, and the Moscow impressionist school. Soviet art
absorbed these and turned impressionism into Soviet impressionism,
and the peredvizhniki into socialist realism. There was
also the avant-garde movement as personified by Pyotr Konchalovsky,
Aristarkh Lentulov, Alexandre Kuprin and the ‘Jack of
Diamonds School’. This was a mixture of post-impressionism
and Cezannism. Then there was constructivism, with artists like
Yuri Pimenov and Alexandre Deineka, who were young in the
twenties, and who were influenced by German expressionism
and Art Deco.
All of these four trends were mixed up, and collectively,
it became known as Soviet Art. All the key players were full
members of the Academy of Art, as were traditional artists like