The collapse of the Soviet Union has had surprisingly little effect on a group of people who might well be among the most concerned: Soviet emigre artists.
The majority of them has faced so many difficulties since they first came to the West almost 20 years ago that change in the country they left has been the least of their problems.
Members of two generations of contemporary Soviet artists have worked in the United States and Western Europe. All wanted to succeed within a structure of galleries and museums. Few have achieved the success they hoped for.
Western reactions to changes taking place in Russia were for some artists a help. But the chief beneficiaries were those who stayed. Emigre artists have remained the odd men (and women) out.
”Most of the emigre artists didn`t make it,” said Margarita Tupitsyn, an art historian and critic who organized several exhibitions of Soviet art after she and her husband left Moscow for New York in 1975.
”They didn`t make it because they didn`t bring anything new to Western art discourse. Some sell their work and survive (on it), but only the Sots artists made careers.”
Sots (which is short for sotsiyalistichiski, meaning socialist) art is a style of painting created in Moscow by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid in 1972. It ironically appropriated images from mass culture, much as Pop Art had in the West. The content was recognizable and looked political. In a way, it was just what Western eyes wanted.
”In the `70s people thought, oh, Russia: oppressive, terrible, you live very badly there,” said Andrew Solomon, author of ”The Irony Tower,” a recent book on Soviet art in the time of glasnost. ”And that was about all people unfamiliar with Soviet art understood.
”So there was a longing for art that was, in a sense, banal. Many Western viewers wanted simple, direct, political work.”
Sots art is neither simple nor direct and is less about politics than the artists` attempts to resolve a past in which virtually every act could be interpreted as political. Tupitsyn maintains it succeeded only because it contributed new symbols and issues to Western postmodernism.
Still, Sots artists who came to the West wanted to be assimilated by the native art scene, and their visual language proved more adaptable than others. In some cases the adaptations achieved a measure of commercial success but resulted in diminished complexity.
”I have changed in my work because there is a different context,” said Leonid Sokov, a Sots artist who came to New York from Moscow in 1980.
”Often I use Russian and American images together. The ideas are not deeply American because I cannot understand that. But if I put Elvis Presley together with Lenin and Marilyn Monroe, they are mythologic images accessible to everybody. I cannot go deeper into American culture because my culture is different.”
Opinion is divided on Komar and Melamid`s gradual shift to American themes. Solomon believes the work retains a peculiarly Russian quality of humor. Tupitsyn feels it is an attempt to keep a distance from other emigre artists, as if to say Komar and Melamid were capable of something the others were not.
”We have changed,” said Melamid, ”but have never understood why we were changing, whether it was because of time or place. It`s very confusing for us immigrants because time and place are intermixed. Russia for us means less the place than a time in the past.
Time has affected other artists in other ways. Dmitri Alexeev`s is perhaps the most poignant. He left Moscow for Paris in 1987, at the beginning of perestroika, and has suffered for being neither a pathbreaking emigre nor an artist who stayed to outlive the Soviet Union.
”My work has a linguistic approach,” Alexeev said, ”and living in the West gives me the opportunity to understand my culture better through looking at myself in another mirror. But the work has found no success.
”People who came out before me, in the time of the `Evil Empire,` were welcomed like Solshenitsyn, who for me is a mediocre writer. When I came out, I was nobody. I am just a Russian artist living in France.”
”I have been 16 years in the West,” said Alexander Kosolopov, a convert to Sots art living in New York. ”For about 10 years I was underground; what I did nobody wanted to see or exhibit.
”Then, when glasnost broke out, there was big attention to Russia. Dealers and collectors looked superficially on Russian culture and thought of the art more or less like caviar. It became a fashion, and since then I have had a good reception.”
The vogue for Soviet art soon established a cachet for artists who had stayed in Russia, as if they were more Russian than the emigres. Western critics and collectors celebrated them out of proportion to their aesthetic worth.
”With a few exceptions, the emigres remained at the levels they were on before the new interest,” said Solomon. ”But they became frustrated that their contributions to the shape of the Soviet vanguard were not acknowledged in exhibitions or, by and large, in catalogues. There was a real snobbery against them.”
”A lot of people from an earlier generation also had left,” said Tupitsyn, ”and they were significant. Oskar Rabin and Lidiya Masterkova, who live in Paris, were important for the Soviet underground and alternative art of the `60s. But when they came out, they were lost because they brought nothing new.
”These artists from the `60s are the lost generation. They don`t have careers in the West or in Russia either because the country doesn`t have museums that can show their work in a proper context.”
The boomlet in contemporary Soviet art gave a false impression to artists who had remained in the Soviet Union. But emigre artists knew a superficial interest could not be sustained, and few took seriously the astronomical prices-$415,000 for a painting by the marginal Grisha Bruskin-at Sotheby`s Moscow auction in 1988. They, like Tupitsyn, saw it as theater.
The American recession came two years later, somewhat clouding the issue. Involvement with contemporary Soviet art had waned partly because increased familiarity had diminished its mystique. But the cooling was also part of a larger condition reflected in several areas of the art market.
”The initial excitement of a whole new country with lots of new artists seems to have passed,” Solomon said. ”And people who buy Russian work now are better informed because there has been more time for them to become informed. But I think recession economics have a lot to do with it. People are not so much buying art on whim as they were five or six years ago.”
”The market is quite saturated in this country,” said Viktor Skersis, a former student of Melamid who has given up his collaborative art for medical illustration.
”I wanted to be shown in an American gallery. I wanted it. I wanted it badly. I don`t know, maybe I didn`t have enough energy to penetrate the market. However, I do know the majority of artists who came from Russia before 1990 could not do it either.”
