Aleksandr Arefiev

Aleksandr Arefiev started his artistic path during the years of the Siege of Leningrad, the nine-hundred-day blockade during World War II that shattered the city’s existence. [1] When it began in the autumn of 1941, Arefiev was just ten years old, and the following year he enrolled in a drawing class in the Leningrad Zhdanov Pioneer Palace (currently Saint Petersburg City Palace of Youth Creativity). In 1944, when the Siege ended (but the war was still ongoing), he enrolled in the Leningrad Secondary Art School (now the Ioganson Saint Petersburg State Academic Art Lyceum) affiliated with the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (formerly and today the Academy of Arts). Consequently, Arefiev had the opportunity to study with famous artists of the previous generation, as well as to visit classes and lectures by prominent figures such as the avant-garde art critic (and professor of art history) Nikolay Punin.

Punin was among those who, after the war, were discussing possible ways of reinventing Soviet art. For him, the old prewar model—in which all artists had to conform to a vaguely defined socialist realism—was no longer working. The war itself was the cause: to keep artists serving their propagandistic duty, the government had loosened restrictions, since the optimistic visual language of socialist realism was poorly suited to expressing the horrors of wartime. Many artists therefore returned to the modernist idiom most of them had practiced during the heyday of the avant-garde and had been forced to give up: it was simply more effective for the spirit-lifting purposes the war demanded.

However, after the war, when the needs changed, it was still unclear whether artists would be allowed to continue to work in a modernist idiom or forced to go back to socialist realist norms. It was as if the war had reset the clock and the world was starting anew, and that included the visual arts. In that atmosphere, Nikolay Punin—a long-time proponent of radical formal experiments—was eager to weigh in on the paths new postwar art might take. Wisely, he used that historical moment to champion the least radical of all the “isms”: impressionism.

In 1946, he gave a lecture dedicated to impressionism and its potential use for the new Soviet art. In it, he encouraged artists to get rid of the outdated formal “scaffoldings,” as he called linear perspective and anatomical accuracy. Instead, as Punin argued, artists should focus on the “fascinating event,” by which he meant any event explicitly connected to the realities of modern life.

Extensive public discourse followed Punin’s lecture, and consequently it became well known among artists and art critics of Leningrad. Arefiev likely attended the lecture, and his subsequent work follows Punin’s advice: he didn’t attempt anatomical accuracy in his depiction of the human figure, and he didn’t follow a straightforward linear perspective in his landscapes; he also focused his work on “fascinating objects” or events. Unlike Punin, however, Arefiev understood “fascinating” not only as something explicitly new and modern, but as something that provokes a powerful emotional reaction—fights, even crimes of various severity. In the late 1940s, immediately after the war was over, Leningrad was still a city where brutality was visible in the streets, and Arefiev began to sketch its life in both its beauty and its ugliness. Among his early works are drawings of social outcasts that are reminiscent of the work of Honoré Daumier and Francisco Goya in subject, and sometimes even in style. Arefiev was particularly affected when he witnessed the hangings of civilians during the war and immediately after, when German war prisoners were executed in public in 1946. He later made several drawings dedicated to this subject.

In 1948, he was expelled from the art school for his interest in impressionism, which he studied mostly through books. Expulsion cut him off from the official system: he could not continue his education at any state art institution and was therefore barred from working as a professional artist on commissions or in exhibitions. He could only work privately, at home—which made him one of the first unofficial artists in the Soviet Union. By then, he was already at the center of a private circle of young artists, most of whom studied with him at the secondary art school and were expelled. This collective was called ОНЖ (Орден Непродаюшихся Живописцев, ONZh, Order of Mendicant Painters). [2] Later, art historians dubbed it the Arefiev Circle, as he was its informal leader—both its organizer and its champion.

His early landscapes and portraits from his school years already show a confident hand. In the late 1940s and early' ’50s, he produced the landmark Bath series—several dozen pastel drawings of women at Leningrad’s public bathhouses. He was drawn to the unposed body. Without a studio, unable to afford models, and uninterested in staged nudes, he drew the women from life—observing them covertly, without their knowledge. [3]

Trauma and death—constant realities in Leningrad during the Siege—became a recurring subject in Arefiev’s work. In the early 1950s, he produced a series of drawings titled After the Bombing, depicting civilians killed in the city’s routine air raids. The compositions typically gather several prone figures, rendered almost entirely as silhouettes and flattened by a steeply tilted perspective so that the bodies read less as individuals than as a single collective form.

In general, in his art, Arefiev, perhaps more so than any other nonconformist artist, was focused on everyday life. In the 1970s, when discussing his and his friends’ aesthetic program, he declared, “None of our guys were formalists. That means: working from inside oneself, with some artistry, and through that creating one’s own world [with art]—that was never the case. The priority was always something observed.” [4] The observation, for Arefiev, came before formal invention. He was an emotionally engaged observer of the world around him, constantly in search of a “fascinating” or “stunning” object to observe.

Arefiev often saw everyday life, with all of its brutality and drama, through the lens of art history. One striking example is his treatment of a seemingly prosaic episode in which three people are helping a fourth one, who is too drunk to walk, down the stairs (They Are Taking Him Down the Stairs, 1955, ZAM, 2002.0793), an episode that was repeated, in real life, in Soviet households in the postwar decades. To render this subject, Arefiev used the scheme of the Descent from the Cross. The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg owns both Rubens’s (1612–14) and Rembrandt’s (1634) paintings titled Descent from the Cross, with which Arefiev would have been familiar, and which his small gouache on paper is in conversation with.

Around 1960, Arefiev began his Antiquity series, using mythological subjects as a pretext to push the human body into states of extreme torsion and strain—the kind of baroque distortion he admired in Michelangelo and Rubens. He was particularly attracted to the story of Prometheus, a Greek Titan who stole fire from Zeus to give to the mortals and was consequently punished. Arefiev depicted Prometheus in several paintings and drawings; he did not include any of the narrative parts of the story, just focused on the main character standing in agony before the viewer. The posture of his figure varies from one drawing or painting to another, but only in the details. In principle, it is based on the pose of Michelangelo’s sculpture Dying Slave (1513–16).  Arefiev’s Prometheus is built up from dense, coiled scribbles of dark blue and black crayon, and the screaming mouth opens as a black cavity at the center of a head barely distinguishable from the rest of the body.

In 1968, Arefiev discovered Pavel Filonov’s (1843–1941) work, an encounter that reshaped both his subject matter and his approach to the surface of the picture. At the time, almost all of Filonov’s oeuvre was preserved by his sister, Evdokia Glebova, in her apartment. Upon his visit, Arefiev was struck not only by the morbid subjects and deep, dark color of the paintings, but also by Filonov’s method and philosophy. Filonov proposed to “paint to the atom”—to build the image up from minute, cell-like units of pigment, finishing every part of the painting to the same degree. After this encounter, Arefiev began to draw on the surrealist undercurrent of Leningrad nonconformist art, taking up macabre and not easily decipherable subjects and combining them, in a peculiar way, with his interest in everyday life. His palette grew more saturated, with sharp passages of bright color cutting through the darker tonalities.

This turn in his art led to his interest in the themes of watching and observing, which can be understood to reflect not only the artist’s close attention to the world around him, but also “watching” as an invasive, somewhat violent practice. The figure of the observer, in this sense, mirrors the state’s looming presence in the lives of Soviet citizens. Therefore, Arefiev continued to explore the violence and brutality of life, but through different subjects. At this point, even the most mundane things, such as tourists flooding Leningrad or other Soviet historical sights, turn into something macabre and dangerous. In his works of this period, a surrealist rendering of the subject matter combines with a semi-abstract visual language and sophisticated techniques, which include different types of paint (some of them invented from scratch [5]), collage elements, and markers of provocatively garish colors.

In an untitled gouache of 1970 (D02740), Arefiev stacks the picture as three registers: a column of prisoners walking behind an armed guard along a band of barbed wire; above them, a frieze of silhouetted bodies; and at the top, framed like an inset painting, a multi-limbed écorché figure holding up a red theatrical mask in place of a second face. The viewer’s gaze is pulled upward and finds, at each level, that what looked like life is being watched from the level above—the prisoners by the guard, the guard by the crowd, the crowd by the masked colossus, the whole arrangement by us. Observation here is not neutral—it is the same apparatus that runs the camp at the bottom of the picture—and the mask at the top turns it into a macabre spectacle.

The gouache (Untitled, 1970, D01475), turns the theme inward. The viewer looks out through a window onto an ordinary riverside landscape, but the frame is occupied: a flayed anatomical figure presses in from the left, and at the right, a boy in a striped shirt raises a camera and aims its lens directly at the viewer. The act of looking out is reversed; the picture catches us in the moment we thought we were the observer. From the masked colossus to the boy with a camera on a balcony, Arefiev gives the same condition in two registers: to live is to be watched, and to watch is already to participate.

Arefiev was a leader of his immediate artistic circle. He was actively engaged in connections with many other circles and artists across the map of the unofficial Leningrad art world and beyond. In the late 1960s, when he met artists from the studio of Osip Sidlin (like Anatoly Basin and Igor Ivanov), these connections became the foundation for the broader nonconformist artists’ movement in the city. This movement, which was also actively forming in Moscow at the same time, led to the nonconformist artists gaining unprecedented visibility all over the world and inside the Soviet Union, too. As a result, unofficial artists were allowed to organize two official exhibitions in Leningrad, in the Ivan Gaza Palace of Culture in 1974 and in the Nevsky Palace of Culture in 1975. Arefiev actively participated in the organization of both, even though he boycotted the second one as a result of a rift in the movement. [6]

In the mid-1970s, authorities started to force the most charismatic leaders of the nonconformist movement out of the country. One of them was Arefiev, who emigrated to Paris, France, in 1977. In Paris, he tried to form an alternative Soviet émigré circle in opposition to Mihail Chemiakin’s—Chemiakin had emigrated six years earlier and was by then an established leader of the émigré community. Arefiev’s plans never came to fruition due to his untimely death in 1978 from a car accident at the age of forty-six.

Arefiev was one of the boldest explorers in Soviet nonconformist art. He worked with explicitly social subjects—streets, fights, and crimes of various severity—and with the same historical and mythological themes that official art did, but rendering them far more daringly. His brutal and fierce antiquity offered an alternative to the idealized and sanitized official view of corporeal beauty. At the end of his artistic career, he ventured ever deeper into the field of formal experimentation, when he used markers to paint mysterious and morbid yet absurd figures on the verge of abstraction. His work of that time anticipates the international neo-expressionist art of the 1980s—American graffiti artists, the German Neue Wilde, the Italian Transavanguardia.

All his life, Arefiev fought for his own right—and everyone’s—to exhibit their art. He was also a “provocateur for painting,” as his close friend, artist Rikhard Vasmi, called him. All this gives him a very special place in Leningrad nonconformist art.

Georg Sokolov

Notes:

1. The Siege of Leningrad was the deadliest blockade in human history, lasting from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944 —872 days—when Nazi Germany and its Finnish allies encircled the Soviet city of Leningrad (modern-day Saint Petersburg) on the Eastern Front of World War II.

2. The group name is an acronym. In Russian, the middle letter of ОНЖ stands for either “mendicant” or “unsellable.” The idea behind it is that it is impossible to put a price on true art.

3. Covertly drawing women in a public bathhouse was both an invasion of privacy and, under Soviet law of the period, an offense; the practice should be acknowledged as such. In the immediate postwar years, however, Arefiev’s habit of patient, unannounced observation was of a piece with the survival ethos of the Siege generation, and it remained central to his method throughout his career.

4. Часы [The Clock], 13 (1978): 193.

5. Like many nonconformist artists, Arefiev was not a member of the Union of Artists and therefore had no access to the professional supply shops reserved for its members. He routinely mixed his own pigments and improvised techniques from whatever materials were on hand.

6. Igor Sinyavsky, one of the movement’s leaders, was barred from the 1975 exhibition by the KGB after staging an unauthorized open-air show in a park. Arefiev was among the few who protested the ban and called for a boycott of the officially sanctioned event.