Mikhail Makhov

If anybody should be counted as an integral part of the unofficial art world of Kazakhstan, it is, inarguably, Mikhail Makhov. He lived and worked during the period that Brezhnev declared to be “the era of developed socialism,” which in the 1990s would come to be known as “the era of stagnation.” Boring, tedious, and hypocritical, the system no longer defended itself as radically as it had in Stalin’s time, relying instead on its primarily bureaucratic mechanisms of security. For instance, for artists, working outside of the Artists’ Union was practically impossible, as access to exhibitions, publications, and even art supplies was pretty much cut off by the state. Escapism was a popular method of self-censorship, even for members of the Artists’ Union, and the realistic landscapes that artists would create to evade the demands of propaganda were still allowed into exhibitions. Attempts at abstraction, however, were strictly forbidden, and could even serve as grounds for expulsion from the union.

Makhov’s escapism was of a different nature. He made no attempt to become an official artist and join the Artists’ Union. Thus, bureaucratic censorship never existed for him. He led a free life, filled with work, and he found his own ways to get a studio, art supplies, and even an apprentice. He liked being an “unrecognized genius,” a Soviet hippie leading a bohemian existence. He had long hair (freakish for that time), flared jeans, bracelets, tattoos, and rings. The romantic aura of a free artist emphasized his distinctiveness—and also served as a good marketing strategy. His work was popular among the small handful of Kazakh collectors (especially Yuri Koshkin), the bohemian Almaty youth, and the actors of the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theater, including Sergei Yursky, Vladislav Strzhelchik, Oleg Basilashvili, and Yefim Kopelyan, whom Makhov met when the theater toured through Almaty. In almost every intelligentsia home at that time, one could find semi-forbidden mystical themes; reminders of religious and Orthodox pathos; a locally made imitation African mask in the china cabinet; a portrait of Ernest Hemingway; and a homemade flower arrangement, symbolizing suffering.

There were plenty of amateur artisans who made these things, but Makhov, with his sincerity, professionalism, and true faith in his vocation, did not even suspect that he was participating in the discourse of mass culture. “I want to emphasize the magical distance that Makhov kept from the world around him. He didn’t live in Soviet Alma-Ata, but in a cloud of his pure fancies about art, beauty, and the artist’s way. He was childlike and didn’t give a damn about what was happening in Kazakh visual art at large or, in a word, in the West. He was no Ernst Neizvetsny, but a local Michelangelo,” wrote the artist Alexander Brener, who had once lived in Almaty. [1]

In addition to his wooden sculptures, for which the artist would salvage wood from construction sites on the outskirts of the city, Makhov made drawings in colored pencil and ballpoint pen and, less often, watercolors. His series Hamlet (1968), the folio Liubov’ [Love] (1968), and Goluboi Issyk-Kul’ [Blue Issyk-Kul] are characterized by abstract compositions that serve as backgrounds for a portrait or a figure. His slightly earlier paintings, the landscapes and portraits of 1966, which seem to have been made while he was in art school, are done in the “fairy-tale art moderne” style of Russian fin de siècle book illustrator Ivan Bilibin. But his chief passion was wood carving, which constantly occupied him. Brener wrote: “Mikhail loved to carve gnomes, mermaids, tritons, chimera, Indians, Khans, old Russian bodyguards, centaurs, Prince Igor, Yaroslavna, Ali Baba, Baba Yaga, Van’ka Vstan’ka, Ivan Tsarevich, Maria-krasa-dolgaia-kosa, a rhinoceros inspired by Dürer’s engraving, Pinocchio, dwarves, cowboys, and Vikings.” [2] His sister Lydia, also an artist, recalled, “He only slept three or four hours a night. He never sat still, he was always drawing or carving. He always had his head down.” [3] She also named the reliefs that were taken to Moscow and Leningrad, Paganini, the triptych Dostoevsky, Jesus, Tri chernykh solntsa [Three black suns], and of course his crucifixions, of which there were many.

In addition to these works, Makhov had many commissions. He painted murals on the walls of apartments and bars, sculpted furniture out of tree roots, formed repoussé panels (which was at that time very fashionable interior decor), and carved wooden bobbling toys to sell and to give as gifts. His commercial success in an era of planned economy was its own kind of provocation, proving the artist’s ability to survive on his own means.

He did not turn down official commissions, either: he restored the carved doors at the Central Committee of the Komsomol, as well as making the Komsomol a cartouche with Lenin for their facade. This contradictory fact is related to the authorities’ methods of censorship, as described by Artemy Troitsky in his writing on the underground music scenes in Moscow and Leningrad (Makhov often attended these underground concerts): “The Komsomol quickly took control of them, censoring the music and doing everything it could to include this ‘new form of youth leisure activity’ to its ideological work.” [4]

It is possible that his work with the Komsomol led to the creation of Krasnaia Armiia [The Red Army] (1969, ZAM, D17209), a relief with a somewhat unusual subject for Makhov. Shaped like a wooden cross, it is dense with body parts: intertwined arms and faces, which most often seem to belong to women. At the top, we see the heads of two Red Army soldiers, recognizable by their Budenovka hats emblazoned with stars. The texture of the relief is powerfully modeled, with clearly visible woodgrain and engraving marks emphasized and brought out. The density, variation in depth of the relief, and dynamics of the composition create a tension suggesting that the subject ought to be read as heroic and tragic. Death, chaos, violence—this is, it seems, what the Red Army brought to the people. However, the placement of the Red Army men at the top of the composition and, crucially, the defensive diagonal gestures of the substantially enlarged arm of one of the liberating soldiers speak of the opposite meaning. Symbols are scattered across the surface of the relief: a cross, the heads of bronze nails, and Red Army stars are like premonitions of the future, when Russian Orthodoxy would be wed with the cult of warfare, as they are under present-day Putinism.

The second piece from the Zimmerli collection, Bozhok [Little God] (1979, ZAM, D17180), would seem to have been made by a different artist altogether. While it has the same material, technique, and theme of a deity as the other work, the meaning and style are completely different. Little God is an anthropomorphic relief constructed from concentric circles and curlicues, an exaggeratedly mannerist rendering of a human body, alluding to African sculpture or, more precisely, to fantasies on that theme. Its asymmetrical nature is most likely informed by the shape of the board and is not its strongest feature. While Little God is rather banal, it is nonetheless representative of the main body of Makhov’s work.

It is essential to mention that the artist did not even live to be twenty-nine, so unlike Vladimir Vysotsky, he had no time to truly develop. Nevertheless, he managed to perfect the stylistic and thematic trends of his time to their fullest extent, his works representing the attempts to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere of the late Soviet era. This brought him close to the intelligentsia, who saw him as a genius, an original, a visionary, and a prophet, capable of intuitively reflecting the subtle anxieties of the intellectual in a totalitarian landscape. In the course of his short life, he only had one solo show, organized not by a professional art institution but by the literary journal Prostor in 1968. According to the breathless article in this journal, the show included twenty-three pieces, the central exhibit being a series of wooden reliefs illustrating scenes from The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. “He’s never seen the old masters in person, he’s only dreamed of getting into the Tretyakov Gallery—it was only a week ago when he saw a reproduction of a Siqueros mural for the first time; until recently, he didn’t know who Andrei Rublev was. The virginal freshness of his impressions genuinely manifest themselves on canvas, in drawing, sculpture, wood carving, metal; the artist’s imagination runs wild from its roots. It makes you wonder where his deep understanding of icon painting comes from. Where, how did he find Yaroslavna, Igor, Boya, all of those powerful, elongated forms that make up Russian faces?” [5]

The text, written by journalist Liudmila Eniseeva-Varshavskaya in 1968, with the sentimental title “Otkrytie Krasoty” [Discovery of beauty], typical of that era, preserves one person’s impressions and some facts of Makhov’s biography. At the same time, it propagates a number of myths and prejudices that still circulate in Almaty to this day. For instance, there is a claim that in 1968, the artist had only just received his degree from the Almaty Art Institute. Brener, who was a close friend of Makhov’s, claims that the artist actually never graduated. Even Makhov’s place of birth is controversial: in the catalogue of Richard Spooner’s collection, it is given as Alma-Ata; Brener says Makhov is from Ural; and Eniseeva claims that he is from a remote Altai village. The artist’s sister, Lydia, said in an interview that the family lived in Prokop’evsk in the Kemerovo Oblast’ [6], which, alas, does not indicate that it was Makhov’s birthplace. In any case, the fact that he came from a village only added to his romantic aura as an autodidact and bearer of authentic Orthodox and folk culture. According to another legend, the series of Igor reliefs was bought by the most important fine-arts museum in Kazakhstan directly from Makhov’s diploma defense. Meanwhile, Eniseeva tells this same story about one of his self-portraits. The Kasteyev Museum of Almaty does have the Igor series in its collection, but it was acquired in the 1970s, not during a thesis defense. The museum even exhibited them in a show co-organized with the Udar Gallery in 1997. The artist’s early tragic death (he fell off a roof) also lends itself to mythologizing. Here, we may be moved to close with lines from the true spirit of the 1970s, the poet Andrei Voznesensky:

“She was born in a house standing

Between a cathedral and a bar…

You are so gifted, especially

Considering how poorly written screenplay about your life is.” [7]

Valeria Ibraeva

Translated from Russian by Bela Shayevich

Photo portrait courtesy of the Makhov family

Notes:

1. Alexander Brener, Zhitiya ubiennykh khudozhnikov [Lives of slain artists]. (Moscow: Gileya, 2016): 26.

2. Ibid.

3. Liudmila Eniseeva-Varshavskaya, “Zhil s bogom v dushe” [Lived with God in his soul]. In Prostor 1997.

4. Artemy Troitsky, Subkultura: The New Social. Manchester: Home / Manchester Arts and Culture Center, 2017: 133.

5. Liudmila Eniseeva-Varshavskaya, “Otkrytie Krasoty” [Discovery of beauty]. In Prostor, 1968.

6. Liudmila Eniseeva-Varshavskaya, “Zhil s bogom v dushe.”

7. Andrei Voznesensky. “Ozero” [A lake], 1975.