Abdrashit Sydykhanov

In 1965, Abdrashit Sydykhanov graduated from the N.V. Gogol Almaty Art School (now the Almaty College of Decorative and Applied Arts). In 1967, he joined the Kazakhstan Artists’ Union. In 1970, he joined the Kazakhstan Cinematographers Union. He was a production designer on the following films: Ән қанатында [Wings of Song] (1967), Қараш-Қараш оқиғасы [Shot at Karash Pass] (1968), Любимая [Beloved] (1975), Однажды и на всю жизнь [Once and for All] (1977), Қаралы сұлу [Beauty in Mourning] (1982), and Құлагер [Kulager] (1972, renamed Тризна [Funeral Feast] for its release). He also worked on Шоқан Уәлиханов [Chokan Valikhanov] (1983–84, four parts) and Әбайдың жолы [Abai’s Path] (1988, ten-episode television series).

Sydykhanov belonged to the cohort of the sixtiers (Shestidesyatnyky) artists. Led by Salikhitdin Aitbayev, they asserted the enduring importance of nomadic culture, celebrating the beauty of the traditional Kazakh way of life. They chose the decorative style of traditional color combinations in clearly contoured forms. They loved and understood Kazakh ornaments, whose broad scope was inspired by the infinite space of the steppe and the sky overhead.

Sydykhanov’s works from before the mid-1980s are full of optimism. These include the remarkable pieces held by the Kasteyev State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan, in Almaty: Bathing the Sheep (1971), Tobacco Picking (1971), Apple Picking (1973), Ninth Microdistrict (1973), and Dream (1978).

Sydykhanov also worked in the portrait genre. His self-portraits demonstrate an interesting figurative dynamic that allows insight into the artist’s sense of self. His first self-portrait, held in the Zimmerli Museum, was painted when the artist was thirty-three (1970, ZAM, 2001.0120). We can immediately notice influences and tangential references to self-portraits by Kazimir Malevich, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse. The young painter throws down the gauntlet to the geniuses of the past with desperate courage: “Here I am!” The portrait is painted in a broad, confident, bold manner. The riotous colors and their wild combinations in the portrait leave a striking impression. The blue eyelids, red “eyepiece,” and the thick blue on the cheekbones create a powerful effect. His large head is set deeply into strong shoulders, making him look like a heavyweight (in this, he resembles Mikhail Vrubel’s barrel-chested portrait of the industrialist and Moscow Private Opera founder Savva Mamontov). The gaze is both fixed and absent. His expression reveals perseverance and stubbornness, but also an ironic disposition. Hence the comically dejected small mustache—the hat with its soft winged rim looks cheerfully absurd atop this macho character. All in all, the “Wild East” is ready to go up against the “wild” and any other isms.

The second self-portrait (1973, Kasteyev State Museum of Arts) was painted just three years later. But it is strikingly different from the first one. The rich palette of the first image has given way to a more restrained use of color in the second portrait. Instead of a jubilant sunny day, there is the delicate light of the moon. Instead of a loud statement, there is silent reflection. It is as if an eternity had passed between the two portraits. His thirty-sixth year turned out to be an important milestone for the artist. Much had been learned, even more had not yet been, and so here a melancholy sadness envelops the soul. The skull, however, palpable under the skin and muscles, speaks of the strength of his character.

The third portrait (1990) is a light outline of the head, in Italian pencil, of a person immersed in meditation. The fleeting nature of sensation is conveyed by rapid movements of the hand. There is something Eastern about the drawing and the countenance of the face, and Sydykhanov had in fact become interested in the ancient teachings of the East. Here the profile is drawn on an old piece of wood, which tempers the pathos of the individual. This detail is important for the artist. And it comes as no surprise that the artist painted another two self-portraits, entirely different from the previous ones; this portrait and the fourth and fifth self-portraits are in the collection of the artist’s daughter, Zauresh Sydykhanova.

The fourth was painted in 2008. Although the artist’s face is not present, it is still his portrait. It is known as Без названия (следы) [Untitled (traces)]. The clarifying word in parentheses refers to two footprints on a multicolored spot on the wooden palette. Here, the metaphor of “leaving a mark on art” is made literal—and comical. In Taoism, the category chi can refer to a trace, the evidence of an elusive reality. Here we have a humble presence and dissolution of the artist in his canvases. Black space surrounds the palette. Perhaps this is a reference to the northern, shadowy side of the mountain. What is the meaning of the light spots of paired objects hovering in the darkness of the night? Measuring time in cigarette packs? The artist always carried the spirit of the Kazakh folk fairy-tale trickster and kind friend of the unpowerful, Aldar-Kose.

The fifth portrait is a collage created in 2010. The artist’s image is composed of a set of real-life objects used in creative work: a palette with blobs of paint, old brushes and tubes, a pen and pencil. The accessories of the studio are also present here: bags of Lipton tea (real Kazakh tea is for the home, while this is a laboratory of creativity), a pack of cigarettes and lighter, and, unfortunately, a packet of pills—his health at this time was not what it used to be. On top is a straw visor for plein air work, which is ironically transformed into something like a bib. Remaining a child through one’s art is the dream of many an artist, and the work of life is the true portrait of the artist. The appearance and direction of the gaze can change, but the desire to work, to create new images, remains constant. Here, the color palette is lighter. Perhaps this is a reference to the southern, sunny side of the mountain.

Fedor Aranyshev is a fellow filmmaker whose portrait Sydykhanov painted (1970s, ZAM, 2001.0121). His image is a breathtaking revelation: a naked “man in a case” (to refer to the eccentric man in the Anton Chekhov short story of that title), a strange, unadorned guy, bare as a falcon (or naked as a baby). The artist inscribed and separated the figure from its background, the dense blue of the sky. A feeling reveals itself: that man is alone with the universe, one on one. It is reminiscent of the existentialists and their idea of a man thrown into the world against his will. With quick and accurate strokes of warm and cool colors, the artist sets up a complex game of mimicry on the face. And with the use of several white spaces, he creates a blinding light, forcing the viewer to watch what is happening through a squint—making the world inscrutable. The artist outlines the collarbone sharply and the shoulder more softly. He stretches out the neck and dismembers it with color. This individual is a complete oxymoron: a defenseless bullhead, a cautious daredevil, a sociable recluse—and lots of other things. Oddly enough, it accurately captures the ambiguity of character, the variability of mood, the complex, elusive essence of a person. By the way, perhaps the universe did notice this strange loner—and she kindly endowed him with a piece of herself, painting his face and chest with blue reflections.

Sydykhanov painted several portraits of women. Although all the models are young, each of their images carries a note of sadness. It is as if a certain counterpoint of existence was revealed to the artist: the inseparability of light and shadow, joy and sadness. In Девушка в дублёнке [A Girl in a Sheepskin] (1981, State Tretyakov Gallery), there is a sadness of expectation. There is a similar intonation at play in a work in the collection of the Zimmerli Museum: Portrait of a Woman (1982, 2001.0123).

Sydykhanov was always interested in the life of the steppe—not as ethnography but as a cultural phenomenon, the people’s character and way of life. The artist was drawn to the metaphor of a condensed image of the world. He painted the sophisticated Белый родник [White Spring] (1985, Kasteyev State Museum of Arts) in a silvery color scheme, evoking the muted flow of nature’s hues. This depicts a wonderful world and the harmony of life. A delicate girl seems to bathe in the streaming moonlight. A loving mother, lifting up her baby, asks the heavens for protection. A milkmaid carefully pours milk from one vessel to another. The dark silhouette of a camel emerges.

This ideal was destroyed overnight when two realities crashed into each other. A tragedy occurred in mid-December 1986: Kazakh youth, believing in perestroika and “socialism with a human face,” took to the streets of Alma-Ata in peaceful protest against the decision of the central government to elect an outsider as first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. The demonstrators would have been happy with any Kazakh Russian familiar with the Kazakh mentality. Moscow saw this as a nationalist rebellion. The student demonstration was brutally suppressed.

This tragedy changed Sydykhanov. The mental trauma of the event needed release, and the artist indirectly expressed his attitude toward what had occurred. In 1987, he painted Пастух ворон [The Crow Shepherd]. A funny scene he had once witnessed—a sleeping rider surrounded by crows—became imbued with symbolic meaning. The slumber of the tired person transformed the “sleep of reason” into a catastrophe of life (recalling Francisco de Goya’s mixed intaglio print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, c. 1799), or when Hamlet cries that “the time is out of joint” (Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5). In 1988, Sydykhanov painted two versions of the same story: Собака, пожирающая своих щенят [A Dog Devouring Her Puppies]. He sought solace in the golden age of the Kazakh nomad. The image in the painting Доение красной верблюдицы [Milking a Red Camel] (1986–87, all three, Kasteyev State ⁠Museum of Arts) offers affirmation. The pure and simple life of people unfolds under the protection of the camel, who reigns over the sunlit space like a giant, warm, living totem, guarding the balance and harmony of the universe.

Paying mournful homage to the December 1986 events in a number of plot-driven canvases, the artist simultaneously worked on the television production Abai’s Path (1988), based on the nineteenth-century multivolume novel by Kazakh novelist Mukhtar Auezov. Sydykhanov did not prepare storyboard drawings, but painted a series of compositions in oil, each of them a self-contained image. Taken together, they form a kind of reel that can compete with the televised version. This movie production was the last in the artist’s oeuvre—only painting followed.

In June 1989, the exhibition Знаковая живопись [Symbolic painting] opened at the Kasteyev State Museum of Arts. It surprised everyone familiar with the work of Abdrashit Sydykhanov. The artist considered everything he had created before those two tragic days in 1986 to be a result of the influence and pressure of socialist realism. That world turned out to have been a fairy tale about a just social order, and now something true was needed, something closer to one’s roots, which could serve as a foundation in both life and creative work. Fortunately, Sydykhanov came across a reprint of Mukhamedzhan Tynyshpaev’s book Материалы к истории киргиз-казакского народа [Materials on the history of the Kyrgyz-Kazakh people] (Tashkent: Bilim AKIPress, 1925), which included a table with the emblems of different Kazakh clans—tamgas. Many had already been known to the artist, but now they all appeared together in an organized system. Tamga (tanba) became a life-saving find. The simplicity and clarity of each symbol inspired a search for something similar in painting.

Now Sydykhanov sought to simplify drawing object forms, to subordinate the planes, to shorten the narrative. Each composition became a fascinating attempt to pack knowledge and sensations into one condensed image. The arrow points to the Adays, the axe is a reference to the Zhagalbayla, the wheel represents the Dulat tribe. These symbols were used to brand domestic animals. A composition dedicated to a particular clan included its tamga, which was essential for creating a linear color composition that reflected the artist’s conception of the clan’s character and distinctive traits. This is how Sydykhanov’s symbolic painting came to be, step by step. Soon, paint was no longer enough for what he sought to achieve, so Sydykhanov introduced outside elements into the painting: grains, the green caps of kefir bottles, cardboard butterflies, tinfoil, eggshells. Regarding the latter, he said that this type of glowing white color could not be achieved with paint. It is reminiscent of the way Kazakh jewelers (zergers) helped out beautiful women who could not afford gemstones and transformed plain glass by putting colored fabric or paper on its underside.

The December tragedy was still on Sydykhanov’s mind when another dramatic event occurred: the collapse of the Soviet government, which began in August and ended for Kazakhstan in December 1991. It was a time of change. Many people worried about predictability and chance, the fragile boundary between life and death. The theme of the accidental death of innocents is central to the painting Бес қонақ [Five Guests] (1991, collection of Richard Spooner, Astana, Kazakhstan). It depicts the true story of five jigits (expert horsemen) who died during a terrible snowstorm, a surprising event in the month of May. The distant past of this event tempered its frightful tragedy, shifted its accents. It allowed the artist to create a powerful image of omnipotent nature: the blue of the cosmos engulfs the still-hot colors of disappearing forms.

Soon, curiosity led the artist to other cultural spaces. Bits of paper with handwritten quotes appeared on the walls of his studio. Here was the aphorism of the Indian spiritual leader Osho (1931–1990): “I am a majority of one.” Its meaning clearly impressed the independent-minded artist. Next to it was a quote by the Chinese Buddhist monk Deshan Xuanjian (780–865): “Only when you have no thing in your mind and no mind in things are you vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous.” And even more mysterious ones: “The perfect man is like an empty boat” by the Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou (c. 369–286 BCE).

With the advent of his interest in the symbolic, his painting began to gravitate toward the white, light, and transparent, especially in paintings about the empty boat. There is a paradox at play here: emptiness is fullness. However, the empty boat is a metaphor. The task is to transform the verbal image into a visual one without turning it into a mere landscape. The goal is to express equanimity in color, but also openness to the world. He painted many Empty Boat paintings in an effort to achieve the desired result. A 2001 painting shows a boat, a dolphin, the sun, and its reflection inside a translucent blue (collection of Nurlan Smagulov, Astana, Kazakhstan). In each new work, one must stubbornly peer into the painterly substance in order to spot the boat, the river, the sky, the sun. The artist gradually moved toward a “hazy mist” (a Chinese synonym for painting) designed to hide the external and reveal internal meanings.

Meanwhile, his own world was not forgotten. He still worked on paintings about his native land. Their amplitude varies from figures (provisional ones) to signs and symbols. In 2002, he painted I Am a Child Again. It shows a young mother with the face of an idol, a symbol of the eternal renewal of life. In 2007, the painting Steppe Amazon in the Moonlight (both works, collection of Nurlan Smagulov, Astana, Kazakhstan) shows a romantic image of a nomad. The picture leaves an instant mark on one’s memory; it is like a giant petroglyph left behind by the ancestors. Here, you can hear the continuous call of nomadic life, whose meanings and images live in the consciousness and depths of memory—the steppe, horses, yurts, dastarkhans (floor dining cloths)—not in terms of daily life, but the eternal, perpetual presence of the spirit of the ancestors and the power of tradition.

In 2011, he painted Under the Blue Sky, an image of a beautiful woman on horseback, in which all the beauties of the Kazakh epic merge together, as well as Girl with a Sheep, a carefree childhood on the pasture. There is also another painting, Untitled (all three in the collection of Zauresh Sydykhanova). It was still on the easel when the artist passed away. And this prompts us to look at it more closely. The color is as transparent as on the empty boat canvases, as if the long-awaited enlightenment had been achieved. Many things were seen anew: the earth and the sky, a yurt in the lowland, an oven on a hill, and a person watching the flight of birds, the wind lifting up his coat. And a strange detail: the smoke rises from his pipe in a completely straight line. Maybe it is an angel or an aruach (ancestor spirit), or a symbol of a soul that has grown wings?

The parabola of Sydykhanov’s creative path as a painter is striking: first, there is the temptation of reality interpreted through poetics. Then, a test of imagination led to a marvelous series of images whose associations are based on arrangements of the Kazakh clan tamga. Then, there is the pull of the symbolic content of life, its elusive meanings, and the unceasing call of national culture, the meanings and images of which live in the consciousness and depths of memory. Sydykhanov’s canvases reverberate with his very personal artistic intonation. He is both his own and other, at the same time, a man of the world with a Kazakh accent. The artist’s studio was always full of melodies from different parts of the world. Music became a part of his soul-body and was transformed into the rhythmic interplay of lines and colors. Sydykhanov could say, paraphrasing the Zen poet Layman Pang: “Miraculous power and marvelous activity— / Listening to music and painting.”

Bayan Barmankulova

Translated from Russian by Maria P. Vassileva