Bella Levikova

In her longstanding commitment to abstraction, Bella Levikova is one of those rare artists who found her idiom in her formative years and developed it throughout her life without ever fundamentally changing it. Her strikingly large canvases sometimes evoke associations with multidimensional puzzles in which various geometric elements and planes of pure color are fitted together in peculiar ways. Other works are reminiscent of dynamic compositions with anthropomorphic forms or resemble brightly colored, non-objective comics, in which a wide variety of associations are enciphered. But all her works seem to gesture toward metaphysical meaning, as though each canvas were an attempt to depict the invisible. And the rhythm set in motion by the painter can always be felt in the final image.

Rather than bringing to mind abstract painting, or other visual art, this sense of chaos arranged upon the canvas suggests nothing so much as music. The effect produced by her paintings—vivid and resistant to analysis—is similar to that produced by atonal music. Alban Berg’s piano sonata, say, or his string quartet, could serve as counterparts to some of Levikova’s works. In our day, this dynamic, contrasting style of painting won’t come as a shock to anyone, but in the USSR of the 1960s (the decade that Levikova considers the starting point of her career), there was nothing else like it.

Levikova always followed her own path. Though she took part in the most important events in the history of the Moscow art underground during the 1960s and ’70s, she did not come under anyone’s influence and never belonged to a group or association, even an informal one. Levikova’s life and creative development ran parallel to the artistic processes of that period, not within them, and she steered clear of ideological battles and trends. While she never joined the fight against the powers that be, she was always stylistically at odds with those in power. Levikova is a nonconformist even with regard to her peers in the world of unofficial Soviet art, which is why she has always remained in their shadow.

Bella Isaakovna Levikova was born in 1939 in the village of Kratovo near Moscow. Her family was poor, if not outright destitute. Her father, a professional artist originally from Vitebsk, had studied at the Saint Petersburg Repin Academy of Arts (Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture), but he had been a German prisoner of war, and on his return he was immediately arrested. “When they gave him back to us,” Levikova writes in her memoirs, “papa said that even the Germans hadn’t tormented him the way they did here… What are you still doing alive, Jew? Who did you betray? You shouldn’t even exist anymore! He was taken away every day, interrogated, and brought back in handcuffs.” [1] Levikova’s father had an active form of tuberculosis, and Bella’s brother died soon after he was born. After her father’s return, their home became a gathering place for people, including artists, who had passed through the Gulag. “There were artists, out-of-work circus performers; sculptors would leave works in our pantry, which was full of sawdust,” Levikova continues. “They would bury their antique plaster heads in there, along with detached arms and legs. But no one ever came for them, and I would go ‘excavating’ in my own pantry and was always genuinely delighted by my finds…”  [1]

This was her first encounter with art. When she was nine, she was taken to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and the paintings she saw there—by Matisse, Picasso, and Braque—permanently altered her consciousness. At her Young Pioneer camp, she staged a ballet based on the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, for which she designed her own sets and danced the main role. She began to draw regularly, but refused to apply to art schools. “My father and husband were realist painters,” Levikova recently explained, “and when papa saw the way I drew his worn-down black boots, which always looked like they’d just been polished … and always with laces that had touched papa’s hands, he would always say: that’s it, I’m preparing you for art school … and he would put a still life in front of me, and I would reject it, saying ‘why draw this—this has already been done.’” [2]  She insists that she never dreamed about becoming an artist, not the usual kind, anyway. After she finished school, she took a job at the Kompressor factory, where she trained to become a crane operator.

Levikova also worked as an orderly at the Institute of Veterinary Medicine; during her time there, she would accompany her colleagues to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, explain impressionism to them, and observe that “the New is conceived in the womb of realism.” [3] At the institute, she learned about the discovery of the DNA molecule, knowledge that would resonate in her work a quarter of a century later. Like Salieri in Pushkin’s 1830 tragedy Mozart and Salieri, who “verified harmony with algebra,” Levikova sought a scientific explanation for creativity. In the early 1990s, she formulated her own interpretation of the phenomenon of DNA. The artist believes that DNA stores not only biological information about us in the form of genetic code, but also a map of the evolutionary development of human consciousness, which determines creative potential.

Levikova also learned how to weave carpets at the Applied Arts Combine and collected works by folk artists across the Moscow region. Eventually, she enrolled at the Saint Petersburg Repin Academy of Arts, where, given the de facto taboo against impressionist and postimpressionist artists in the postwar years, she was told she couldn’t talk about Van Gogh. Only later, after her marriage, did she apply to Moscow State University’s Department of the Theory and History of Art.

Levikova discovered her unique voice as an artist at the age of twenty-six, in 1965. She was a student at the time and had already given birth to a daughter. One day, she was making cut-outs with her child: “I laid out some sheets of colored paper … I got distracted for a second. White, black, red—I lost all sense of where I was, quickly began cutting the red and black sheets into little pieces, and rapidly, unthinkingly gluing them onto a snow-white sheet—so that there would be unity!!! This idea, which at the time I found incomprehensible, came to me as if from within. For 45 minutes, I was somewhere else. I forgot where I was. I was astonished by the change inside me, I had become someone else, someone new—forever!” [4] Levikova refers to this day as her moment of revolution, of rebirth: in that moment, she was born into her vocation, the way Athena was born out of the head of Zeus. She emerged with all her ideas and tools at the ready, with a new, integral vision and a conscious need to expand her knowledge, not only about art, but about the world, the earth, and the cosmos. She studied quantum physics, astrophysics, and bioenergy, reading books on philosophy and psychology and promptly applying this knowledge to her art, adding new spatial dimensions and new layers of meaning to her paintings. Levikova’s works are never just abstractions. To quote an essay from the catalog of Levikova’s exhibition Вычисление интеграла [Calculation of the integral], mounted in 2017 at VLADEY Space in Moscow, her works always combine “painterly intuition with meaningful content; she depicts the fluid, shifting informational and energy flows of the cosmos, the planet, and its inhabitants.”

Levikova exhibited her work most actively during the Soviet years. She was a participant in the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974, and a year later her work was included in the exhibition at the Beekeeping Pavilion at the All-Russian Exhibition Centre (VDNKh)—the first officially sanctioned exhibition of twenty nonconformist artists, including Levikova. She also took part in numerous apartment exhibitions, including those organized at Oscar Rabin’s studio. One of her abstract paintings was sold at Sotheby’s in 1988, at its legendary first Moscow auction.

Today, Levikova lives and works just outside of Moscow. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Moscow New Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg; in the contemporary art collection at the State Hermitage Museum (from the collection of Georges Matcheret and Nadia Wolkonsky) and the New Museum in Saint Petersburg; in the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey; and in private collections around the world.

Irina Mak

Translated from Russian by Philip Redko

Notes:

1. Levikova, Bella. “My autobiographical story…” proza.ru

2. Ibid. “After the War...” proza.ru

3. Ibid. “DNA” proza.ru

4. Ibid. “1965. The Beginning!” proza.ru