Dmitrii Krasnopevtsev

Dmitrii Krasnopevtsev began drawing as a child, studied at the local art studio, and regularly visited the Museum of New Western Art (now the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), where he became familiar with the works of the impressionist and the postimpressionist painters. In 1941, he entered the scenography department of the Moscow Regional Art School, skipping the first-year course and studying painting in a workshop led by VKhUTEMAS graduate Anton Chirkov (1902-1946)—who had himself been a student of Ilya Mashkov (1881–1944), Petr Konchalovsky (1876–1956), and Alexander Osmerkin (1892–1953), members of the avant-garde circle Jack of Diamonds. Beginning in 1942, Krasnopevtsev interrupted his studies for three years to serve in the military in the Soviet Far East. He returned to the school from 1945 to 1957, teaching drawing at a secondary school from 1947 to 1950. From 1949 to 1955, he studied in the graphics department of the Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts, primarily with the master etcher Matvei Dobrov (1877–1958).

Until the second half of the 1950s, Krasnopevtsev’s work consisted mostly of etchings, along with romantic views of deserted country landscapes, empty city courtyards, and solitary towers (Ruins, 1953, ZAM, D22201). He also illustrated literary works (including books by Edmond Rostand and Mark Twain). In 1958, thanks to a meeting and a subsequent correspondence with the “father of Russian futurism,” David Burliuk (1882–1967), one of his etchings was reproduced in Burliuk’s magazine Color and Rhyme (published in New York). From 1953 through 1973, Krasnopevtsev worked as a film poster artist at the Reklamfilm [Film Advertising] factory.

From the mid-1950s on, Krasnopevtsev devoted himself to a genre that became his nearly exclusive subject: the still life (working at first in watercolor and gouache, and then in oil). Almost never painted from life, his still lifes were, from the beginning, laconic combinations of a limited number of objects, which were “devoid of geographical or temporal markings” (according to Krasnopevtsev himself). These included vessels, scrolls, books, candles, skulls, tiles, shells, stones, starfish, dried fish, branches and twigs, and so on, which appear in painting after painting. Usually painted in oil on fiberboard, all roughly 20 by 20 inches, the pictures perfectly realize the literal meaning of the still life, or nature morte, as a painting of “dead nature,” depicting a world of inanimate (or maybe never “living”) objects. If an object is, in fact, organic, then it’s been cut or broken, and if it’s man-made, then it seems to be lacking any trace of humanity. There’s no indication of its method of creation or later use; it has, rather, simply been deformed by the passage of time.

Bridging the poetics of Old Master still lifes, particularly those of Jean Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), with his modernist interpretation, Krasnopevtsev was initially close to the post-fauvism of André Derain (1880–1954), Alexander Kanoldt (1881–1939), and Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) (see Still Life with Plate and Skull, 1959, ZAM, 2003.0742). But by the start of the 1960s, he had established a practically unchanging, easily recognizable individual style—graphically polished, with a muted color scheme tending toward the monochrome (employing shades of ash, ocher, and gray): See Still Life with Three Pots (1969, ZAM, 2000.1055), and Untitled (1973, ZAM, 2003.0740). From 1963 until his death, the artist painted about 540 works in this style.

The first solo show of Krasnopevtsev’s works was held in Moscow in 1962, at the apartment of the famous pianist Sviatoslav Richter. In 1976, the painter became a member of the Moscow United Committee of Graphic Artists (painting section), and in 1982, a member of the Artists’ Union of the USSR. A significant number of his works, as well as the contents of his studio, are in the Personal Collections section of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Konstantin Dudakov-Kashuro

Translated from Russian by Elina Alter

Photo portrait: Igor Palmin, Dmitrii Krasnopevtsev and Sviatoslav Richter (cropped), undated. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, D09131.