Oleg Vassiliev

Oleg Vassiliev lived and worked in Soviet Russia until his migration to the United States in 1990, on the eve of the collapse of the USSR. The Soviet period became the primary focus of one of the largest museum collections of the artist’s graphic and painterly legacy outside Russia. Largely derived from the Norton and Nancy Dodge donation, this collection reflects Vassiliev’s three decades of creative evolution and includes, arguably, his most significant painting, Ogonek № 25 (1980, ZAM, 2013.016.090).

When critics and scholars discuss the Soviet period of the artist’s work, they often point out one peculiarity: Vassiliev was both a central figure in the Moscow Conceptualism movement and yet barely known even within its circles, let alone to a wider audience. At first glance, Vassiliev’s career appears indeed exemplary of a Soviet nonofficial artist. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he attended the same Moscow Art School as one of the future leaders of Moscow Conceptualism, Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023). Soon after, both studied in the graphics department of the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, where they met Erik Bulatov (1933–2025). From that time on, Vassiliev and Bulatov became close friends and collaborators. Like many nonofficial artists, they made a living as children’s book illustrators, working together for three decades, from 1959 to 1989. (The Zimmerli Art Museum holds nearly twenty books from this period in its collection.) This official job provided not only financial stability but also a studio space where they could develop their own art in private. Vassiliev’s only solo exhibition in the Soviet Union took place at the café Синяя птица [Blue Bird jazz club] in 1968. After that, it became too risky to publicly display this type of art. The major public identification—and, in a sense, canonization—of Vassiliev’s nonofficial artistic status came through the Paris-based magazine A–Ya (1979–86), a pioneering bilingual Russian-English publication that introduced Western audiences to unofficial contemporary Russian art. The second issue, presented in 1980, featured examples of Vassiliev’s works, noting that they were “virtually unknown in [Russian] artistic circles, both conservative and avant-garde.” [1] Like his friends Kabakov and Bulatov, Vassiliev eventually emigrated to the West, following the surge of interest in Soviet underground art during perestroika. However, unlike them, Vassiliev’s international presence did not extend to Russia for quite a while. His first—and only—retrospective there took place a quarter of a century later, at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. The Zimmerli collection may provide some insight into the reasons for this belated recognition.

Vassiliev and his fellow artists were fortunate to study art at all during the height of Khrushchev’s Thaw in the late 1950s. The country, which had barely survived Stalinism, was slowly recovering and opening up to the world, albeit for a short period. Moscow hosted several international exhibitions featuring leading contemporary Western artists and movements, such as Picasso and American abstract expressionism. In this period of thaw, the partisan rediscovery of the Russian avant-garde became a milestone experience for the Soviet underground art movement. This was particularly true for Vassiliev, Bulatov, and their circle, for whom two prominent and still-living adherents of Cézanne’s ideas—Robert Falk (1886–1958) and Vladimir Favorsky (1886–1964)—served as direct connections to early Russian and French modernism. Even in the later stages of his career, Vassiliev acknowledged his discussions with Favorsky as the most formative long-term influence on his artistic development. One can indeed observe several of Favorsky’s original concepts in Vassiliev’s art, recurring throughout the decades.

One of them is the concept of time, with its simultaneously present and past (memory) dimensions. According to Favorsky, “An image that claims to be artistic has the task of organizing and depicting time.” It is up to the composition to merge different moments into a single image space, to “perceive, see, and depict in a holistic manner the multi-spatial and multi-temporal” phenomena. Hence, there arises the “problem of the center, where we tie time in a knot, as it were, and where we evaluate it as the past and the present: the past, standing behind us and surrounding us, and the present, which is the center of the composition, uniting everything, into which we delve.” [2] The concise and dynamic linocut series Metro (1961–62, ZAM, 1995.0866.001–009) suggests how, at the start, Vassiliev was overtly influenced by Favorsky in successfully tackling such creative challenges. However, the sequence of three Walk paintings (1975, ZAM, D06419, D06287, 1999.0826) serves as a good example of how this time-based spatial concept evolved over a decade into a more metaphysical vision, while still resonating with Favorsky’s ideas. From painting to painting, the solitary wanderer—standing with his back to us, much like in Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscapes—slowly dissolves into, or is consumed by, the past-present space of the forest road.

Believing that “black and white in art correspond to evil and good in the real world” was another of Vassiliev’s cherished conceptual habits, inherited from Favorsky. According to him, the interpenetration of the opposite principles is a necessary condition for the birth of true art. [3] Vassiliev’s early series of five abstract paintings, Spaces (1968, ZAM, 1995.0917, 1995.0918, 1995.0743, 1995.0744, 1995.0746), can be viewed within this conceptual framework while also enriching it with spectral color analysis. The series is also remarkable for introducing a recurring motif in Vassiliev’s art—a sort of crux decussata, or diagonal cross, formed by two flows of light. These flows serve as a source of illumination, dynamism, and stability, an energy reservoir, and the semantic center of the image space, imbuing it with a semi-religious, transcendental character. Created a decade later, the frieze-like Figure in Space, or Diagonal (1977, ZAM, 1995.0742) incorporates many of these elements, suggesting that the battlefield of the interpenetrating opposing forces is, ultimately, man himself.

These concepts aligned with Vassiliev’s long-standing experimental commitment to traditional easel painting. He questioned the canvas’s structure, the nature of its space, its surface and boundaries, its internal energy currents, background and foreground, the transformation of objects, space and light movement within it, the intersection of the finite and the infinite, and so on. Hence, Vassiliev’s recurring motifs included frames, open doors, windows, a picture within a picture, roads, fading reality, and graphic symbols in contrast to (photo)realism. It is in this questioning of his own medium space that Vassiliev functioned as a conceptual artist. A-Ya magazine alone could suggest that this creative strategy was hardly innovative compared to main trends in Moscow conceptual art, which aligned more closely with Western developments of the 1970s. Nevertheless, Vassiliev was apparently one of those that Boris Groys had in mind when attempting to define the specific, intrinsic features of the Russian conceptualist movement—such as “lyrical,” “mystical,” and “romantic”—in his famous essay “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” published in the first issue of A-Ya in 1979.

In this vein of formal experimentation, Vassiliev’s art remained largely indifferent to the sociopolitical issues of his time (in contrast to, say, his close friend Bulatov’s). When it came to social reality, a sizable number of his works were autobiographical, featuring his wife, Kira, fellow artists, and rural scenery. Looking retrospectively at Vassiliev’s Soviet period, one might legitimately wonder how his experimental search and private life could have caused any problems. But at the time of the socialist realist dictate, insisting on one’s own voice and creative method was, indeed, a form of political dissent and nonconformity.

It is in light of this socially reclusive creative strategy that one can appreciate the particular originality of Ogonek № 25 (1980). In this rare yet remarkable instance, Vassiliev’s autonomous experimental ideas directly interacted with the everyday visual propaganda of the state, suggesting a transcendental take on Soviet political routine. Somewhat paradoxically, this least representative painting of Vassiliev’s Soviet period proved to be the most well known, widely publicized, and sought after. Virtually all landmark exhibitions and publications on the history of Soviet nonconformist art made sure to include it.

Andrey Shabanov

Photo portrait by Igor Palmin, used by permission.

Notes

1. Shablavin, Sergey. “Oleg Vassiliev. Atelier,” A–Ya, no. 2 (1980): 27.

2. Favorsky, Vladimir. “O kompositsii [1932]” [On composition], in Literaturno-teoreticheskoe nasledie [Literary and theoretical heritage]. Moscow: Sovetsky khudozhnik, 1988: 211–13.

3. Vassiliev, Oleg. “O. V. Vassiliev,” in V. A. Favorsky. Vospominaniya o khudozhnike [Vladimir Favorsky. Memories about the artist], ed. Galina Zagyanskaya et al. Moscow: Kniga, 1990: 259, 261.