Timur Novikov

Timur Novikov was one of the most intriguing figures of Leningrad/Saint Petersburg art. From the late 1970s until his death in 2002, he was a leader and mentor to a narrow circle of like-minded artists, as well as a strong creative influence on a wider circle of colleagues. He was an object of envy, veneration, and dislike in the professional community, a newsmaker, and an entertaining public figure. Although Novikov is considered an artist, it would be more accurate to call him a cultural figure, since his influence was broader as an ideologue, propagandist, and manager who was able to realize his ideas first in the underground, and then in the resource-scarce 1980s and crisis-ridden 1990s.

The literature about him is extensive, but the historians should be very careful. Novikov worked tirelessly to compose his own myth, which became his most significant artwork. Mystification was his instrument and his element. He did not seem to care whether his fame was linked to paintings or films, concerts or lectures, manifestos or parties, whether he was considered “avant-garde” or a “retrograde,” a freedom-lover or a supporter of the government, a cosmopolitan or a patriot. He surrounded himself with fascinated art critics and friendly journalists, and as a result he was considered the originator of virtually all Saint Petersburg cultural initiatives.

Young Novikov began his career in the late 1970s, like almost everyone else in the Leningrad underground, with lyrical expressionism, in the group Letopis` [Chronicle], led by the expressionist Boris (Bob) Koshelokhov (1942–2021). They lived in a squat in an abandoned church and held exhibitions in apartments in vacated buildings outside the city. In 1980, Novikov opened the gallery Assa (named for an expression meaning an energetic exclamation common in the Lezginka Caucasian folk dance) in his room in a shared apartment.

Since the early 1980s, it has sometimes been possible to exhibit non-government-sanctioned art (but under strict KGB control) in Leningrad. Some institutions, such as the Rock Club, TEII, Fellowship for Experimental Fine Art, and the writers' Club-81 were specially permitted by the authorities to “release steam from an overheated boiler.” At the same time, the third independent force, an artistic subculture that was alien to both Soviet and political dissident ideology, was taking shape in Leningrad. Its best-known groups were the Mitki, the Necrorealists, and the New Artists, led by Novikov. 

The New Artists enacted the Zero Object programmatic action at the general exhibition of the TEII in 1982. Novikov and Ivan Sotnikov (1961–2015) declared a found object—a plywood stand with a square hole in the middle that they called Zero Object—to be their artwork. This was perceived by the management of the TEII as a mockery and provocation, and Zero Object was removed from the show by the TEII Exhibition Council. This event underscored the difference between two generations and their approaches to art.

Among the New Artists, the pathos of struggle and suffering characteristic of earlier Leningrad nonconformist art was replaced by a relaxed and cheerful attitude. Poverty dictated the economy of means. In the absence of a market, the quality of works did not matter; it was important to use any opportunity to exhibit, to make works quickly, to exhibit them flashily, to transport them with minimum expense. Large formats, painting alla prima or in a single session (under Bob Koshelohov's influence), simplicity of form, and boldness of subject matter were favored, as well as stencil, collage, markers, sprays, and other readily available materials and techniques.

The New Artists collaborated with the closely related music group New Composers and underground pop stars of the time—Viktor Tsoi, Boris Grebenshchikov, and Sergey Kuryokhin. They created bold stage sets for the concerts of their musician friends, often painting a huge piece of randomly found fabric in one sitting with anything that came to hand. Almost all the New Artists, especially Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) (b. 1966) and Georgy Guryanov (1961–2013), were ready to sing, dance, and perform as musicians, composers, actors, and fashion designers. Тhe crisis of Soviet power compromised all prohibiting and regulating authorities, which resulted in unprecedented artistic freedom.

The New Artists sought inspiration in folklore of all times and peoples, the Russian avant-garde (especially Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova), and Vladimir Mayakovsky's extremely simplified drawings for the Okna ROSTA propaganda posters of 1919–21. Any kind of pop art or music, whether domestic or foreign, was widely quoted.

Art historians put the New Artists on a par with the Transavantgarde, the German Neue Wilde, and the East Village, defining them as “punk” or “post-punk.” Indeed, information about related currents was sought out and avidly absorbed by the Russian New Wave.

Novikov's favorite genre in the late 1980s and early 1990s was textile collage, which seems to have developed from the practice of decorating concert stages. These large, brightly colored collages (which he called tryapki, or “rags”) represented earthly and heavenly expanses, mountains, waters, deserts, and icebergs with small figures, either cut out of magazines and glued or sketchily drawn in a childlike way. These collages seemed to tell us that the world is huge and beautiful, and that everyone can go on a journey into the unknown. These “rags” became Novikov's most successful genre and signature product.

As perestroika briefly brought Russian artists onto the international stage, Novikov traveled extensively, exhibited, and became acquainted with celebrities of the European and American art scene (including Andy Warhol, Pierre and Gilles, and A. R. Penck). By the early 1990s, however, euphoria was replaced by disappointment. It became clear that the boom was fleeting, Russia was a backwater province in the eyes of the West, and the “new Russian avant-garde” dreamed of by the New Artists would not be realized. Moreover, the New Wave was going out of fashion everywhere.

Novikov turned the total disillusionment felt by all Russian artists in the early 1990s into a dramatic change of course. In 1989 (as he claimed, but in fact some years after), he announced the creation of the New Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, in opposition to the dominance of modernism and postmodernism, and started his “fight for the revival of classical traditions.” At first, these activities were a kind of carnival, a new kind of rave party with cross-dressing, swimming in the pool, trips to the countryside, and jester lecture-performances. At the same time, the movement embraced the city’s still-preserved palaces and luxury in general, whether real or fake.

New academism reflected a fascination with antiquity, ballet, fashion, glamour, and to some extent sport, all expressed in the slogan “youth and beauty.” A conference with this title was held in 1990 in the House of Scientists (former Grand Ducal Palace) by Novikov and the young promoter Dunya Smirnova. In 1991, an exhibition of Novikov's associates, Neo-Academism, was held in the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum. In the Engineering Castle (also belonging to the Russian Museum), Novikov's friends, self-proclaimed professors of the New Academy, mentored young followers. Ekaterina Andreeva, an art historian at the Russian Museum who was the daughter of a well-known scholar of antiquity, helped to conceptualize new academism.

The movement also became firmly associated with homosexuality in the eyes of the public. Gay culture became fashionable, and Novikov was so influential that some of his associates found it convenient to style themselves as gay, although not all of them were.

The New Academy promoted the cult of the nude body, classical drawing, and figurative painting—everything that was associated with “high art” in the common person’s mind. The New Academicians also considered the grand styles of the totalitarian era to be “classical art.” Abram Room's The Severe Young Man (1935) and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) became cult films for them. 

The New Academists’ fight for the classics continued as a struggle against modernism and postmodernism, with the art historian Andrey Khlobystin as its leading ideologist. In 1995, at the Pushkinskaya-10 art center, Novikov and Khlobystin cocurated the exhibition Nudity and Modernism, which parodied the Nazis’ Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937. The show consisted of black-and-white photocopies on A4 sheets of various twentieth-century artworks, hanging on the walls. These pictures all showed, in one way or another, “disfigurement” and desecration of the human body. Human faces and figures were deformed. Many of them were depicted suffering of madness. Many “were in acts of shitting, vomiting, and copulation in mud pits or garbage dumps,” as described by Ekaterina Andreeva. The artists of modernism and postmodernism, from Picasso and Dali to the Viennese and Russian actionists, appeared as a company of mad perverts mocking the image and likeness of God. Despite the exhibition’s obvious humor, many colleagues and critics found it to be not a parody of Nazi (and also Soviet) propaganda, but rather an exaggeration of it.

Novikov's own works of the 1990s were also textile collages, but made of luxurious materials—velvet, brocade, beads, lace, and galloon. The free composition was replaced by a concentric template one, the theme of which can be defined as “idol in the center of attention.” Perhaps this is a manifestation of Novikov’s own personality cult. Perhaps the concentric composition speaks of a strengthened “feminine” principle. Or perhaps it’s simply a craving for a classic, symmetrical composition.

In 1999, Novikov directed the film The Golden Section, in which he, in the role of a dandy-professor, flogs the student Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe for drawing a modernist red square, alluding to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting Red Square as well as the square in front of the Kremlin in Moscow. Here, the apology for classicism winks slyly at dandyism and homosexual eroticism.

The artist’s parodies gradually took on more and more serious forms. In the late 1990s, he emphasized his religious orthodoxy and conservative patriotism and praised Alexander Dugin, an extreme traditionalist and propagandist for the restoration of the Russian/Soviet empire and the creation of a Eurasian superpower. Some works of this time are dedicated to the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In the late 1990s, Novikov went blind, reportedly as a result of AIDS (or, according to other sources, encephalitis). Styling himself anew in dark clothes, with a graying beard and a staff, supported at the elbows by his associates, he looked like a blind Homer or an Orthodox elder (though he was only about forty years old). He continued to work (supervising assistants who made artworks according to his verbal instructions), attend exhibitions, and direct the New Academy.

In 2000, at Kronstadt, the historical island-fortress near Saint Petersburg, the New Academy held a grim “Burning of Vanities” action in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of Girolamo Savonarola's execution. Novikov and his followers fed the fire with “false” art, their old “wrong” artworks, as well as glamorous magazines and other “temptations.”

Novikov died at the age of forty-four, leaving his followers inconsolable and confused.

Marina Koldobskaya

Photo portrait by Andrey Bezukladnikov