Valentina Kropivnitskaya

Valentina Kropivnitskaya was born in Moscow to Evgeny Kropivnitsky (1893–1979) and Olga Potapova (1892–1971), both of whom were nonconformist artists. Her childhood home in Lianozovo was a gathering place for artists and poets; this informal circle, known as the Lianozovo group or school, was at the vanguard of unofficial creative and intellectual life in Moscow during the 1950s and 1960s. Kropivnitskaya was formed in this highly creative environment, which hosted not only Lianozovo group regulars (the painters included Valentin Vorobiev [b. 1938], Lydia Masterkova [1927–2008], and Vladimir Nemukhin [1925–2016], while the poets included such key figures of late Soviet unofficial literature as Vsevolod Nekrasov, Genrikh Sapgir, Igor Kholin, and Yan Satunovsky), but also artists, writers, and musicians who already had international reputations at the time, such as Sviatoslav Richter, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Slutsky, and Yevgeny Rein. Kropivnitskaya married the painter Oscar Rabin (1928–2018), himself a notable figure in the Lianozovo group (and a former student of her father’s), and the couple had a son (Alexandre [1952–1994], who also became an artist) and a daughter. The young family lived together in Lianozovo, in the same type of barracks-style housing as Kropivnitskaya’s parents.

Though she studied art with her father and attended a local art school, Kropivnitskaya’s creative output was mostly literary prior to the 1960s; her contemporaries recall that she wrote stories depicting a fantasy world, one that stood in stark contrast to the Soviet reality in which she lived. Only in the early 1960s did she turn her attention fully to visual art, surprising her family, friends, and acquaintances with her sudden “confidence, decisiveness, and originality,” and with her “fully developed pictorial style” that portrayed “a distinct and highly specific world” (in the words of her brother, the artist Lev Kropivnitsky [1922–1994]). [1] Her style thus emerged fully formed, and resembled nothing else that was being done by either official or unofficial artists of the time. Rather than experiment with different media or varying degrees of abstraction (as did her parents and the painters with whom they associated), Kropivnitskaya, from the beginning of her career, chose to work primarily in a narrow range of media—drawings on paper, using pencil (she preferred Italian pencils), ink, and felt-tip pen, sometimes in combination—and one style, characterized by strong contours, stylized volumes, and fine shading. Drawings make up the bulk of her output, but she also produced paintings and prints, including engravings and linocuts. In subject matter, too, as in her writing, she mostly hewed to the depiction of a single fantastical world. Many consider her drawings to be a single cycle spanning her entire creative life.

Kropivnitskaya’s drawings often depict half-animal, half-human creatures inhabiting a landscape that is itself a kind of hybrid—recognizably Russian, but at the same time fantastical. Kropivnitskaya called these creatures “beasts” (zveri); they have long, pointy ears, large, almond-shaped eyes, and slender, flexible limbs, and even their faces display a curiously hybrid psychology, both human and more than human. Sometimes the beasts have tails, sometimes they are shown on horseback; sometimes their bodies are smooth, other times shaggy; but even when they are drawn in silhouette, there is a suggestion of an animal coat. Sometimes the “beasts” are shown performing a simple action—praying, interacting with one another, playing a musical instrument—but more often they simply inhabit their world. Their thoughts are inscrutable, but something about the way they are drawn and integrated into the landscape, and the inwardness they seem to express, convey emotions that are hard to pin down—melancholy and tenderness. The landscapes vary: lakes, swamps, gardens, and meadows, with lush tangles of plant life, and occasionally signs of habitation such as huts, churches, even entire villages. While the depiction of human structures alternates between the fairy-tale-like and the realistic, they always seem to be part of the natural world. A decidedly Russian style is also often in evidence.

Kropivnitskaya began exhibiting her works in unofficial and quasi-official exhibitions in 1966, and eventually participated in foreign shows as well. Her works were included in group shows in Moscow, Tbilisi, Sopot, Poznań, Florence, Lugano, Bochum, Dallas, Zurich, Montgeron, Jersey City, London, Paris, and Tokyo. She held solo exhibitions in private galleries in London in 1978, Oslo in 1981 and 1985, and Paris in 1983 and 1985. While the style of her drawings of the 1960s has been termed “metaphysical escapism” (F. Romer) because of their melding of Russian symbolist and Art Nouveau motifs, in the 1970s, her work became increasingly less serene and began to show suggestions of anxiety and hopelessness.

She participated in the famous Bulldozer Exhibition of September 15, 1974, a large unofficial exhibit of art by nonconformist artists, which was broken up by police officers with bulldozers and water cannons. Oscar Rabin, Kropivnitskaya’s husband, was one of the key organizers of the exhibition—in which their son, Alexandre, participated as well—and for their role, both Rabin and Kropivnitskaya were stripped of their Soviet citizenship. This took place in 1978, when the family was traveling in Paris, and as a result, Kropivnitskaya remained in Paris for the rest of her life.

Beginning in the late 1970s, and well into the 1980s, Kropivnitskaya increasingly used colored pencils for her drawings, delicate shades of brown and blue, usually in combination with plain pencil, and her works also began to exhibit a decorative quality that “tends to predominate over the narrative-fantastical elements.” [2] By this point, her otherworldly, emotionally charged combinations of folklore and fantasy, landscape and figure drawing, serenity and anxiety, had won her worldwide renown—though some, especially in the Russian art world, continued to view her work as simplistic, naive, or escapist.

In 2006, Kropivnitskaya and Rabin had their Russian citizenship restored. Although they spent several weeks in the new Russia for an exhibition, they had no interest in moving back permanently. Kropivnitskaya died two years later, in 2008, in her adopted home of Paris.

Ainsley Morse

Photo portrait: Valentina Kropivnitskaya, 2007. Photo by Vladimir Sychev. Courtesy Alexander Smoljanski

Notes

1. Artist of the Week: Valentina Kropivnitskaya at Artinvestment.ru.

2. “Kropivnitskye,” Entsiklopediia Krugosvet.