OVERVIEW

1.- The Collection:

Between Spring 1986 & late 1989, 69 young Soviet Artists created their Artworks in Moscow's 49 Furmanny Lane Workshops. Their common characteristics are neither theoretical, nor aesthetic or pictorial; rather, the gathering of such a large group of Artists relates to the social & political circumstances prevailing at the time in Moscow & throughout USSR. Up to then, Artists unwilling to conform their production to Communist Party's official line, would not affiliate themselves to the dictatorial UNION OF ARTISTS (SAU), created by A. Jdanov in the early '30s. Thus, they had neither a recognized status nor an administrative existence as Artists. Early 1986, an impatient GORBATCHEV introduced Glasnost (1) & Perestroïka (2). He also granted a status to those categories up to then devoid of any. However, the Regime did not award workshops, much less salaries, pensions or subsidiaries of sorts to these Artists! Hence, some of them had recourse to unorthodox ways of obtaining workshops. This is how, in the Spring of 1986, a group of young unofficial (ex-underground) Artists decided to squat run-down-tenements at 49 Furmanny Lane, in downtown Moscow.

This phenomenon, unique in the approximately 70 years of Soviet history, has been deemed worthy of the constitution of a Collection called - with a smile - Perestroïka's Bateau-Lavoir (3), some 8 decades after the famous Montmartrian experience!

The Collection's large body of Artworks has been gathered between late 1990 & early 1992 to keep a coherent & scientifically rigorous memory of this historical & key, albeit short-spanned, final moment of evolution of Soviet unofficial Art within the short-lived Glasnost & Perestroïka. It consists of 166 works of Art, most of them oil paintings, representing all the Artists who did work at Furmanny Lane and only Works of Art produced in situ during that short time span.

Until end 1989, when the Soviet Authorities finally expelled them from their 3 ½ years squatted occupation, a total of 69 Artists had gone through the Furmanny Lane Workshops, which had quickly became famous throughout the local Artists' community for being the melting pot of Soviet Avant-Garde of the mid '80's. Moreover, SOTHEBY'S initial auction - and sole under the Soviet Regime - , held in Moscow in July 1988, strongly contributed to the rapid spread of Furmanny's fame & aura throughout Art circles in the Western Hemisphere.

Of all Artists present, at one time or another, at Furmanny, one group is missing in the Collection: the MEDICAL HERMENEUTICS's S. ANUFRIEV, V. FEDOROV, Y. LEIDERMAN (4) & P. PEPPERSHTEIN - who essentially indulged in installations. However, they have promised to recreate one of the installations made during the 1986-'89 years, whenever the Collection gets exhibited.

Exhibition space has to be large, given the number of artworks - 166 - and its size (totaling almost 360 sq. m.).

1) Transparency & Sincerity in USSR's Information System, decreed simultaneously by GORBATCHEV.

2) Reconstruction policy decreed by GORBATCHEV, in early 1986.

3) Literally : the Wash-Boat, name of world renowned workshops at Montmartre, Paris, France, where Artists such as MAX JACOB, VAN DONGEN, MODIGLIANI, JUAN GRIS, PICASSO, among other celebrities, created some of the most important Artworks of the beginning of the XXth century, notably Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon".

4) Represented by one large painting.

2.- The socio-political background:

In the early 1930's, amidst the feverish creativity proliferating in Communist-revolutionized former Russia, STALIN decreed an end to all artistic freedom, appointing Andreï JDANOV as Commissary for Arts & Culture, with authority to organize the conformity of all cultural life and artistic creation to the official dogmas of the Soviet ideology.

As the Cultural neo-Tsar of the Communist Regime, JDANOV saw to it with a vengeance: creative minds in every venue - literature, music, painting, sculpture, even scientific research, etc - had to strictly conform to and overtly convey Communist dogmas through their creations. The Avant-Garde Art works of the early '20's became buried deep in Museums' underground Reserves, not to be seen by anyone for well over 7 decades. One of Andrei JDANOV's main tools was the SOVIET ARTISTS UNION (SAU), to which all Artist had to adhere, if they were to be recognized as such and, therefore, benefit from the Regime's social recognition and ensuing perks (official commissions, housing, workshops, subsidies, pensions, etc.). Those who prided the freedom of creation over their daily comfort had to hide in underground and guaranteed misery, with no social status whatsoever and the constant risk of police persecution.

Since KRUCHTCHEV's short-lived liberalization of the mid '50's, two systems of artistic life in the Soviet Union have coexisted with a malaise, as Artist V. ZAKHAROV outlined in an interview. The Official one, just like the guild system of feudal societies, was represented by Soviet Artists Union (SAU). It monopolized the entire artistic life. Artists had practically no influence; SAU's Bureaucrats thought for them; but it attracted many of them, mostly for the financial security offered. The other - allowing for the free individual creativity - was an underground system: everyone had to count on himself only. Those Artists had to look for the market (1) as the source of earning a living - or indulge in other occupations. Thus, they gather on the sole basis of friendly feelings and affinity, with multiple precautions because of the watchful NKVD. Their Artworks are shown confidentially only, until GORBATCHEV's Glasnost & Perestroïka somewhat alleviated that situation in May 1986, when all those without a status finally were granted the right to exist and to become social beings. Artists not registered with the SAU could, at last, come out of clandestine creativity, pretend to the right of forming associations, clubs, leagues, etc., even to exhibit in communal exhibition halls. Unofficial Art, whether avant-garde or not, was finally coming to the streets!

(1) Until SOTHEBY's June 1988 Moscow auction sale, mixing Soviet Avant-Garde Art of the '20's with that of the '80's.

This is precisely when the story of the 49 Furmanny Lane Workshops begins.

3.- The Workshops:

Furmanny Lane is one of many Moscow's small streets, situated in the area of Tchistoprudnensky and Sretensky Boulevards. It is the very part of old Moscow where the past finds its reflection in almost every dwelling. Typical of PETER THE GREAT's baroque epoch, ornamental decorative effects of MENSHIKOV's Dungeon (Michael Archangel's Orthodox Church) unite with the middle XVIIth century palace baroque from Count APRASKIN's house. Many classicistic XVIIIth & XIXth centuries houses have survived to the present day. Private mansions, tenement buildings & public service houses give their modernist character to this old area of Moscow .

It was in this area that, as early as the late '50's, non-conformist culture came to life. In the early '70's, it had become one of its most vigorous centers of opposition to STALIN's era of official triumphant socio-realism. Its most vocal representatives: E. BULATOV, I. KABAKOV, J. SOOSTER, O. VASILIEV, V. YANKILEVSKI, among others, would set up their first workshops in the attics of the huge houses in Sretensky and Tchistoprudnensky Boulevards. These were the Artists who devised the modem artistic character of Soviet unofficial Art, They, the first, opposing the official falsely idealizing culture, engaged in stating and analyzing the true Soviet reality, full of complex contradictions. Painters such as E. BULATOV & I. KABAKOV introduced the surrounding social reality into the sphere of the so-called sublimated Art, by means of a transplantation of culture. The word SOCART was coined to depict it. Those Artists, as well as their numerous followers, reached, at first, to the Western transatlantic PopArt in order to reveal completely different and independent evolutionary trends, which became the revelations of the '70's & the '80's.

A review of ILYIA KABAKOV's paintings quotes from LERMONTOV's novel Princess Ligovska, which describes with precision the Artist's everyday walk to his workshop: [...] - Go to number 49! - he said. - And how do I go in? - From the backyard! Number 49 and use the entrance from the backyard. Nobody who spent half his life searching would understand those terrible words... Number 49 is a gloomy and mysterious number, similar to number 666 in the Apocalypse. First you go through a narrow, sharp-edged, full of deep snow or slippery mud backyard... heavy stink, biting, horrible, poisons your breathe, the dogs growl at you, pale faces marked with the stamp of destitution and debauchery look through the narrow windows on the ground floor. At last, after the long wandering, you find the looked-for door, dark and narrow, just like the door to the purgatory; slipping on the doorstep, you slide two steps down your feet plunging into a puddle on a stone platform, then with a shaking hand you feel the stairs and you begin to climb up...

Ironically enough, this description fits exactly the way Artists of the younger generation have been walking daily to their workshops for the last fifteen years: those who settled down not far from KABAKOV's studio on Furmanny Lane. In spring 1986, as KABAKOV had his own workshop in the attics, a group of young Artists invested 49 Furmanny Lane, on the tenants' departure, and began the restoration of the tenements. For the building did not house Artists' workshops but municipal flats, which the homeless Artists hastened to occupy as a chance to be grabbed to work in more spacious, high ceiling rooms, if only for a short time.

4.- The Artists

The 1st Artist to enter the artistic-life-to-be of 49 Furmanny Lane tenements-soon-to-become Workshops was Farid BOGDALOV, soon accompanied by 7 companions, who settled in 2 neighboring flats: Yuri ALBERT, Andrei FILIPOV, Sven GUNDLAKH, twins Sergei & Vladimir MIRONENKO, Vadim ZAKHAROV & Kostia ZVEZDOCHOTOV. They still consider themselves as the only true locals of 49 Furmanny Lane. They all grew up in the conceptual circle, which gathered around E. BULATOV, I. KABAKOV, A. MONASTYRSKI, and other like Artists of the elder generation. When settling in Furmanny Lane they had already had an extensive experience of work in common, while participating in the group FLYBANE's many exhibitions, as well as in private apartments under the signboard APT-ART, which was then the only artistic group whose members worked constantly together. They rejected, in the process of artistic creation, the hierarchical system of values, worked on new trends, using different approaches to their Weltanschauung. They deemed essential to explore all potential artistic forms and materials, from traditional canvas and oil paints to everyday materials like kitchen tiles, vinyl table cloth, etc. All of them, in one way or another, tried the varied possibilities offered by different modes of conceptualism, including performances, happenings, work with photography, phonograms, texts, etc. The large use of verbal material combined with visual elements is a characteristic feature of their Art. Many Artists of this group created paintings on mythological subjects. For example, Vadim ZAKHAROV has, for quite a while, painted scenes from the Cyclops' legendary lives and other strange mythological creatures, in many variants. Having exhausted this subject, he took to making compositions with tiles and linoleum. Kostia ZVEZDOTCHOTOV imagined, as his reference point, the Perdo Land, recalling memories from his time in Soviet Army's Construction Brigade, thus providing social stereotypes with new meaning.

Andrei FILLIPOV's attention focuses on the historical problems of power. His paintings depict Moscow as the 3d Rome with its pagano-christian symbols. Sergei MIRONENKO's works often feature contemporary relationships between nations, with a strongly accented ideology. Yuri ALBERT firmly believes in the necessity of democratizing Art by painting for socio-professional groups, using their very tools, symbols and imagery to access to them more easily. One of his cycles is entitled Selectively Democratic Art. The Artist maintains that, historically, Art has appealed to the elite and nowadays Artists ought to aim at democratizing it by widening the connoisseurship. To witness: his cycles Paintings for the Blind - on the Braille model -, Paintings for the Marines - on the signal ensigns mold, etc. Vladimir MIRONENKO's conceptual compositions, often organized into cycles, require relatively elaborate commentaries. Sven GUNDLAKH combines verbal, visual and musical elements in his works; but, contrarily to many of his colleagues, he does not neglect aesthetics.

The group WORLD CHAMPIONS is tightly connected with the autochthones already working at 49 Furmanny Lane. Its members turned up there in late 1987, occupying several tenements converted into workshop, after having come frequently for visits. The group had already existed as such for 4 years. It had been formed by Kostia ZVEZDOCHOTOV, whose works show a strong inclination towards mysticism, tainted by an ironically critical tone aiming at the Authorities. ZVEZDOCHOTOV has kept trying to cut himself off the vanguard hierarchy. This endeavor led him to assemble the group WORLD CHAMPIONS in 1983, which includes Guram ABRAMISHVILI, Konstantin LATYSHEV, Boris MATROSOV, Andrei YAKHNIN & Igor ZAIDEL, somewhat later. At first, the group built up a particular artistic culture, arranging happenings & performances. Everything seemed important to them: personal relationships, conceptual actions, a particular style in clothing, etc. In 1986, they started organizing exhibitions in private apartments as a homogeneous group. As they did not have money for canvas and paints, they painted on bits of cloth, sheets and boards. They used cheap school paints, gouaches and aniline paints dissolved in buckets of water. What they did was, at first, similar to the activities of the FLYBANES group, to which Kostia ZVEZDOCHOTOV had belonged 10 years earlier. The group WORLD CHAMPIONS reminds of the Futurists & Dadaïsts of XXth century's 1st quarter. What tied this group's members together was their interest for the ideological metaproblems. Until 1988, this problematic had been treated collectively and thus the anonymity principle played a significant part in such process. The Artworks were not signed at all, or else were signed WORLD CHAMPIONS. They were often destroyed or included in new ones being completed. Once settled down in Furmanny Lane, the ties among the members of the group loosened. They began to work individually, signing their paintings with their own names. Since late 1988, although, up to then, their works had not been meant to be sold, these Artists clearly eyed the Art market - one of SOTHEBY's Summer 1988 auction sale's after-effect?

This process of individualization is rather typical of the then prevalent state of underground Art in USSR. It is partly connected, just like the very phenomenon of Furmanny Lane, with the commercial side of Art. The July 1988 SOTHEBY's auction in Moscow introduced not only the international Art market to the Soviet Vanguard but also the notion of artworks' commercial value. Western Art World circles had suddenly become quite interested in Soviet unofficial Art and latter' oeuvres found buyers. It is thus & then that the Moscow Art market started appearing. For those interested in contemporary Art Works of this type, 49 Furmanny Lane thus became the place to visit. 4 artists - selected by SOTHEBY's to represent the unofficial Soviet Art of the youngest generation - promptly settled down at Furmanny: Leonod PURYGIN, Sergei SHUTOV, Sergei VOLKOV & Vadim ZAKHAROV. Furthermore, at end of 1988, quite a few Artists, who claimed to be Avant-Garde, rejoined the 49 Furmanny Lane workshops.

Another group, CENTER, was created by Alexandr BROVIN, Dimitri KANTOROV, Andrei KARPOV, Nikolai KRASHCHIN & Alexandr ZAKHAROV in early 1987. It consisted of 19 painters from Moscow, Pereslavin, Tula & Zalesky. From Spring 1987 to Fall 1988 they organized a few collective exhibitions. They had had little contact with their Furmanny colleagues, except for a few communal presentations. Nevertheless, they chose to settle down at the Lane in late 1988. Painters such as A. BROVIN, D. KANTOROV, A. KARPOV, N. KRASNCHIN & A. ZAKHAROV, contrarily to those painters representing the Conceptualists'' trend contenting themselves with very modest means of expression, adopt a variety of styles. Constantly engaged in the same social topics, they give up neither imagery nor aesthetics. They show contemporary reality not through vanguard forms, but tend to borrow from Primitivism & Grotesque, making use of surrealistic situations. BOSCH & BREUGHEL's traditions of folk grotesque & comic culture transported into contemporary materials are clearly evidenced in BROVIN's Babylonian Towers. ALEXANDR ZAKHAROV uses hyperboles and complicated symbols. Almost all his pictures show aggressive situations in the ecology sphere. The Artist often draws from mythology, Russian history or fables from all over the world. For the composition of his paintings he uses a stereotype of children plate games, where the schematic path of the figures' movements, their activities in a given situation, is laid on the picture.

Social trait is strongly present in the naïve paintings of Alexei SUNDUKOV & Andrei KARPOV. SUNDUKOV is interested in the ant-like crowd of people, where there are no heroes or individualities, where everyone is reduced to be a small screw in a monolithic machine. Formally, he uses scarce means of expression to underline bleakness, showing the mechanical homogeneity of space, the newspaper-like triteness of form and color, imitating the black & white photography. The tradition of primitivism shows its presence in the Art of Andrei KARPOV. His world is inhabited by the fat, big-bellied small fellows-tadpoles who fill up the pictoral space with their amorphous masses. The omnipresent domination of the body is most often represented in a sharply grotesque form, contrary to the captive, robbed-of-emotions figures of SUNDUKOV.

To characterize the new artistic trends evident not only in the works of those active at Furmanny, a new term was soon coined: SOCARTISM (not to be confused with BULATOV & companions' SOC-ART, reflecting an awareness for social stereotypes as a new socio-cultural phenomenon. The work of Dimitri KANTOROV is representative of this trend. He does not include himself in the contemporary vanguard, for he does not try to create something new; quite to the contrary: he intends to remain a Traditionalist. The pictures' plane, the colors, the composition play an important role in his works. They show a domineering fairy-like, colorful hyperbolism. KANTOROV methodically treats the stereotypes of STALIN's epoch. The 1st cycle of his picture was entitled Nomenclature Spa (Nomenkiaturowe Uzdrowisko). His bursting enthusiasm depicts plain workers, kolkhoz women, Nomenclature clerks in trench coats, against the splendor of stalinist architecture, stone horns of plenty, garlands of flowers, bowls filled with fruits, shown in scales exceeding normal proportions. Deformation, together with the abolition of the proper proportions, suggest surrealistic situations, glutted with metaphysical tension.

The interest for the phenomenon of social stereotype is also very noticeable in the works of other Artists like: Vadim FISHKIN, Nikolai KOZLOV, Anastasia MIKHAILOVSKAYA, Anton OLSHVANG, Nikolai OVCHINNIKOV, Oleg. PETRENKO & Ludmila SKRIPKINA, i.e. PERZI, Alexei TARANIN, Igor ZAIDEL & Larisa ZVEZDOCHOTOVA. The ways and directions of their preoccupations vary widely. Nikolaï OVCHINNIKOV primarily addresses the subject of the very Russian Peredvizhniks - although he is not alone. Larisa ZVEZDOCHOTOVA uses tricks typical to Pop-art: everyday objects turned into ornamental stereotypes, typical of the bourgeois' applied art. Instead of canvas, she uses ordinary plush table cloths, rugs decorated with routine patterns, beautifying them. She adds stamps produced in STALIN's times. The use of the ready-made industrial objects, such as quilted bedclothes, rugs, toys for children is typical of Nikolai KOZLOV's method, glutted in sharp paradoxical situations.

There is a genuine continuity of Ilya KABAKOV's communal talks in Alexei TARANIN's works. The images of the interlocutors talk on the canvas. The only Artist close to sculpture is Anton Olshvang, whose metal stereotypes sharply stand out of the mainly landscape paintings. Repeated use of aluminum spoons, forks and knives, newspaper moulds, whose texts paradoxically and unexpectedly break away from the twisted-together metal pages, shows one more variant of artistic research on the social stereotype. Another lecture one can make of his work is his preoccupation with time, memory and the fading thereof.

Dimitri KANTOROV, Andrei KARPOV & Alexandr ZAKHAROV's renewed attempts at creating a non-conformist Young Artists Circle have not been confined to Moscow. In 1988, Dimitri KANTOROV & Alexandr ZAKHAROV took part in the first Soviet-American exhibition in Kiev. The friendly relationships and the common interests with Kiev Artists resulted in an invitation to a group of them to visit Moscow in order to acquaint them with Furmanny Lane's artistic life. As an outcome to those contacts, Kiev's Artists organized their own studio in Moscow. Konstantin REUNOV coined a very long wounded & complicated name for the group: the VOLUNTARY  BORDER FOR A NATIONAL POST-ECLECTISM, in 1987. He shaped its program, together with Oleg TISTOL. Its main point was the slogan: Struggle for the beauty of stereotype. This group's Artists seek new ways for the development of classical Art. They try to synthesize different outlooks, inspired from various cultures, resulting in a variety of stereotypes. TISTOL, for example, analyzes historical stereotypes, whereas Konstantin REUNOV is more interested in formal artistic stereotypes. Latter focuses on the poetic side of VOLUNTARY BORDER FOR A NATIONAL POST-ECLECTISM. Stylistically, the group's representatives are mostly drawn by the Ukrainian national emblems. They generally consist in baroque decorativity, even pomposity at times, in organic unison with the best traditions of Ukrainian culture. In addition to K. REUNOV & O. TISTOL, Yana BYSTROVA, Alexandr KHARCHENKO & Marina SKUGARIEVA are the other members of the group. The Kiev group's demonstrative struggle for beauty, and also for stereotypes, the deliberate resignation from the social direction of Art is not the only phenomenon evidenced at Furmanny Lane.

Long before the efforts of this Kiev group, Nikolai FILATOV, Sergei SHUTOV & Alexandr YULIKOV had invented the so-called conceptual SOCARTISTIC Art. The latter, eldest representative of non-conformist Art & eldest Artist at Furmanny, still keeps up the line of abstract Art. He took part in the celebrated non-conformist exhibitions of lzmailovsky Park, as well as in Moscow's exhibition of the National Economy Achievements, in the early 1970's. Notwithstanding the close friendship with such conceptual artists as Yuri ALBERT and Vadim ZAKHAROV, he still works on color and form, although he went through a period of Minimalism. Although SHUTOV's latest works contain contour-figurative pictures of social-implied meaning, they still do not dominate the fantastical decoration. Continuing along Absract Art tradition, enriching it with different forms and factures, according to the principle of Dadaïst collages, the Artist aims at creating a particular tension, complicating the monotonous Iandscaping through the use of untypical and real objects. As a result, all of SHUTOV's works are somehow included in one single stream, which is supposed to actively change the surrounding environment, introducing therein an element of fantasticality. Nikolai FILATOV's neo-expressionist search also ends in the sphere of color and composition. He does not seem to be interested in social problems. He expresses the modem world's tension and struggles by using bright colors and changeable forms. Recourse to color & form is also characteristic of Victor KASIANOV's work. He represents the world in the unconventional state of its growing old, falling into pieces; the earthly shell is shown in the form of color spots which are cracked and covered with growths.

Maxim VARDANIAN, born & raised in Tashkent, Uzbekhistan, working at Furmanny Lane at the end of its artistic existence, creates the beauty of the world for himself. He sees the world as filled with wonders and surprises, just Iike ANDERSEN's fairy tales relate. He approaches it with the naivety of a child always able to transform the dull, stereotype world into something fantastic. The expressive deformation of the form, the unreal enlargement or reduction of proportions, the ornamentally bright colors favor the creation of a fantastically beautiful, though slightly barbarous world.

Other aesthetic directions, yet unclear, are developed by the very young Ignat DANILTSEV , Dimitri LIKIN & Maria ZATSELIAPINA.

Such is the contemporary picture of artistic progress at Furmanny Lane during its brief existence. Its complexity and heterogeneity, just like in a drop of water, reflect the state of the unofficial Soviet Art in the short duration of Perestroïka & Glasnost - at least that of the younger generations. The preeminence of the social-conceptual Art (SOCART) is still strong, after its irruption on the '70's & the '80's Sovietic Art scene, no matter if Furmanny's Conceptualists agree, but it seems visibly diminishing, passing sometimes into the state of inertia. This trend will undoubtedly progress for some time; but the eventuality for the emergence of new spiritual and artistic ideas is likely to decrease as time passes.

As to the aesthetic trends evidenced at 49 Furmanny Lane, none shows anything definitely new. Paying attention to them nevertheless is symptomatic of the non-conformist artistic circles. It speaks for the search of new means of expression and thus reflects the contemporary artistic process, which takes place in the whole world.

Moscow, 1990

---

STATISTICS REGARDING