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"Odessa School of Art" and "The Odessa Group"(Distinctions in terminology)
If the visual arts of Moscow and St. Petersburg (Leningrad) have become relatively known in the West due, mainly, to the continuous, successful sales of Russian art by major Western auction houses and to the fast developing internal art markets in Russia, the artistic life of the regions still presents a very fragmented and often much distorted view. Yet the art from the city of Odessa (Ukraine) has often been praised by art aficionados around the world. Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea had been founded by the Russian Empress Catherine II (the Great) in 1794. Before the 1917 Revolution the city was part of Southern Russia and at present it is the territory of the Ukraine. Odessa has always been the city of sailors, merchants, musicians and painters. Below is a brief review of the Odessa school of painting. Towards the end of 19th century there had developed a local school of art represented by the creative group of the Southern Russian artists – “The Association of the Southern Russian Artists” (TYURKH). Their merit was in that they had discovered, entirely on their own, their version of Impressionism – colouristically subtle “en plein air” painting, which was made largely possible due to the unique natural environment of the Odessa region. At the turn of the 20th century the artistic life of Odessa had been growing and developing at a rapid speed. The Odessa artists had close contacts with the cultural centres of Russia and Europe. Not being content only with their own developments, they were open to the new trends and experiments exploding around them at the time. It is from Odessa that such stars of the Art world as Vassily Kandinsky and David Burliuk had sprung from. Unfortunately that blossoming was put down by the communists after the October Revolution and came to an abrupt end followed, one by one, by social and cultural catastrophies which the Bolshevism brought with it. Still, in spite of that, the creative life of the city was not completely destroyed. The artists could not continue with their innovations and so their main task became the preservation of the tradition of the Odessa school of painting and so the theme of the fine impressionistic painting had managed to survive. The next explosion took place in the 1960s, in the time of the so called “Khrushchev’s Thaw”. Having had just a tiny taste of freedom, the country had started to show signs of a revival. Odessa, always dynamic and responsive had also made its contribution to the change. In the early 1970-s there had already formed a group of young artists who refused to follow the official line and who put all their creative efforts into developing their own style of art according to their vision and their ideals. Gathering bits and pieces of scarce information on the artistic developments in the West, they experimented with the form and searched for their own artistic language. Rejecting the traditional approach, so characteristic of the early Odessa painting, they understood a work of art, whether abstract or a figurative painting, as a world in itself with its own laws. The destiny and the path of this generation of artists was a dramatic one. Towards the middle of 1970s, these artists became the object of the ideological process. Their creative search had been viewed by Soviet power as a decadent regression and equalled to the disloyalty. There began a confrontation between the authorities and the most active artistic personalities. They were not allowed to exhibit their artworks in public places and they would not be accepted to the Union of Artists and that, practically, sentenced them to some sort of an illegal existence. And so the phenomenon of the ‘underground art’, provoked by the stupidity of the Soviet system, was born. The artistic process in the Soviet Union became split on the officially accepted artists – who were mostly the members of the Union of Artists, and among whom could be found many true masters of painting, and the nonconformists who as a rule were young, dissatisfied with the official line, artists. But you cannot stop a true artist from creating and showing his/her art, so he/she finds a way! If they can’t exhibit officially, publicly they can still exhibit privately. Thus the “Apartment Exhibition” movement was born. The Odessa artists, like their counterparts in Moscow, began to show their art to a selected audiences initially in their private apartments and later in the apartments of their friends and admirers. Officially, nobody could prevent them and the organizers of such exhibitions from inviting their friends, relatives, colleagues and anyone interested to their homes to see the artists’ latest achievements. Of course, not without a certain amount of risk as such an activity in those years was bound to be frowned upon by the KGB and incur pressure and anger from the top. Most of these artists had already become close friends and now their artistic impulse brought them even closer together. By the mid 1970s, in Odessa, a core group of nonconformist artists was formed whose most active members were: Vladimir Strelnikov, Alexander Anufriev, Valentin Khrushch, Victor Mariniuk, Lyudmila Yastreb, Stanislav Sytchev, Evgeni Rakhmanin, Ruslan Makoev and others. These artists continued to create and show their art privately inspite of the constant harassment from the authorities and the oppression and hatred coming from the majority of the officially recognised artists. They had close connections with the Moscow centres of the underground art movement and were participating in the apartment exhibitions of nonconformist art in Moscow and in Leningrad. They also invited their Russian colleagues to visit Odessa and to take part in their apartment exhibitions there. That underground artistic activity had created a number of forward thinking personalities who had offered their homes for these exhibitions. From the mid-1970s, the nonconformist artistic activity in Odessa centred in the private apartment of Vladimir Asriev, a professional violinist and enthusiastic art collector, where the exhibitions by the Odessa nonconformist artists became a regular feature. His apartment became a unique artistic environment open to all creative personalities and to the curious public. In 1976, to the great annoyance of the Odessa KGB he issued as a samizdat - "Catalogue of the Collection of Vladimir Asriev". This included about 100 artworks, representative of almost every nonconformist Odessa artist. During this period, he was also behind many private exhibitions of nonconformist artists, including an exhibition of "Ukrainian Contemporary Painting" in 1977 at his apartment transformed into an "unofficial gallery" in the city centre. Inspite of continuous harassment and threats from the Soviet authorities during the 1970s he managed to keep his flat an open house for local artists, musicians and poets. Since settling in England in 1980, Asriev has been behind many exhibitions of Russian and Ukrainian art. The three periods concerning the development of the Odessa art mentioned above didn’t evolve sequentially. In the second half of the 20th century there were those who continued the ‘en plein air’ tradition alongside the representatives of the so called “Severe Style” in Soviet painting - the shestidesyatniki, and, finally, the nonconformists, the ones who found themselves in the zone of the unofficial art. In each of those categories there were true, deservedly admired maestros of painting with the majority of artists just following the trend, conforming to the ideological line in the pursuit of their own mercantile goals. The consciencsious researcher ought to make an effort and try to distinguish between those categories in order to present that period of the Odessa art history in its true context. For that a certain terminology has been suggested. At present, there are two widely used definitions: “The Odessa School of Art” and “The Odessa Group” – a term coined by Vladimir Asriev at the time of the Group’s first exhibition in London in 1989. The former can be applied to all of the Odessa traditionalist style of painting beginning from the time of TYURKH. Really, if we were to observe any period or any stylistic direction taken by the Odessa artists we would inevitably notice something in common in all of them - it is, firstly, a life-affirming attitude, the colourist preferences and that specific something that could be called “the spirit of the region”. The terms “The Odessa School” and “The Odessa zhivopis’ (Painting)” are often being used in relation to the en plein air, impressionist tradition. Although, in our opinion, it would be more correct to unite these two terms under one - “The Southern Russian Impressionism”, which represents a long line of well known names in the Odessa art such as Kostandi, Golovkov, Dvornikov, Sinitsky and in the second half of the 20th century: Konstantin Lomykin, Gennadi Malyshev, A.Gavdzinsky and the more contemporary, Vladimir Litvinenko. Naturally these are by no means the only representatives of the term. The term - “The Odessa Group” defines the circle of the avant-garde artists and has been associated with the nonconformist artists who were the core of the Odessa underground movement in the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Among them were the already mentioned above: Vladimir Strelnikov, Alexander Anufriev, Valentin Khrushch, Victor Mariniuk, Lyudmila Yastreb, Stanislav Sytchev, Evgeni Rakhmanin, Ruslan Makoev who were later joined by Vladimir Tziupko, Alexander Stovbur, Valentin Shapavlenko, Vladimir Naumetz, Vitaly Sazonov, Valery Basanietz, Oleg Voloshinov, Andrey Antonyuk, Sergei Savchenko and others. Aesthetically, these artists hold very different, diametrically opposite views to those followed by the more traditionalist Odessa artists and their other contemporaries such as K.Lomykin, A.Gavdzinsky, A.Rusin, V.Litvinenko and others. And, although on a deeper level all of the finest Odessa painters share the painterly qualities of the Odessa school of art, they can’t be grouped together under one term. It was only logical that they had always exhibited separately. These are just some elementary facts about the Odessa Art phenomenon. The ever growing artistic authority of Odessa demands a thorough and professional research of the available resources. We hope that the facts given in this short article would help those who wish to learn more about the artistic talents of the unique city of Odessa. Olga Savitskaya, Light, Lucidity and Freedom
The city of Odessa is arguably the most important artistic centre in the Ukraine. Its landscape stands firmly within the artist's field of vision, transformed into a creative image by figurative experiment. Indeed, with its spectacular topography and pan-meditteranean, Odessa has long been an inspriation to the great painters, who exploit the bright sun filled colours of the Odessa landscape. Odessa painters are able to capture the purest elements of art, exploiting not just the airy brightness typical of the city but also the rectilinear and cursive shapes of rock formations along the shores of the Black Sea and even the expanse of the shoreline repeated in horizontal stripes on their canvasses. The importance of light in their work can not be overstressed. The unique qualities of light on the Black Sea shore have caused artists working their to deploy a diversity of spacial solutions and to develop special notions of plasticity to convey volumes and outlines. Formal experiment with light developed during the 1970's in contrast to the deepening gloom of social reality and the slow decline of national consciousnes; the works of Odessa artists more and more are imbued with the strongest sensations of purifying, cleansing sunlight in all its depth. One Ukrainian painter in the 1970's defined her aesthetic credo as: 'light, lucidity and freedom' The Specific Characteristics of The Odessa GroupThere is a strong folkloric tendency in Odessa art and an awareness of the Black Sea's ancient cultures. One ritual characteristic is the ubiquitous female form. Totemistic 'stone women' are plentiful on the steppes of the Ukraine and in the museums of Odessa and contemporary Ukranian art reflects this. The woman is invoked to protect even the modern artist. She is the original source of life whether mother or mother-earth, both stone goddess and contemporary icon. The woman has become the symbol of a primeval deity, invoked to protect the work and lending it a spiritual (pre-Christian) intensity. She can be an angel, lover, mother-earth or goddess but always a woman. Characteristically, Odessa art is non-literary and rejects narrative implication. These artists strive for the purity of the image, with an emphasis on decorativeness and on a specifically painterly professionalism. Formal experiment often leads to metaphysical flight and aesthetic rebellion is confined within the frame of the painting without reference to any social theories. There is an implicitly optimistic psyche motivating the creative energy of the artists. It is a psyche in which there is no room for fatalistic notions. Whether in exile in Munich, New York or Washington, in internal exile in Moscow, or living in Odessa, these artists have remained true to their century-long traditions of formal pictorial experiment. "Художник всегда ощущает в себе потребность в разумной деятельности. Путем искуства он создает гармонию определенных абстрактных определений, таких как свет, цвет, время и через них выстраивает эстетику реальной материи - т.е. действительность". (Маринюк) An artist always experience a necessity for an intelligent activity. Through art he tries to create a harmony of certain abstract definitions (concepts) such as light, colour, time building an aesthetic of the matter, which is a reality. (Marinyuk) "Я из тех художников, про которых на западе говорят: тот, кто идет сам. Можно удивлять самого себя, можно других, но я - прикованный к галере раб, обязан творить свое". (Стрельников) I'm amongst those artists about whom in the West they say: the one who walks alone. One can surprise oneself, one can surprise others, but I am a slave, chained to a galley - I ought to create my own. (Strelnikov) "Меня вдохновляет не форма. Форма - это уже результат. Мне трудно анализировать каким образом я прихожу к той или иной форме. Меня ведет нечто, что я не могу выразить словами. Я не отдаю предпочтение ни одной из форм выражения". (Цюпко) My inspiration is not a form. The form is just a result. It is hard for me to track and to try to understand the creative process of that or another form. I'm lead by something which I'm unable to express with mere words. I give no specific importance to either form of expression. (Tsyupko) "Счастлив тот, кто развил в себе способность ощущать звучание видимых образов. Видение, в свою очередь, звучит как музыка. Человек слышит звучание того, что он видит". (Басанец) Lucky are those, who developed a certain ability to feel the sound of visual images. Vision, in its turn, sounds like music. One hears what one sees". (Basanietz) О.С.: Сегодня происходит потеря такой функции искусства, как сопереживание. От него требуют развлечения, шока, щекотания нервов, то есть, эрзаца или видимости сочувствия. Характерные для масс-культуры критерии применяются к собственно искусству. Вытравливаются традиционные для русской культуры нравственность и сострадание. Ю.Е.: Не только сострадание, но и со-радость! В искусстве заключен огромный потенциал ликующей энергии. Могу назвать конкретные имена художников, которые ее несут! Это – колоссальная сила, и столько людей обделяют сами себя, лишаясь возможности приобщиться к этому животворному источнику. O.S.: Today we can see that the contemporary art is loosing one of its functions - compassion. This is what is expected of art today: an entertainment, a shock, a titillation of nerves, an ersatz or at least a pretense of compassion. The characteristics which belong to the mass-culture are being applied to art. The traditional Russian values - morals and compassion are being destroyed. Y.E.: Not only compassion is disappearing from art but also joy! There is in art and enormous potential of a triumphant energy. I can name quite a few artists who are the possessors of this energy! It is a colossal force, and, unfortunately, so many people rob themselves of it, they deprive themselves of an opportunity to connect to this life-giving source.  
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