Why did Khrushchev smash the exhibition at the Manege? Before and after the defeat: how Khrushchev insulted artists at the exhibition in the Manege Khrushchev and avant-garde artists.

Moscow, 2 Dec— RIA Novosti, Anna Kocharova. Fifty-five years ago, on December 5, 1962, an exhibition was held at the Manezh, which was visited by the head of state Nikita Khrushchev. The result was not only sounded insults, but also the fact that this whole story divided the artistic life in the USSR into "before" and "after".

"Before", one way or another, there was contemporary art. It wasn't official, but it wasn't banned either. But already "after" objectionable artists began to be persecuted. Some went to work in the field of design and book graphics - they just needed to earn at least somehow. Others became "parasites", as they were then defined by the official system: not being members of creative unions, these people could not engage in free creativity. The sword of Damocles hung over each - a very real judicial term.

The exhibition in the Manezh, or rather, that part of it where avant-garde artists were exhibited, was mounted in a hurry - right at night, on the eve of the opening on December 1. The offer to participate in the official exhibition, timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Moscow Union of Artists, was unexpectedly received by the artist Eliy Belyutin.

Shortly before the Manege, he exhibited the work of his students in the hall on Taganka. Under his leadership, a semi-official studio worked, which is now commonly called "Belyutinsky", and its members - "Belyutins". His students later wrote that Belyutin's studies and classes were "a window into the world of contemporary art."

The exhibition was held following the results of the summer plein-airs, Ernst Neizvestny also participated in it, who was not formally a member of this circle, but later became the main person involved in the scandal at the Manege. The unknown, as well as Vladimir Yankilevsky, Hulot Sooster and Yuri Sobolev, were invited by Belyutin to give the exhibition more weight.

This story with Khrushchev over time acquired legends, many participants had their own versions of what happened. This is understandable: everything happened so rapidly that there was simply no time to comprehend and remember the details.

It is believed that the exhibition at Taganka was visited by foreign journalists who were surprised to discover that the avant-garde exists and develops in the USSR. Allegedly, photographs and articles in the Western press immediately appeared, and even a short film was made. This seems to have reached Khrushchev - and now at the highest level it was decided to invite avant-garde artists to the Manege.

There is another version of this hasty invitation. Allegedly, the avant-garde artists in the Manege were needed by academicians in order to show the head of state and, as they say, stigmatize objectionable art. That is, the invitation to the Manege was a provocation that the artists simply did not recognize.

One way or another, Belyutin was called by the secretary of the Central Committee, Leonid Ilyichev. Being himself a passionate collector of art, and not always official, he persuaded him to show the work of his studio members. Belyutin seemed to refuse. But then, almost at night, employees of the Central Committee arrived at the studio, packed the works and took them to the exhibition hall. At night they did hanging - avant-gardists were assigned three small halls on the second floor of the Manege. They did everything quickly, some of the work did not have time to hang. And, which is significant, there is still no complete and accurate list of works that were exhibited at that time.

Artists waited impatiently for Khrushchev. Leonid Rabichev, a participant in the infamous exhibition, recalled that someone even suggested putting an armchair in the middle of one of the halls: they suggested that Nikita Sergeevich would be put in the center, and the artists would tell him about their work.

First, Khrushchev and his retinue were taken to the halls where paintings by recognized classics hung, including Grekov and Deineka. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, the “scrapping” occurred at the works of Falk, which the General Secretary was incomprehensible, and therefore did not like. Then the situation began to grow like a snowball.

Ernst Neizvestny later said that while waiting for the General Secretary on the third floor, he and his colleagues had already heard "the cries of the head of state." Vladimir Yankilevsky later wrote that when Khrushchev began to climb the stairs, all the artists began "politely applauding, to which Khrushchev rudely interrupted us:" Stop clapping, go, show your daub!

Ernst Neizvestny fell under the hot hand. “Khrushchev attacked me with all his might,” the sculptor later recalled. “He shouted like a slashed man that I was eating away the people's money.” The Secretary General did not like the work of the artist Boris Zhutovsky either, the painting by Leonid Rabichev caused irritation.

"Arrest them! Destroy them! Shoot them!" Rabichev quoted Khrushchev's words. “Things that cannot be described in words happened,” the artist summed up.

All those present, according to eyewitnesses, were in a state of shock. Even after leaving the Manezh, no one left - everyone stood and waited for immediate arrests. The following days also lived in a state of fear, but there were no arrests, formally no repressive measures were used. This, as many believe, was the main achievement and conquest of Khrushchev's rule.

A few years later, the artist Zhutovsky visited Khrushchev at his dacha - the former general secretary had already been removed from power and led a calm and measured life. Zhutovsky said that Khrushchev even seemed to apologize and said that "he was screwed up." And Ernst Neizvestny later made the famous black-and-white gravestone monument to Khrushchev. The sculptor himself called this fact the most incredible result of this scandal.

On December 1, 1962, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR, an exhibition was held, which was visited by Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev himself. The exhibition featured works by avant-garde artists. The first chairman of the Central Committee of the CPSU went around the hall three times, and then subjected the paintings to harsh criticism. After this exhibition, the Soviet Union forgot for a long time what abstract art is.

The exhibition was organized in the Moscow Manege. The artists of the New Reality studio also exhibited their works there. Avant-gardism was then an art recognized all over the world, but Khrushchev, brought up on socialist realism, not only did not understand the paintings, but burst into abusive speech: “What are these faces? What, you can't draw? My grandson can draw even better! … What it is? What are you - men or f ... damned, how can you write like that? Do you have a conscience?"

Nikita Khrushchev did not hesitate in expressions, stopping at each picture: “What is the Kremlin?! Put on your glasses, look! What do you! Pinch yourself! And he really believes that this is the Kremlin. What are you talking about, what kind of Kremlin it is! Is a mockery. Where are the battlements on the walls - why are they not visible?

But most of all went to the organizer of the avant-garde exhibition, the artist and art theorist Eliy Mikhailovich Belyutin: “Very general and incomprehensible. Here's what, Belyutin, I'm telling you as Chairman of the Council of Ministers: the Soviet people do not need all this. You see, I'm telling you! … Deny! Ban everything! Stop this mess! I order! I say! And follow everything! And on radio, and on television, and in the press, uproot all fans of this!

After such a resonant visit by Khrushchev to the exhibition, an article appeared in the Pravda newspaper that practically put an end to avant-garde art. The artists began to be persecuted, it came to the point that the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs detained them for interrogations with prejudice.

The position of avant-garde artists in the USSR improved only after 12 years. And even then, it was not without a struggle. On September 15, 1974, the artists, despite the official ban from the authorities, organized an exhibition of their works in a wasteland. Among the spectators were their friends, relatives and representatives of the domestic and foreign press.

As soon as the paintings were installed, workers immediately appeared with seedlings, which had to be planted on Sunday. The exhibition lasted no more than half an hour, when bulldozers, watering machines and police officers arrived at the wasteland. Jets of water were directed at people, paintings were broken, artists were beaten and taken to the polling stations.

The events, which were dubbed the "Bulldozer Exhibition", caused a public outcry. Foreign journalists wrote that people in the Soviet Union were imprisoned simply for wanting to express their ideas on canvas. And for harmless avant-garde paintings with artists, they do whatever they want.

After these articles, the Soviet government was forced to make concessions, and two weeks later the avant-garde artists organized an official exhibition of their paintings in Izmailovo.

The name of the French avant-garde artist Pierre Brasseau, who exhibited his work in 1964, was associated with a curiosity. His paintings were a great success, but, as it turned out later,

Culture shock

In December 1962, the head of the USSR Nikita Khrushchev, in contact with modern art, was offended in the best feelings and poured out his anger in the ways available to him - he overlaid the artists with a good obscenity and spit with relish at the picture of Leonid Mechnikov, when looking at which his patience, apparently, burst.

The exhibition of 1962 in the Moscow Manege is the first exposition of Soviet avant-garde artists, or rather abstractionists, which was held by the New Reality studio headed by Eliy Belyutin. "New Reality" is a unique Soviet phenomenon, which could only come true thanks to the so-called thaw. The reason for the exhibition was quite decent - the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR. But Khrushchev was unprepared for the perception of abstract art.

This is pederasty! Why pederasts are 10 years old, and this order should be?<...>Does it evoke any feeling? I want to spit! These are the feelings

By the way, the picture that Khrushchev spat in, Leonid Mechnikov subsequently cherished and cherished - circled the place of spitting, took the audience to watch. She also became the highlight of the reconstruction of the exhibition "New Reality" in 2012 in the same Manege.

Few of the artists survived - one of them, Pavel Nikonov, gained worldwide fame, became a People's Artist of the Russian Federation. As well as the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who recently left the world, who got, if not a spit from Khrushchev, but an honorable dressing for his "freak factory". Ironically, it was the Unknown who made a monument to Khrushchev on his grave at the Novodevichy cemetery.

Another exhibition of "New Reality", but not in the Manezh, but in the Museum of Modern Art MMOMA, will open on October 19, 2016. There will be several paintings from that devastating exhibition, however, as Olga Uskova, the main collector of works of this movement and head of the Russian Abstract Art Foundation, says, their task is to tell about the artistic phenomenon, and not to reconstruct the 1962 exhibition, in which Khrushchev’s spitting was not so quite a significant event.

Twenty persistent avant-garde artists and the shortest exhibitions

In the same 1962, Khrushchev said:

We appreciate that position (in art. - Note. Life) is good. But there is also a lot of rubbish. Gotta clean.

And they started cleaning. However, according to researchers of the avant-garde movement of those years, if the entire party apparatus believed that these paintings were so bad and harmful, they would have been destroyed, and their authors would have been imprisoned. Nevertheless, none of the defeated artists lost their freedom, Khrushchev's order to expel them from the CPSU could not be implemented, since none of them were members of the party. Somehow they could continue their work and even teach (the same head of the "New Reality" Eliy Belyutin), and their works were even periodically taken to international exhibitions from the USSR.

In the late 1960s, already under Brezhnev, the so-called twenty artists began to form in Moscow, the main of which was the leader of domestic nonconformism, Oscar Rabin.

On January 22, 1967, together with Lianozovo (a group of artists) and collector Alexander Glezer, he organized the first of the shortest exhibitions in their history at the Druzhba Palace of Culture. Two hours after the opening, KGB officers came and ordered to close the disgrace.

In the same months, the artists attempted a number of exhibitions, and one turned out to be shorter than the other - the exhibition of Eduard Zyuzin in the cafe "Aelita" lasted three hours, the exhibition at the Institute of International Relations - forty-five minutes, and Oleg Tselkov in the House of Architects - fifteen minutes.

bulldozer exhibition

In the fall of 1974, another significant event happened in the informal art environment. On the outskirts of the Soviet capital, in Bitsevsky Park, the same Rabin with the already formed "twenty" decides to hold an exhibition in the open air - a sort of vernissage. It was attended by journalists from foreign news agencies, diplomats, as well as another group of painters who came to support their colleagues. Not far from the crossroads, the artists hung their paintings on makeshift racks.

The scope of the exposition was small - a few dozen works and participants, but the reaction of the authorities was not long in coming. About half an hour after the start of the exhibition, bulldozers and dump trucks drove to the venue, and about a hundred policemen in civilian clothes arrived, who began to crush and break paintings, beat and arrest artists, spectators and foreign journalists.

The event caused a resonance at the world level. After publications in foreign media, the authorities decided to rehabilitate themselves by allowing the G20 artists to hold a similar exhibition in Izmailovo in two weeks. It lasted, however, not much longer - about four hours, and the work was not of the same level (destroyed and confiscated works from the first opening day could not be returned). But later these four hours in Izmailovo were remembered by the artists as "half a day of freedom".

Avant-gardists and hippies in "Beekeeping"

And yet the ice broke just then. A year later, in September 1975, the first truly free (because permitted) exhibition of avant-garde art took place in the VDNH pavilion "Beekeeping". It went down in history as an "exhibition in Beekeeping". It was organized by the artists Vladimir Nemukhin, Dmitry Plavinsky, and Eduard Drobitsky acted as curator. other.

Several hundred works, from paintings to hippie performances, managed to be put on display, which lasted only a week, but opened the door to new Soviet art.

The current sectologist, and then 18-year-old hippie Alexander Dvorkin, in his book of memoirs "Teachers and Lessons" recalls this exhibition in the following way:

To admire the "almost forbidden" works of fans of abstractionism, surrealism and other nonconformism, the people lined up in a kilometer-long line, along which mounted police drove sullenly. In total, 522 works were presented under the vaults of the pavilion. The group "Volosy", of course, also did not stand aside - the "Hippe Flag" made by her, measuring one and a half by more than two meters, attracted everyone's attention. The collective authors succinctly listed Lime, Mango, Ophelia, Shaman, Bumblebee, Chicago. We will not reveal the secret completely, but among these pseudonyms was one that bore the name Alexander Dvorkin.

Organized freedom

After the resounding success of the exhibition in "Beekeeping", the authorities allowed the "twenty" to have their own premises and exhibition area. In the autumn of 1976, an exhibition of eight luminaries of the movement - Otari Kandaurov, Dmitry Plavinsky, Oscar Rabin, Vladimir Nemukhin, Dmitry Plavinsky, Nikolai Vechtomov, Alexander Kharitonov and Vladimir Kalinin - was opened in the newly opened premises of the city committee of graphics on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. Since then, the "twenty" settled in the city committee of graphics and stayed there until their last exhibition in 1991.

One of the leaders of Soviet unofficial art, the artist Eliy Belyutin, whose works were criticized by Nikita Khrushchev at the 1962 exhibition at the Manezh, died at the age of 87 in Moscow.

On December 1, 1962, an exhibition dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR (MOSH) was to open in the Moscow Manege. Part of the exhibition's works was presented by the "New Reality" exposition, a movement of artists organized in the late 1940s by the painter Eliy Belyutin, who continues the traditions of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century. Belyutin studied under Aristarkh Lentulov, Pavel Kuznetsov and Lev Bruni.

The art of the "New Reality" was based on the "theory of contact" - the desire of a person through art to restore a sense of inner balance, disturbed by the influence of the surrounding world with the help of the ability to generalize natural forms, keeping them in abstraction. In the early 1960s, the studio united about 600 Belyutins.

In November 1962, the first exhibition of the studio was organized on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Street. The exhibition was attended by 63 artists of the "New Reality" together with Ernst Neizvestny. The head of the Union of Polish Artists, Professor Raymond Zemsky, and a group of critics managed to specially come to its opening from Warsaw. The Ministry of Culture gave permission for the presence of foreign correspondents, and the next day - for a press conference. The TV report about the opening day was held at Eurovision. At the end of the press conference, the artists, without explanation, were asked to take their work home.

On November 30, Dmitry Polikarpov, head of the Department of Culture of the Central Committee, addressed Professor Eliy Belyutin and, on behalf of the newly created Ideological Commission, asked to restore the Taganskaya exhibition in its entirety in a specially prepared room on the second floor of the Manege.

The exposition, made overnight, was approved by Furtseva along with the kindest parting words, the works were taken from the apartments of the authors by the Manezh employees and delivered by transport of the Ministry of Culture.

On the morning of December 1, Khrushchev appeared on the threshold of the Manezh. At first, Khrushchev began to consider the exposition rather calmly. Over the long years of being in power, he got used to attending exhibitions, got used to how works were arranged according to a once worked out scheme. This time the exposure was different. It was about the history of Moscow painting, and among the old paintings were the very ones that Khrushchev himself banned back in the 1930s. He might not have paid any attention to them if the secretary of the Union of Soviet Artists Vladimir Serov, known for his series of paintings about Lenin, did not talk about the paintings of Robert Falk, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Drevin, calling them daubs for which museums pay a lot of money workers. At the same time, Serov operated with astronomical prices at the old rate (a currency reform was recently passed).

Khrushchev began to lose control of himself. Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU on ideological issues, who was present at the exhibition, immediately began to develop the theme of daub, "freaks that artists purposely draw", what the Soviet people need and do not need.

Khrushchev walked around the large hall three times, where the works of 60 artists of the New Reality group were presented. He then rapidly moved from one picture to another, then returned back. He lingered on the portrait of the girl Alexei Rossal: "What is this? Why is there no one eye? This is some kind of morphine drinker!"

Then Khrushchev quickly went to the large composition of Lucian Gribkov "1917". "What is this disgrace, what kind of freaks? Where is the author?" "How could you imagine a revolution like that? What kind of thing is this? Don't you know how to draw? My grandson draws even better." He swore at almost all the pictures, poking his finger and uttering the already familiar, endlessly repeated set of curses.

The next day, December 2, 1962, immediately after the release of the Pravda newspaper with an accusatory government communique, crowds of Muscovites rushed to the Manege to see the reason for the "highest fury", but did not find a trace of the exposition located on the second floor. The paintings by Falk, Drevin, Tatlin and others, cursed by Khrushchev, were removed from the exposition on the first floor.

Khrushchev himself was not pleased with his actions. The handshake of reconciliation took place in the Kremlin on December 31, 1963, where Eliy Belyutin was invited to celebrate the New Year. A short conversation took place between the artist and Khrushchev, who wished him and "his comrades" successful work for the future and "more understandable" painting.

In 1964, "New Reality" began to work in Abramtsevo, through which about 600 artists passed, including from the original art centers of Russia: Palekh, Kholuy, Gus-Khrustalny, Dulev, Dmitrov, Sergiev Posad, Yegorievsk.