SERGEY KALMYKOV (1891-1967)

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Text by Valentina Buchinskaya for the catalogue for the Kazakhstan's pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale—The first New Genius Book "Sacred expositions of the Great and Immortal Lai-Pi-Chu-Plee-Lapa", 2022

 

 

"I live among the astonished stars of the universe"

 Sergey Kalmykov 

 

Sergey Kalmykov is certainly one of the most interesting and original representatives of Kazakhstan’s varied and multinational art. Indeed, his work is a new discovery for international art history, worthy of a prominent place. Private collections of his work are being created in Kazakhstan and abroad; international art historians are writing about him; plays, novels and films are being dedicated to him.

Kalmykov spent his most productive years in Almaty; it is here that his unique style has blossomed. Leading a secluded life, absorbed in his own art world, he preserved and developed in his own way the principles of the Russian Silver Age. He had been invited to Almaty in 1935 to work as a production designer at the newly-created Musical Theatre (now called the Abay Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet), where he designed sets for operas such as Aida, Prince Igor, Faust, and Tosca, to name just a few examples – sets so impressive that the audience would stand up to applaud when the curtain opened. 

Sergey was a well-educated man, a person of many creative gifts. Everything he did, he did impressively. He was astonishingly good at creating costumes – and the characters in his paintings, too, are always interestingly dressed. In this way, his painting has a connection with theatre. He wrote poems, prose, theoretical art essays, operettas, novels, diaries. His friends, the ones he talked to in his imagination and in his works, were the great masters of world art.

He considered himself a lucky, happy person – after all, his whole life was filled with creativity, devoted entirely to Art. It was the raison d'être of his existence, and he fully believed in its infinite possibilities. Work was always emotionally uplifting to him; he existed in a state of flow and complete dedication. In any weather, all year round, he kept creating magnificent studies from nature distinguished by a sharp eye able to discover beauty and unexpected contrasts in nature, to turn the most ordinary cityscapes into little masterpieces of expression and charm. The most astonishing feature of Kalmykov’s work is arguably the organicity of form and the integrity of colour: he was a born colourist.

He could work in a great deal of styles and genres, using a great deal of methods and techniques. Sometimes, he’d create a lively and touching sense of simple earthly reality, tender, warm, humorous, playful, almost sensual. Other times, he’d work on complex conceptual constructions, such as the plastic embodiment of his research on the relationship between the point and the line on the plane. Obsessed by the fourth dimension, he wrote that he wished to surpass Malevich and Kandinsky. He called his method "mathematical-physical-metaphysical": it combined heightened emotionality with rigorous logic. Kalmykov's magical world of art fuses fantasy and reality. The portrayal of ordinary objects turns into a phantasmagoria of striking combinations and intertwined forms. Each of his works is a "small world, a microcosm with its own physical and geometrical characteristics": a unified structure with its own laws, its internal logic, its centre and axis of rotation, its value system, with small structures far from the centre dedicated to their own tasks and interests but united with the whole by a shared idea and a shared rhythmic harmony. Sure, every artist strives for integrity of composition – but the degree to which Kalmykov has achieved is highly impressive to modern artists. Such subtlety of relations can only be achieved by a subtle internal world. Each element of the image system speaks to the composition as a whole: thus, Kalmykov creates plastic models, whose whole structure expresses a refined aesthetic world order. 

The atmosphere of lofty contemplation born by his complex inner world and his keen sensitivity is revealed perhaps most strikingly in his simplest pencil drawings, sometimes consisting of a mere few lines. These few lines can be a breathtaking landscape, or, for instance, a delicate female figures with elongated proportions wearing an exotic costume. Female portraits are among the most expressive parts of his oeuvre. Some are quite concrete, accurate renderings, often nudes, with their individual characteristics. Others are fantastical, such as The Great Costume-Maker’s Daughter: dreamy, almost ethereal creatures, expressions of the artist's ideal soul. Free from all things earthly, they dwell in the world of the artist’s heightened spirituality. These works impress most by the freedom of construction, the beauty and refinement of plastic language. 

Kalmykov’s graphic art is unique in many aspects: the subjects and images; the expressive significance of linear structures; the perfect interaction of pulsating lines… The line is crucial not only in his drawings but also in paintings; it often appears as an independent colour contour with its own intensity. These multicoloured contours create manyfold facets and structures, manifesting intellectual power and will, a strength of mind and character, a structural method of thinking. At the same time it is almost a formula of pure monumentality. Like many great artists – for instance, his teachers Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin – Kalmykov loved the idea of murals, and many of his works seem like sketches for extraordinary, grandiose frescoes. 

A large cycle of fantastic works is a unique part of his creative heritage. It is a phenomenon that is very rare in the history of art – a whole world, a universe beyond the boundaries of space and time. In its way, it is sacred, magical art. It has its own mythological time, its own symbolical sense. Spiritualizing objects and the environment as a whole, it raises everyday life to the level of perfect Being. Kalmykov’s cosmist worldview is manifested in fantastic landscapes with arresting architecture such as flying towers as well as astonishing alien creatures travelling through interplanetary space with artists from different epochs and ancient gods. These works contain mysterious semantic plans and planes, which reflect the artist's unique personality or state of mind, his view of time and the human role in the universe. The space-time continuum he inhibited can hardly be envisioned by our everyday minds. Here, distances may diminish or grow, freeze as folds or pulsate as curves. 

A sense of belonging to the Cosmos was the basis and the very essence of Kalmykov's art. His thinking was profoundly cosmic: to him, there were no races and nationalities, only good and evil; his world is truly whole. A 1944 painting with the strange title Strakhilad (which sounds rather like the Russian word for fear, strakh and perhaps harmony, accordance: lad) could serve as an epigraph to his whole oeuvre. The motif is unusual for art in general but rather characteristic for Kalmykov: an alien creature, touchingly defenceless and graceful, appeals both to the feelings and the mind. It is a quintessential expression of Kalmykov's striking ability to paradoxically unite opposites: fear and harmony, inseparable, united by a dynamic force. This is the basic principle of Kalmykov’s worldview. As an artist, he worked at an interconnected, global level that we might call spiritual.

His works create a sense of mystery, of something far beyond ordinary understanding; they are full of signs, symbols, formulas, and incantations that cannot be comprehended purely in terms of art history. The more one tries to study the connections between his art with sciences and humanities, the deeper one’s surprised at his intuitive and intellectual penetration into the mysteries of the universe. Conversations about his work with musicians and musicologists, specialists in physics and esoteric knowledge lead to ever new discoveries. In his subjects, images and structures, he uses such a vast range of concepts that it is difficult to imagine them all in the mind of a single person. Freemasonry, ancient mythologies, the religions of Mongolia, China, Egypt – all that, and something more, something beyond comprehension. Kalmykov possessed (or was possessed by) a synthesising mindset. His thought lived in harmony with feeling; his working process was a stream of consciousness illuminated by flashed of insight. 

We could call Kalmykov a creator of "planetary art". In his works, we find manifestations of the newest scientific discoveries (often gleaned intuitively) and ancient esoteric knowledge. His method is truly polyphonic, incorporating and reflecting countless styles and methods, alluding to traditions and cultures from different countries and times. Despite Soviet pressure, he managed to create his own creative reality. He worked in the 1930-50s: while Tsiolkovsky and his student Nikolay Fedorov were envisioning space travel and designing rockets, Sergey Kalmykov wandered the streets of Almaty and his imagination travelled "among the astonished stars of the universe". He called himself "a slice of the earth crust" and created unique images thanks to intuitive insights. To name but one example: he once wrote, "elastic, rubber, armoured surfaces will be the face of future landscapes" – modern submarines have precisely this kind of surface, as rubber does not transmit radio waves, rendering such a submarine "invisible". 

To get back to basics: Kalmykov was born in Samarkand on October 19. His family soon moved to Orenburg, where he studied at a lyceum. In 1909-1910, he lived in Moscow, studying art with Konstantin Yuon and attending a preparatory course at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. In the autumn of 1910, he came to Petersburg and for four years he studied at Zvantseva’s private art school (where Marc Chagall had just left) with Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. After the revolution, he lived and worked in Orenburg. From 1924 onwards, he began to work on set design of performances at the Orenburg theatre and circus. By and by, e created his own theory of line and point in visual art, his own picturesque and imaginative style. He sought to find his own technology of producing black-and-white prints on cardboard, close to monotype in their expressiveness. 

The A. Kasteyev State Museum of Arts hold an immensely valuable collection of 1111 – a rather mystical figure – artworks by Kalmykov. This unusually large number of works was taken into permanent storage by the museum after the artist’s death thanks to Lyubov Plakhotnaya, the museum’s director from 1950 to 1973. Almost all works had been reserved in bad condition, painted in oil on the back of old reproductions, geographical maps, or wrapping paper; if Kalmykov managed to get hold of a precious piece of canvas, he often painted on both sides. At our museum, they are carefully and professionally preserved, restored, studied, exhibited and popularized; dozens of articles are published in different editions, collections, and magazines of Kazakhstan. The inhabitants of Almaty first encountered Kalmykov’s works at our museum at the first personal posthumous exhibition in December 1968 – January 1969. In the following years, eight more personal exhibitions were organized, including one at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow and in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. 

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Translated by Alexandra Berlina

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