About Stanislav Goncharov

The collections of Old Russian, folk, and decorative-applied art from the 18th-21st centuries of the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve are widely known in our country and far beyond its borders. A comparatively small but organic part of the museum complex is the collection of contemporary painting and graphics that became a continuation of the fine art collections of Ancient Russia and Modern times. It provides an opportunity to trace, to a certain extent, the development of the artistic traditions of Sergiev Posad over the past hundred years.

The specificity of this collection is the predominance of works by local artists and themes related to the iconography of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the city, and its surroundings. Most of it consists of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Another feature of the collection of paintings from the 20th-21st centuries in the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve is the prevalence of works that are quite conservative in their style, representing traditional realistic directions. This characteristic also applies to museum works from the second half of the 20th century. The layer of "nonconformist art," or "other art," in the museum is small—this is primarily the collection of paintings by S.K. Goncharov and individual works by Sergiev Posad masters such as A.N. Orlov, I.T. Sandyrev, E.P. Zhurukhin, and others.

The Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve has the largest collection to date of paintings by the bright, unique artist, "a younger contemporary of the leaders of unofficial art of the sixties," Stanislav Kirillovich Goncharov. The life of this monographic collection in the museum began more than 20 years ago.

In 1996, the first large personal exhibition of Stanislav Goncharov was organized in the museum halls in Sergiev Posad. It featured more than 70 works created during his 30 years of creative activity. At the end of the exhibition, in 1997, the Sergiev Posad Museum received a rare and incredibly generous gift from Stanislav Kirillovich: he donated 53 of his paintings to the collection of contemporary fine art, selecting significant, milestone works for the museum (two paintings were purchased from the author in 1995). Thus, a self-valuable monographic collection of paintings flowed into the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve, representing one of the layers of domestic unofficial art.

When transferring his works to the museum, the author expressed a wish that they "would not lie as dead weight in the funds," but would come out to people, to viewers. "The museum is my path to Eternity" (S.K. Goncharov). This gift became, indeed, a farewell—a creative testament of Stanislav Goncharov, who passed into Eternity in 2003.

One of the "conditions" for transferring the paintings to the museum then, in 1997, was the artist's "order" to publish a catalog of the works he donated. With a delay of many years, the museum is now returning this debt to the author.

Stanislav Kirillovich Goncharov was a painter, poet, and thinker... "He is not an artist who wrote poetry, and not a poet who painted pictures." He was a Creator. Painting and poetry in his work are inseparable.

Stanislav Goncharov began his life journey in 1940 in the small town of Kommunarsk (now Alchevsk) in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. The early stage of his creative biography was first associated with Rostov-on-Don, where Goncharov graduated from the M.B. Grekov Art School, then with Stavropol and Minsk, where he taught at children's art schools. His first teachers in art were T.F. Teryaev and G.P. Mikhailov, who, in turn, had been schooled by M.S. Saryan and K.S. Petrov-Vodkin. Thus, one of the sources of S.K. Goncharov's creativity was the tradition of Russian art from the first third of the 20th century.

The artist's youth happily coincided with the period of the "thaw." He was captivated by new publications about the art of various European schools, exhibitions, and collections of previously "forbidden" paintings. Stanislav Goncharov studied the work of K.S. Petrov-Vodkin, Old Russian art, and "avidly read the memoirs of Western European artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, forming his own way of self-expression in art that was adequate to his inner world."

A significant role in the formation of Goncharov's aesthetic and worldview positions was played by his acquaintance and creative communication with a circle of Moscow artists who largely determined the face of art in the 1960s (representing the "severe style" and "unofficial art"): Gury Zakharov, Dmitry Zhilinsky, Ernst Neizvestny, Andrei Goncharov, who "broke through in the monolith of official culture."

Andrei Goncharov, Dmitry Zhilinsky, and Ivan Sandyrev gave Stanislav Goncharov their recommendations to the Union of Artists, which he joined in 1975.

From 1974, Stanislav Kirillovich lived in Zagorsk – Sergiev Posad, and worked in the Zagorsk Art Production Workshop.

From the second half of the 1960s, Goncharov became a participant in zonal exhibitions first, and then republican exhibitions. In 1967, his paintings first appeared at a zonal exhibition, and one of them was acquired by the USSR Ministry of Culture. A large personal exhibition of Stanislav Goncharov took place in 1990 in the Hall of the Union of Artists on Krutitsky Val. His personal exhibitions were repeatedly held in Sergiev Posad and Moscow. He participated in many exhibitions in the country and abroad.

S.K. Goncharov's works are in the Stavropol Regional Art Museum, the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve, the Local History Museum of Pushkino (Moscow region), in galleries and private collections in Russia and abroad.

It is not easy to talk about the stylistic features of Stanislav Goncharov's painting, about the artistic tasks that he solved in his work. The author himself, reflecting on these problems, called himself an "expresser of the inexpressible" and sought to "avoid falling onto any rigid shelf of art history definition."

Goncharov belonged to those painters who are very sensitive to new stylistic trends, can boldly change their manner, master new materials and techniques, while maintaining adherence to their themes in art.

If we try to characterize the creative path of the artist S.K. Goncharov as a whole, it can be argued that from the period of the "thaw" of the 60s, it ran "in line with the avant-garde wing of the 'seventies' and in recent decades ended with the creation of mature in skill and content [...] works of painting."

Almost immediately in his work, Goncharov moves away from natural painting. In the 1960s, he paid tribute to the "severe style." It is enough to name such works of his from 1965 as "Motherhood" (where a majestic image-symbol of motherhood is created) or "The Path Traveled from 'Iskra' to 'Pravda'" with monumentality, statics of images, openness of emotions, and flat-decorative solution of space and color inherent in the aesthetics of the "severe style." Later, in the 70s, reminiscences of this direction would often arise.

In 1974, Goncharov, as if "remembering" the visual form of the "severe style," wrote one of his deepest works—"Evening Train," where there is only "on the surface" a banal plot: people who accidentally met in a compartment of a reserved seat car are depicted. The plot is "stopped" (as in a freeze frame), the simplified silhouettes of figures in a dark car are absolutely static. A deep color scheme is found, which needs an "exit" into the light of the window—into the world. The presence of the author among those depicted in the picture gives additional semantic nuances to the scene "from everyday life" that he captured.

Almost at the same time, S.K. Goncharov created a cycle of works "Return to Nature" (not included in the collection of the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve due to the problematic preservation of the paintings). In its style, other roots can be guessed, analogies arise with the French movement in painting of the 1910s-1920s—"pictorial purism" with its desire for simplicity of technique, forms, color, the glow of color, the wide contour of images.

In a number of the artist's works from the late 60s and early 70s ("Poets," "Masks," etc.), the influence of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century is definitely read—in the use of suprematist techniques.

In domestic art of the 1950s-1960s, "such concepts as metaphor, allegory, symbol... were affirmed as an innovation." The attraction to metaphor and symbol, characteristic of Stanislav Goncharov's work, manifested itself already in his early creations, including the paintings "From Childhood," "Interior," and others. Thanks to the poetic-metaphorical "reading" of the plot, the theme of childhood and youth acquires a special, tragic sound: Goncharov speaks about the loneliness, the vulnerability of a small person. It is no coincidence that minimalist means of expression are used here, primarily in color: Goncharov paints "black on black"; black as "the color of childlike, cosmically inconsolable grief." ("Black" and "white" cycles of works would continue later in the author's work.)

In general, Stanislav Goncharov's art is "metaphorical through and through, and this requires from the viewer a skill of non-literal perception," co-reflection with the author, to discover different layers, the depth of content for oneself. Such active work of the viewer is embedded in the perception of most of the artist's paintings—and this is one of the main laws of the "creator-viewer" connection in contemporary art.

Autobiographical moments play an exceptional role in Stanislav Goncharov's works. The large number of self-portraits in the legacy of a number of artists from the 1960s-1970s, including Goncharov, is a feature of the time: "the constant inclusion of oneself and one's loved ones in the image—the author is inseparable from his heroes."

Stanislav Kirillovich not only painted numerous self-portraits and portraits of his muse—his wife Tatyana, but also actively introduced the self-portrait into thematic compositions ("Dedication to V. Popkov," "Memory," "Artist in the Village," etc.). A peculiar form of the author's lyrical, poetic monologue emerged. The artist sought to emphasize that the world created on canvas was personally seen and experienced by him—a world more often disharmonious than bright. Even Goncharov's muse has a "tragic face-mask."

The particularly pointed plastic language of his paintings speaks of disharmony, where deformation of nature becomes the norm, where faces can be grotesquely, expressionistically expressive. Instead of a face, a "mask" can emerge (as it sounded in S. Goncharov's poetic lines: "Pictures are painted mutely—without faces"). He used "clashes of local colors, different textures, some general roughness of writing."

Special emotionality is achieved in many of Stanislav Goncharov's works through a "hot" color scheme, through the relief of the colorful surface.

He often used collage and assemblage techniques. He enriched the expressive possibilities of easel works by including in the pictorial structure "everything that comes to hand": sheets of rusty iron in series of still lifes and portraits "in settings," tin objects, paper, torn fabrics, and other "anti-artistic" materials, if it contributed to the solution (sometimes paradoxical) of figurative tasks, "the acquisition of a new plastic truth," responding to the metaphorical fabric of the paintings ("Lilac," "Chernobyl Cycle," etc.).

Goncharov could apply dull bronze paint, bitumen varnish in his works. He introduced technical liquid enamel, aluminum powder onto the canvas, which helped create unexpected lighting effects, "glow" of the surface, thereby hinting at the "otherness" of images—as, for example, in the painting "Flying Windows" with its "images-symbols of flying figures of Icaruses" (?)—children (?), hovering in the world of wonders and in the world of reality.

Many of his pictorial compositions ("Teapot Smoker," "Copper Teapot Smoker," "Parables") testify to the paradoxical nature of Stanislav Goncharov's figurative and plastic thinking, to his ability to create sharply unusual "plots." "Who else could have thought of painting a portrait of a smoker, where the main plastic hero is smoke, molded into the shape of a teapot?"

Goncharov's pictorial language, the language of metaphors and symbols, opens space for the imagination of the viewer, and the specialist too. Readings-interpretations of his paintings can be variable...

One of Stanislav Kirillovich's programmatic works is the self-portrait "Artist with a Brush": in the frame of a window (earth) against the black background of the space of the world (cosmos), the "face" of the artist and the brush in his hand seem to burn. The brush is a "candle," the artist is a "candle," if he, like Stanislav Goncharov, is distinguished by complete self-denial, self-burning service to art, and generosity of gift.

...One can relate differently to the work of S.K. Goncharov, interpret and evaluate his paintings differently. "It is only impossible to imitate them. It is also impossible to repeat them, just as it is impossible for a person to repeat the talent of their author..."

The collection of Stanislav Kirillovich Goncharov's paintings in the museum (55 works) is distinguished by special selection and representativeness: it covers the main periods and a wide genre-thematic range of the master's work. The predominant part of the works are pictorial compositions that can be defined as "poetic-metaphorical." In addition, the museum collection includes portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and canvases of philosophical and journalistic content. They all reflect the spiritual, creative world of the artist-poet Stanislav Goncharov and the themes that went through his entire life in art.

Such basic themes as "The Fate and Image of Russia," "The World of Slavs and Slavic Images," "The Poet and the World," "The Poet and the Muse," and others were embodied in painting in different ways. The museum collection of Stanislav Kirillovich's works, covering the period of the 1960s-1990s, allows us to present fairly integral cycles related to the comprehension of these eternal themes in art.

Individual series of Goncharov's paintings are dedications to the poet Nikolai Rubtsov, the artist Viktor Popkov—iconic figures in the culture of Russia in the 60s-70s, who embodied in themselves and their work the spirit of the acquired "cherished freedom."

A number of S.K. Goncharov's works can be considered as unified cycles, reflecting his searches in the field of pictorial plasticity as such, in which the special emotional qualities of color, volume, line, and texture became the subject of the author's close creative interest. "The artist created his own language, where the life [...] of the soul appeared as the only object and value." They always contained a certain allegorical meaning.

One of such pictorial series by Goncharov is the "Light Cycle" of the 1970s ("Light Portrait," two "Parables," "Young Football Player," "Artist in the Village"), where a contemplative, emotionless object seems to dissolve in the environment... Let us recall that in the same years, the task of depicting "white on white" as a sign of disappearance was being solved by another master of "other art"—Vladimir Veisberg.

In his paintings "Night," "White Night on Academichka" (two works with the same plot and title), S. Goncharov paid tribute to deep color—thick, impenetrable, where "everything is not on the surface, but inside"—color that gave landscapes a certain metaphysical power, a special "lasting meaning—time flows slowly in them."

In Goncharov's landscape compositions related to Zagorsk – Sergiev Posad, the qualities of his individual style and coloristic searches were vividly manifested. In one of these paintings—"The Night Before Christmas"—a corner of the old city with the Ilyinsky Church and a self-portrait of the artist appears mysteriously and alarmingly. Sharp emotional expressiveness is born from the dark dramatic color, some angularity of the drawing, energetic writing, giving a "whirling texture." One of those night landscapes by Goncharov that embody "a feeling of homelessness, abandonment of a person on the outskirts of life" and at the same time delight with their pictorial beauty as part of the "formidable and beautiful" world of the artist.

Most of S. Goncharov's works in the museum's collection are associated with collage and assemblage use of various materials, primarily iron, tin ("Tanya. Portrait in Setting," "Waiting," "Artist Zhdanov," "Bouquet in Setting," etc.). As noted above, these were not just experiments with material, "tricks" for the author, but searches for hidden metaphors. Iron and tin were viewed by Goncharov as a "rebellion against the poverty of gold."

The museum collection also presents Goncharov's sharp social and political compositions of philosophical and journalistic content—works from the "Museology" cycle. The theme of "garbage" occupied an important place in the philosophy and work of Stanislav Goncharov. He believed that "green civilization has gone wild in the waste of human material to museology," and people are "garbage for politicians." In general, this theme is characteristic of post-avant-gardism in Russia, it is viewed as "a figurative paraphrase of the biblical quote: 'dust from dust, and to dust you shall return.' The artist conveys his individual despair before the garbage of existence."

The cycle of paintings dedicated to the Chernobyl catastrophe, which became for the artist one of the symbols of the collapse of human civilization, belongs to a number of alarming, tragic philosophical and journalistic works by S.K. Goncharov from the 1980s; among them is "Chernobyl Bouquet" with the author's metaphor: "Baudelaire's flowers of evil."

The collection of works by Stanislav Kirillovich Goncharov in the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve excellently demonstrates how mobile the painting of this master was in its style, relevant in form and timeless in content, connected with the leading directions of domestic unofficial art of the 1960s-1970s and the Russian avant-garde of the "first wave," having absorbed the influences of experiments by classics of Western modernism. At the same time, this collection of paintings presents how gradually S.K. Goncharov's painting freed itself from various influences, how the master's unique aesthetic credo matured.

...With the passage of time, it becomes obvious that Stanislav Goncharov belongs to those artists "who were previously considered nonconformists and who are now essentially the best representatives of contemporary art... from whom Russian free culture originated."

The life of S.K. Goncharov's painting collection in the museum continues. The author's works have appeared before viewers more than once in recent years.

In 2002, the exhibition "Fine Art of the 20th Century in the Collection of the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve: Selected Works" opened new exhibition halls in the main building of the museum. Along with works by luminaries of domestic art (K.S. Petrov-Vodkin, B.M. Kustodiev, K.F. Yuon) and the best painters and graphic artists of the city, "selected paintings" by S.K. Goncharov were shown. In November 2003, several works by Stanislav Kirillovich were included in the exhibition dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Sergiev Posad branch of the Union of Artists of Russia. In 2004, the entire collection of the master saw the light at the exhibition "55 Paintings by Stanislav Goncharov: The Artist's Gift to the Museum." It was an exhibition of the author's "living creative heritage."

And finally, now the collection of paintings by Stanislav Kirillovich Goncharov is being fully published in the museum catalog.

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