The Art of Contemplation: Leonid Glandin's Artistic Journey

There are fortunate creative individuals for whom the profession of an artist comes not only through school training and institutional education but much earlier – it is literally absorbed with mother's milk, supported by father's living example, developed and strengthened in a family atmosphere saturated with the aura of art and the priority of cultural interests and values. Such is the creative destiny of Leonid Glandin, who long before his higher education at the Moscow State Academic Art Institute in Memory of 1905, successful exhibitions at home and abroad, the Academy of Arts medal, and high honorary title, recognized himself as a representative of a dynasty, an organically formed artist with ancestral roots. And with all his own originality, individual essence, and stylistic peculiarity.

The roots and hereditary traits consisted in the fact that from an early age, Leonid observed the selfless and completely natural work of his parents – different from each other but equally self-sufficient and brilliant painters Alexey Leonidovich Glandin (1922-1988) and Iveta Lvovna Salganik (1926-1996). Their main similarity lay in the fact that in the predominant environment of Soviet officialdom, they both gave preference to the supremacy of pictorial plasticity rather than topical plot painting. Valuing domestic painting traditions (especially of the boundary period between the 19th and 20th centuries), they discovered world landmarks for themselves, probably most often focusing on the innovations of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse... In my view, this pair was analogous to the remarkable creative tandem "Drevin-Udaltsova," but without the sharp drama of the fate of their senior colleagues.

Obviously, Leonid Glandin inherited much from his parents in terms of the idea of pictorial quality, the primacy of color-bearing and decorative richness of canvas or pastel surface. At a number of joint family exhibitions, distinctive features in pictorial imagery and stylistic key of each representative were clearly visible: the material, textural modeling of the image within the framework of the Moscow school of painting – the father's; gravitation towards poetization, primordial purity of motif through means of "naive" manner – the mother's; striving for abstract conventionality of depiction, where the plot of the painting becomes the painting itself – the son's. Genre and plot proper for the latter are merely external pretexts to express the internal energy of color, to convey all the richness of psychological states and aesthetic preferences through a complex formula of pictorial plasticity. In this conceptual radicalism lies the fundamental difference, and not at all chronological, of the 21st-century artist Leonid Glandin from his parents, who, with all their innovative features, were still artists of the past century.

Leonid Glandin was born in 1955, when in the second half of the 50s the "second avant-garde" was born, implementing its vision of art, and in a style alien to official stereotype, the artist visualized his internal images and ideas about the external world. But already in the 1970s, at the beginning of the nonconformism era, Leonid realized his calling as an artist and moved at a slow but rather confident pace, through formal searches and paths, toward that personal formula of painting that defined his style in the 21st century. Being a person erudite in matters of culture, genetically open to world processes and innovations in art, Leonid Glandin began to build his imagery from simple to complex: from conditionally figurative plots in still life and interior genres to pictorial-geometric constructions with encrypted symbols and meanings. As the main figurative element, the artist chose the world of folk toys for his paintings, emphasizing not only the maximum plasticity, malleability, and symbolic capacity of these puppet characters but also the deep connection of his work with the figurative system of folklore and "naive" art.

With the same organic quality, consistency, and enchantment with which some contemporaries create paintings on biblical themes, Leonid Glandin writes peculiar "hagiographic" scenes with a limited set of clay characters, focusing attention on the emotional scale of pictorial plasticity, on linear strictness and laconicism, on the beauty and expressiveness of silhouette. This cycle (or expanded theme) the viewer sees thoroughly and skillfully welded into a single whole by common patterns and own solutions of composition, drawing, color dominance, decorative rhythm. And, of course, by the very methods of conveying the idea of the object, by the plastic logic of the captured state.

Looking at Leonid Glandin's geometric constructions, it is impossible to separate them from the avant-garde of the early 20th century, both Western and domestic. And there is not the slightest hint of secondary nature and lack of independence in our contemporary. Simply the very concept of avant-garde art contains the idea of abstraction from external individualization, from direct and intrusive authorial style, as, let's say, in realistic painting, where the very choice of plot or hero most often tends to be emphatically personal, maximally authorial. Therefore, it is completely natural that Leonid Glandin's non-objective works easily fit into the general avant-garde context of a century ago, but in the spirit of contemporary sophistication, refinement, primordial taste and measure, as well as the proper level of professionalism and culture of easel painting.

By age characteristic and behavioral model, it is difficult to attribute Leonid Glandin to the artistic movement of the "seventies." He did not declare his creative program at noisy and colorful youth exhibitions, was not published in clear "clips" of beginning, promising masters, and probably did not make romantic travels around the country in the schedule of Komsomol vouchers. But, born as an artist at the very end of the 1970s, he still inherited and shared the generic features of this direction: restoration of connections with world culture, interest in questions of style formation, choice of his own attraction and mental habitation. At that time, these were not only Renaissance, Baroque, Gothic, Russian academicism and "Peredvizhnichestvo" (naturally, with intonations of carnival and grotesque), but also closer layers of art: French impressionism and aboriginal "naive," German expressionism and American "Pollockism," Italian neorealism and various ethnographic traditions...

More closed and externally removed from any overt conceptuality of that time, Leonid Glandin through his private "laboratory" way developed a line of creative behavior, mainly focusing on an educated viewer ready for not always easy perception of painting, thereby completely alienating himself from the mass viewer.

Probably, just as Leonid Glandin's parents were once impressed by the experiments of Cézanne and Matisse, the son is more close to and attracted by the innovators of the 20th century – both in expressive plasticity, and in self-sufficient pictorial imagery, and almost musical harmony of geometric segments of composition and even in the general conceptual vocabulary. After all, in Glandin's "illusions" and "compositions" there is as much detachment, freedom of action and completeness of experiment as, for example, in Kandinsky's demonstratively numbered with Roman numerals "improvisations" and "compositions," Exter's "geometric abstractions," L. Popova's "pictorial architectonics," Filonov's analytical opuses and Malevich's impersonal figures.

Glandin even has some direct intersections with the searches of his predecessors. Thus, his composition "Two" resonantly echoes with the identically named painting "Two" and the canvas "Two Sisters" by the master of metaphysical painting de Chirico. The musical theme "Jazz" is parallel to Mondrian's geometric symbolism on the same jazz themes. Glandin's "toys" and Morandi's humanized "bottles" enter into a silent dialogue. And the clay figurines of our Russian artist are easily imaginable in the company of Mikhail Larionov's "provincial characters" with his ironic theatricality.

In the works of the late (current) period of Leonid Glandin, the pictorial painting is not reduced to logical concepts, to specific dramaturgy. Having developed his method of figurative coding, he recreates variants of "Holiday," "Bouquet," "Toy," "Jazz" exclusively by means of thought-out form-making: not only by color, light, drawing, compositional principle, but also by "small" private effects – rhythmic geometry, decorative ornamentality, background expression. And all together these effects are akin to spontaneous and fascinating jazz improvisation, turbulent color syncopation, linear repetitions and cadences, as well as the general impression of intense swing.

The artist gives the viewer the opportunity for unhurried and thoughtful contemplation, offering careful hints in the titles of paintings: "Solar Eclipse," "Premonition," "Evening Song"... The author strives to translate his subjective view, personal feeling, psychological state into a broad objective field of figurative reality, philosophical thought, emotional experience. In his best works, he succeeds in this. Especially with the intelligent and trusting participation of the viewer.
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