The Art of Perseverance: Vasilisa Gubareva's Creative Journey

In the memories of her relatives and friends, Vasilisa Ivanovna Gubareva (1930-1970) remained a person and artist passionately devoted to her work. As if sensing how short her allotted time was, she worked with extraordinary hunger, enthusiasm, and persistence. In essence, work "not on commission, not by program, but freely – for herself," as she wrote in her diary, was the main part of her life.

A great influence on the formation of Vasena's character – as her close ones called her – came from her mother, Alexandra Georgievna Zavitnevich, an employee of the A.V. Shchusev Museum of Architecture, and her aunt, Ekaterina Georgievna Krusser – a musician and teacher. They protected her and helped her overcome her ailment. Most importantly, they managed to shape her attitude toward her physical disability as a characteristic that did not obscure her full personality from others. From her small family world, Vasena carried away openness, composure, and an analytical approach to her thoughts and actions. The Moscow Secondary Art School, which she graduated from in 1950, gave her a solid professional foundation and undoubted respect for creative work.

Vasilisa Gubareva was an artist open to experimentation, persistently seeking her own plastic language, genres, and techniques, fortunately during the period of the Thaw that expanded artistic horizons. She worked as a painter, though not extensively but interestingly: self-portraits, portraits of her daughter and husband survive, freely painted in various stylistic manners. The portraits show great attention and tenderness toward loved ones, but without a hint of sentimentality. The intimate still lifes with simple "random" household items are poetic. These works are like small windows through which an ordinary but warm and cozy family world opens up. One of her favorite compositional techniques was the combination of a still life on a window and a landscape beyond the window: a juxtaposition of the domestic "own" world and the external "foreign" urban space. However, vibrant urban landscapes, painted with thick sweeping brushstrokes, sometimes look like sketches for well-thought-out graphic sheets.

Her poetic gift was most fully embodied in graphics. The artist worked with watercolor, colored and simple pencils, experimented with the newly appeared felt-tip pens and ballpoint pens as full-fledged graphic techniques. She devoted much time to linocut, monotype, and etching. "If we consider Vasilisa Ivanovna's work retrospectively, one notices willful, most persistent searches for a form of self-expression. But all searches for form do not appear as something independent; they are subordinate to the spiritual principle," wrote Boris Turetsky, a friend and colleague from ZNUI. Vasilisa Gubareva belonged to the type of people and artists who firmly believed in the healing and transformative power of visible beauty. She could put aside any everyday matters for the sake of an extraordinary sunset that needed to be immediately sketched in an album. Or call her beloved friend Alya Lukashevker in the middle of the night to share the joy of an extraordinary still life that she had just managed to complete.

Gifted with a natural talent for contemplation, she easily freed herself from the "tyranny of nature" while remaining committed to figurative art. Despite the diversity of interests, the artist's work developed mainly within the boundaries outlined by Russian artistic culture of the 20th century.

Vasilisa Ivanovna's professional life was complicated by the lack of higher art education. This was compensated for by studies at the I.I. Nivinsky Studio under the guidance of E.S. Teis, work in the printmaking workshop of the House of Creativity in Chelyuskinskaya, and strictly organized daily work.

From the late 1950s in graphics, pushing aside other techniques, linocut in strict black and white execution came to the forefront. "The fashion for black linocut, like an epidemic, swept through graphics... Linoleum was enthusiastically cut everywhere from Minsk to Vladivostok." Among young metropolitan graphic artists, I.V. Golitsyn, G.F. Zakharov, I.P. Obrosov, O.A. Kudryashov, I.A. Popov, Ya.N. Manukhin, and A.V. Borodin were captivated by black linocut. Generalization and conventionality as inherent properties of this technique provided an opportunity to move away from naturalistic-illusory depiction of forms and space, to establish the significance of the graphic plane. The energetic, masculine, and laconic language of linocut of this time is close in imagery to the "severe style" in painting.

As if competing with male colleagues, V. Gubareva worked in this popular technique from the mid-1950s. She turned to landscape, still life, and genre scenes.

The heroines of her earliest exhibition linocuts are modest working women: plasterers, landscapers, seamstresses. Different subjects are developed within a unified visual system. The scene of action: construction site, square, sewing workshop are conditionally marked by several characteristic details. The faces and figures of middle-aged workers, sharply expressive and far from canons of beauty, speak of familiarity with the engravings of Käthe Kollwitz. The rhythmic alternation of dark planes and light silhouettes, encompassed by an energetic contour, creates both tension and inner harmony of roughened forms. The viewer is a witness to an ordinary moment of life. The characters, immersed in work, are turned "inward" to their world, enclosed in it. The deliberately intimate, non-pathetic intonation corresponds to the spirit of Thaw-era art. The story of an ordinary "non-poster" person, neither a hero nor a shock worker, is at the center of attention in fine arts, literature, and cinema.

In the early 1960s, Moscow's appearance was noticeably changing before the eyes of its residents. Capturing the unchanging and the departing, while at the same time discerning the new – this was a task that, as in all times, captivated many artists. The objects of attention often became not the avenues, but the lanes, not the ceremonial squares, but old courtyards or yet uninhabited outskirts. At the Youth Exhibition in 1959, I.V. Golitsyn's linocut with the programmatic title "The Old and the New" was exhibited. At the foot of a bright apartment building with clear rows of windows and balconies, darkened with age, crooked huts and sheds of Moscow's one-story suburb clung together. The calm, confident structure of the work gave a sense of naturalness and positivity to the changes.

For V.I. Gubareva, a native resident of Nikolo-Shchepovsky Lane near Smolenskaya Embankment, the collision of old Moscow's environment and the new industrial appearance of the capital was a personal and exciting experience. The drama of this encounter is reflected in the small sheet "High-Rise Building Under Construction." The artist observed the construction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs high-rise building on Smolenskaya Square, but her concrete impressions are generalized and sharpened, as in the set of an expressionist film. Above the black wings of sharply outlined mansions, the illuminated silhouette of the high-rise building soars upward. It is so enormous that it extends far beyond the edge of the sheet – beyond the edge of the visible and accessible to the eye, almost into cosmic darkness. Not only the old and new, black and white, large and small are contrasted. The composition combines different viewpoints, sharply colliding planes. The changing world is unstable, tense, and full of contrasts.

The same theme, but more restrained, also sounds in "Roofs" – a small series of linocuts composed on the principle of a film frame. In the foreground, taken from above, the roofs of old houses crowd together. They reach only to the "waist" of their tall new brothers closing the horizon. For now, the old and new coexist in an unreliable balance.

Throughout her life, Vasilisa Ivanovna kept notes. In her youth, it was a detailed diary in which impressions and feelings were analyzed. In maturity, she wrote down poems and brief notes, reflections on work and creative search:

"I am tormented by questions – watercolor? Or drawings? Or etching? Or maybe sculpture? In essence, idle torments and wanderings. After all, a person remains the same, whatever they touch. Picasso is always Picasso – whether he makes a painting or a plate. But that's Picasso. Not only with anything but also in any way. For him, there is no gradual slow maturation of some idea. There is much play, lightness, audacity in him. But everything is difficult for me. And therefore every detail matters. Both the size of the sheet (very large) and what to use. And what to depict."

At the same time, the artist very clearly formulates significant qualities of graphic landscape: "...constructiveness and masculinity, this is very important to me."

The choice of "what" – be it landscape, still life, or portrait, for Vasilisa Ivanovna was always colored in very personal tones, connected with some important moment in life. Even the detached urbanistic landscape "Metro Leninsky Hills" is not devoid of these motifs. Not far from the station, the Pioneer Palace was being built, where her husband, artist Alexei Andreevich Gubarev, worked on the artistic design together with friends – classmates from the Moscow Secondary Art School. They visited the Hills as a group, swimming in summer and skiing in winter.

The metro station, integrated into the two-level bridge across the Moscow River, was, in the perception of contemporaries, an engineering victory and a gateway to the new Moscow. "When you exit the metro at the 'Leninsky Hills' station, climb the escalator to a high hill on the bank of the Moscow River, you immediately enter a modern city. The planes of streets, the greenery of boulevards, the bridge across the river, the straight lines of Komsomolsky Prospect..." – this is how D.V. Sarabyanov describes the impressions. Clear straight lines form the basis of the figurative structure in the linocut "Metro Leninsky Hills." The composition is built almost like an academic exercise in linear perspective. The gentle slopes of snow-covered hills are cut through by the sharply receding construction of bridge supports and spans. It draws groups of people under its gloomy vaults, and with them, the viewer. The measured step of faceted columns sets a rigid "giant" rhythm, strikingly different from the human one. This is the gait of civilization advancing on humans – simultaneously majestic and overwhelming. The small-sized work is endowed with inner monumentality, plastic completeness, and semantic ambiguity.

Gradually, the artist moves away from expression and sharp effects. The compositions become balanced, enclosed, and planar. The brittle white stroke "breaking through" the merged dark masses outlines forms but does not overcome the gloom, does not soften the anxious mood. This is how the engravings "Old Courtyard," "Staircase," "Window," comprising the small series "Departing Moscow," are resolved. The title recalls the lyrical cycle of engravings that made I.N. Pavlov famous at the beginning of the 20th century, but V. Gubareva treats the theme quite differently. Her view of old Moscow is not colored by nostalgia and tenderness. In the tight, dense space of the city, there is coziness, but at the same time constraint and lack of freedom.

By the end of the 1960s, critics reproached linocut for superficial decorativeness, poster-like effectiveness, and "forcing of voice." This reproach can hardly be applied to V. Gubareva's works. The expressiveness of her linocuts developed toward external simplicity of plot and internal tension of atmosphere, saturated with complex vibrations of stroke.

Searches for expressive form sharpened the lyrical concentration of view. Under the gloomy clouds of the unfriendly windy Pechora, on the Moscow embankment, or forest edge, one would inevitably encounter a thoughtful human figure – a distinctive semantic module of the composition. The most harmonious of Moscow landscapes – "Borodinsky Bridge" – is a color linocut built on flexible black contours and soft color spots. The city suddenly breathed freely, filled with air, unfolded in the soft line of the embankment and snow-covered river. The solemn chord of the bridge colonnade "calms" the array of different-height houses crowded in the background. In laconic images, solemnity and lyricism, history and modernity, classical elevation and unhurried breadth, recognizability of a specific place, and typical diversity of Moscow landscape intertwine.

Parallel to labor-intensive monochrome linocut, V. Gubareva masters monotype – a print fundamentally different in expressiveness and working methods. At the very beginning of the 20th century, E.S. Kruglikova revived monotype as an independent, rather than sketch-serving technique, inspired by the "feverishness and risk of this technique." Her enthusiasm was shared by younger contemporaries – A. Shevchenko, R. Barto, V. Kapterev. In the 1960s, this emotional technique carrying a large share of improvisation was mainly used by women artists – T.A. Shevchenko, T.A. Pokrovskaya, R.E. Heidenreich, embodying impressions from exotic travels or the playful world of theater.

V. Gubareva's monotypes appeared in 1961 in Novocherkassk – a city of sun and summer, where the artist spent holidays with relatives. She writes in detail about her new passion in a letter:

"...due to circumstances, I became fascinated with monotype. And by the end of the second week, I began to understand something about what needs to be done. I enjoyed taking a break from my own engravings, from their blackness and gloom. And here the material is such that color must be applied vividly – when you mix, dirt appears – and to the limit of conventionality, and this itself dictates images. In general, very interesting and completely different works. Made about 30 sheets, of which 3-4 are interesting."

Among the surviving "interesting" ones are several views of Novocherkassk. Specific details of the urban landscape, outlined in colored silhouettes, are almost dissolved in the warm sunny haze of the background. At the center of the urban panorama is an iconic monument – the Triumphal Arch on Herzen Descent (former Kreshchensky) – the main city thoroughfare. The city appears as a fairy-tale mirage, either emerging or disappearing in the sultry air. But into the southern languor breaks the businesslike hustle of modernity. Pushing apart the boundaries of the sheet, a bus and cyclists scatter in different directions, as in a school problem. Such a mobile, naive manner with motley color and "awkward" composition will become fixed in landscape monotype, regardless of whether it depicts a Moscow construction site or the Khabarovsk port. To some extent, the artist was influenced by contact with the work of "self-taught artists" – students studying by correspondence at the People's Correspondence University of Arts, where the Gubarev spouses taught.[3]

Monotypes with floral still lifes are done in a completely different refined-pictorial manner. Flowers are a special theme in V. Gubareva's work. All her life she felt a close connection with nature, staying in the city for long periods, she "yearned and rushed to freedom." At home and in the studio, there were always many bouquets – "Vasilisa's little flowers" – in vases, jugs, jars, and goblets. Living or carefully dried flowers, twigs, leaves became friends and interlocutors worthy of strict linocut, swift watercolor, or finely worked etching. Often still life monotypes were created for the Combine of Graphic Arts, with which V. Gubareva began to cooperate after becoming a member of the Moscow Union of Artists in 1963. This was a time of great popularity of prints, which were assigned an important role in shaping modern domestic aesthetics. "Ever wider circles of Soviet people... find in prints the fullness of thoughts and aesthetic experiences,... and at the same time, a print is not a distant museum unique piece that we see only occasionally, but a thing with which beauty enters our home, into everyday life."[4]

"Fantastic Flowers" are festive-decorative still lifes with a complex color palette. The image is dynamically molded by color spots radiating joyful energy. Graphic materials – loose paper and gouache acquire pictorial expressiveness. But gradually, the images move away from the initial material form. The environment and objects reveal increasing unity; vases and flowers hover rather than stand in the shimmering atmosphere. Their soft flowing silhouettes are very convincing, while being light and transparent. They are no longer parts of the material world, but defenseless souls of things stripped of their outer shell – reflections of the imperishable world. Exploring the expressive possibilities of monotype, V. Gubareva comes very close to lyrical abstraction but does not go further along this fascinating-forbidden path. The mystery of life and art revealed itself to her through the visible, not the speculative.

At the turn of the 1960s-1970s, a new trend emerged in graphic art. In exhibition spaces, the rigid forms of large-cut linocuts were replaced, in I.V. Golitsyn's expression, by "sensitive techniques" – etching and modest pencil drawing. The strict completeness of plastic form, characteristic of V.A. Favorsky's school, gave way to the motor principle of drawing, coming from P.V. Miturich. V. Gubareva focused on drawing and etching, capable of "fixing the breath of one's own excitement"[5], in the last two years of her allotted creative life.

The circle of favorite themes hardly changed – trees at the edge of a forest, a quiet courtyard, a view from a window, a vase with flowers on a table, a corner of an interior – the figurative structure changed. The etchings are made with rare light strokes, the space is almost devoid of depth and chiaroscuro contrasts, and objects lack distinct contours. In the "Windows" cycle, the same intimate motif varies. A corner of a room with a window and a few significant objects – books, a vase with brushes, a round table – opens to the viewer trustingly and cautiously. The interior is synonymous with the artist's inner world, solitary, quiet, but whole.

The triptych "New Moscow" is woven from the same silvery-airy tones. The fairly large-sized etchings are perceived as distant panoramas opening from a highly opened window of the house in Devyatinsky Lane, where the Gubarevs lived. In fact, the views are thoughtfully constructed from significant, well-recognizable elements of the surrounding landscape. The pyramidal silhouette of the High-rise Building on Revolution Square floats into the clouds. Above the river and the old embankment hover the white towers of the new Kalinin Prospect. The panoramas, smoothly developing not in width but upward, gain dynamism from the free combination of different scales and several viewing positions. It's impossible to grasp the composition at a glance. Each sheet requires unhurried reading and attention to details; only then will it reveal itself in fullness. The etching "Krasnaya Presnya" can be deciphered like a puzzle to extract from the fluctuating atmosphere the characteristic dome of the Planetarium, discern on the horizon the thin needle of the Ostankino Tower, and below under the trees of the square, the tiny figure of a woman bending over her baby. The short quick stroke conveys not so much the forms of trees and buildings as the flowing air environment between them. The expressive techniques combined seemingly incompatible breadth of coverage and intimacy of episode, sense of flight and human lostness.

The term "quiet graphics" entered artistic circulation in the early 1970s thanks to Yu.Ya. Gerchuk. By the time when the new trend acquired a name, its stylistic features and inner mood were defined, V.I. Gubareva was no longer alive. But she managed to make the first important steps. "Probably, V. Gubareva will remain for us the most significant and whole, the most organic representative of this sympathetic direction."

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Literature and sources:

1. Gerchuk Yu.Ya. The Effect of Presence. M., 2016. p. 75.

2. Sarabyanov D.V. Real Fruits of Synthesis. Tvorchestvo. 1962. No. 9. p. 1.

3. The teaching staff of ZNUI, combining the older generation of Moscow artists R.R. Falk, V.P. Miturich, A.S. Eisenman, and the sixties generation M. Roginsky, B. Turetsky, A. Grositsky, A. Kamensky, represented a unique creative and friendly community occupying an intermediate position between the official art world and the underground.

4. Nurok A.Yu. Soviet Graphics. M., 1962. p. 2.

5. Expression of the artist Vyacheslav Ivanovich Pavlov (1934-2014).
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Andreeva-Prigorina Ekaterina Nikolaevna

Marchand Gallery

Collection Curator

Member of the Art Critics Association

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