The Chronicle of Silence: Stanislav Goncharov's Artistic Defiance in Soviet Russia

"And for people this will become Like the times of Vespasian, And it was only a wound And a small cloud of torment above it." —Anna Akhmatova

"A lifetime on the scaffold."
‍ — Stanislav Goncharov

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The artist and poet Stanislav Kirillovich Goncharov, who lives in Zagorsk, is a younger contemporary of the leaders of unofficial art (or to put it simply, genuine art) of the sixties. Having fully experienced the impact of the oppressive circumstances of the "era of stagnation," when state-sponsored lies became obvious to almost everyone while "the torture continued," Goncharov miraculously survived and, having reached the milestone of his fiftieth birthday, was honored with a personal exhibition in the capital. This exhibition, astonishing in its power, nevertheless risked passing unnoticed for a number of reasons, primarily due to our having lost the habit of recognizing genuine artistic values during many decades spent outside the fold of world artistic culture, our eyes spoiled by all sorts of ubiquitous decorative substitutes that replaced real art. As usual, our catalog was not ready for the exhibition, and now we can confirm that this fear has, most unfortunately, proven true. Of course, Goncharov's work, like everything authentic, will gain recognition both here and abroad. But we seem to have missed a rare opportunity to participate in the magnificent discovery of one of Russia's greatest talents.

The basic biographical information about S. Goncharov can easily fit into a few sentences: born in 1940 in Kommunarsk, in 1964 he graduated from the art school in Rostov-on-Don, in 1965-1966 he became acquainted with underground Moscow artistic movements and saw the famous collection of G. Kostaki, from 1965-1972 he taught at the children's art school in Stavropol, and from 1973-1974 at the Minsk children's art school. Since 1974, he has been working at the Zagorsk art production workshop. In 1975, he was accepted into the Union of Artists.

In Zagorsk, S. Goncharov organized four personal exhibitions. The latter would seem to indicate recognition and success. But this, alas, is far from the case. All exhibitions were conducted solely on the personal enthusiasm of the artist in an atmosphere of profound indifference and even hostility. The gift of a generous soul, extended to society with an open hand, was left hanging in the air. "Unnecessary" canvases began to accumulate, literally displacing the artist and his family from their dwelling. (He practically never had a studio, nor, for that matter, an easel, good paints, and many other things without which, it would seem, the work of a painter is inconceivable!) All this accumulated endless fatigue and evoked a sense of hopelessness.

Thus, the personal fate of the master intertwined with the tragic fate of the Fatherland. And when Chernobyl happened, the artist created the image of a palette burning on a cross as a plastic equivalent.

From exhibitions and publications of recent years, we have learned about the existence of "unauthorized art" (a term by O. Mandelstam) that was carefully hidden from us. Under conditions of mandatory uniformity of thought, it defended Pushkin's principle of the artist's "secret freedom" and opposed the official culture of the totalitarian empire, decorative in the most direct sense of this legally established definition, which created its ceremonial facade. It turns out that not only in the 1920s, when the authorities had not yet managed to break all ties with pre-revolutionary culture, but also in the 1930s, 40s, and even 50s, there were artists faithful to the principles of beauty and truth who painted pictures, the creation and even storage of which was dangerous, and sometimes deadly dangerous. Now a whole history of art from the 1920s to 1980s can be written (and this should be done without delay). It will give us a completely different picture than the one that has been painted by official Soviet art criticism until now.

Among the stages of this culture, the last in time remains the least clarified. We have yet to learn about the greatest artists of the last two decades, and S. Goncharov's exhibition in this respect is one of the central events. Stanislav Goncharov is a bright representative of unofficial, or, as we are beginning to understand, the actual culture of the 60s-80s. This last stage has its own significant differences. Unlike the artists of the 30s-40s, and even the 50s, who were condemned to public silence but constantly felt their connection to the old, traditional culture (and sometimes even managed to feel themselves recognized leaders, artists of European scale, which, of course, helped O. Mandelstam or A. Akhmatova to hold their heads high amid the most profound disgrace and open persecution), the artistically gifted youth of the 60s still needed to guess about the total lie of totalitarian art and the necessity of returning to the thousand-year tradition of organic development of domestic and world culture.

But how was an ardent young man to guess all this, having inherited not the fruits of education but, in Solzhenitsyn's precise word, "educationship," and in the remote provinces at that? And yet, the path to real art was found. Stanislav was fortunate with his teacher. Timofey Fedorovich Teryaev, who taught at the Rostov Art School, studied with Minas Avetisyan under Saryan himself. The monolith of official culture was also breached through acquaintance with Moscow underground artists and G. Kostaki's collection of Russian avant-garde. And so, in the work of the temperamental southerner Goncharov, distinguished by phenomenal productivity, the forcibly broken backbone of national culture began to heal!

In a handwritten treatise of 1967, the artist wrote: "I am a visual being who needs to crawl over objects, transforming them into art." This announced the priority of an objective plastic comprehension of the world through the instrument of his artistic subjectivity, leaving no room for demagogic ideological speculations that confused so many. The news that the artist brings to the world, according to Goncharov, is unfortunately unknown even to the Central Committee and the Politburo. Addressing his still very hypothetical viewer, the artist says in the same treatise: "...you still know nothing about the visual world that I discover in myself, in Nature, and show to you, so that your world too might be scratched by the cat of my visual discovery."

I do not know whether we should attach to the term "farbism" (from the Ukrainian word for "color") proposed by S. Goncharov in his treatise-manifesto the significance that we readily attach to every term ending in -ism or -art that reaches us from the West, but I think that this call to "farbism" coincided with the artist's breakthrough to new plastic values. In the best works of this time and the following decade, which, in my view, led to a creative peak in the summer of 1978, spent with his beloved wife and muse Tanya in Sevastopol, Goncharov achieves such a fury of color as it did not know even in Avetisyan's "Dzhajur." And the magnificent "Trumpeting Bouquet" of 1975, and the masterpieces of 1978: "Summer in Sevastopol," "Self-Portrait" and "Portrait of Wife" — I am firmly convinced, will take their place in the history of Russian and world plastic art of the 20th century.

Sensing his own quite extraordinary talent, S. Goncharov sought points of support, contact with the indisputable achievements of culture. His "Self-Portrait with Vincent Van Gogh" (1971) and "Letter to Vincent Van Gogh" (1975) are certainly programmatic. These "letters," naturally, were written with a brush, but a real correspondence developed between him and his namesake, the well-known book illustrator Andrei Dmitrievich Goncharov, in 1966-1969. By a happy coincidence, history repeated itself here: like Derzhavin, who, "descending to the grave," blessed Pushkin, Andrei Dmitrievich, with amazing delicacy and at the same time with honest, demanding directness, welcomed and gave guidance shortly before his death to the young painter, in whose great talent he firmly believed.

Such responsiveness was practically impossible in the provinces. The struggle for a piece of the pie excluded sentimentality, and anything somewhat decent, being completely removed from official so-called artistic life, was thereby deprived of the opportunity to help anyone with anything. Moscow, with its intelligentsia not completely exterminated despite everything, constituted an exception for quite a long time. That is why young people were drawn to Moscow, feeling wings growing behind their shoulders and bearing heavily the deafness and complete detachment of the Russian provinces. But, having moved to the Moscow suburb of Zagorsk in 1974, S. Goncharov discovered with surprise that the province and its customs could begin almost immediately beyond the Garden Ring.

How was it possible to reconcile the inspiration and illumination of the artist with the miserable vegetation that had been offered for decades by a bastardized reality as the norm? And Goncharov's unique works became a plastic impression of a time that would later be called the "timelessness." Stanislav Goncharov is not only an artist but also a poet. And how eloquent are just the titles of his works from different years! "Masquerade of Death" (1966), "Trouble. The City Weeps" (1971) — surrealistic images of astonishing persuasiveness! Self-portraits full of bitter self-irony — "Non-Prospective Architect" (1973) and "Theater with One Actor" (1976).

So, according to Goncharov, an artist is a visual being that processes images of the world into golden ingots of art. But the world, which once offered a feast of life to those entering it, was visibly becoming less beautiful and more furious. Hence the tragic face-mask of Goncharov's muse. And in world art, he is attracted to tragic parallels of the surrounding reality. Thus, Moskvin briefly remarked in '37: "Read 'Macbeth'!" In Goncharov's triptych "Reading Dante" (1971), "Hell" clearly outweighs "Paradise" and "Purgatory." Characteristically self-portrait-like are "Pan. In Memory of Federico Garcia Lorca," "Emigrants," "Requiem" (1971), "Icarus" (1975), "In Memory of Rubtsov" (1972) with such an actualizing personal postscript: "Nikolai, I came to remind about you!," "Self-Portrait in a Broken Mirror. In Memory of the Artist Viktor Popkov" (1975). The artist himself considers "Burning Bouquet" (1985) as a premonition of the Chernobyl catastrophe.

In the second half of the 80s, the tragic outcome to which Russia came by the end of the 20th century, and the suicidal behavior of modern world civilization capture the artist's main attention: "Tragedy of Reason" (1985, 1988, 1989), "Chernobyl," "Chernobyl Scaffold" (1989), "Apocalypse of Conscience" (1989) and "Russian Tragedy" (1973-1990). In the last painting, the artist wanted to paste a real mirror so that the viewer, contemplating with sorrow the tragedy of Russia, would suddenly look at himself with the same gaze.

Alongside this spiritual chronicle, S. Goncharov creates beautiful, though often equally tragic in their essence, paintings depicting flowers each year, which he conditionally unites in a single cycle, "Flowers of Our Time."

It is very difficult to speak about S. Goncharov's plastic language and the artistic problems he poses for himself in his work. One can say, quoting him, that he is "an expresser of the inexpressible." This pursuit of the plastically elusive gives the artist's visual style a protean quality that is difficult to classify. It is characteristic that S. Goncharov himself (however, like any real artist) strives at all costs to avoid falling onto any rigid shelf of art criticism definition. Just as I caught him on the words "I am the last Russian avant-gardist!," upon reading this phrase in my article, he essentially immediately began to disavow it, offering his own interpretation of avant-gardism, according to which it is no longer a sufficiently defined phenomenon as we know it, but a mysterious super-art, giving "an exit from within that light that does not blind the sighted, that is visible even through the cataracts of spiritual blindness, to which the essence of temple revelations and graves has not been revealed."

Such a conjuration with words is very characteristic of the creative laboratory of S. Goncharov, poet and artist, in which, as in the crucibles of some medieval alchemist, poetic and plastic images melt, bubble, and murmur. And each time, this attempt to do the impossible — to express the inexpressible — ends, if sometimes partially, in the victory of the artist (relying to the greatest extent on his unerring intuition) over the chaos of the formless.

In an effort to hear "Both the underwater movement of sea creatures, And the growth of the valley vine" the artist comes naturally to minimalism — attempts to depict white on white in the "white" or black on black in the "black" cycles. Therefore, these cycles are not limited to certain creative stages but continue and supplement constantly.

The refinement of plastic perception sometimes reaches directly Japanese elegance, to a calligraphic sign, as, for example, in the painting "Five Minutes to Midnight" (1973), in the diptych "A Pair of Full Moons" (1989), or in the polyptych "Four States of One Winter Evening" (1982), even the title of which is quite "Japanese."

S. Goncharov does not tear away the veil from the mystery hiding behind the physical appearance of the world. Before the blasphemer, emptiness would open up! The artist only, as it were, lifts the curtain, letting us feel the entire bottomlessness of this mystery. Here are flowers. They are caught off guard by the painter, at midnight, when, according to the unanimous testimony of fairy tales and legends of all peoples, transformation occurs and everything in the world acquires speech. But, having caught the flowers speaking, the artist quietly closes the door and tiptoes away, putting his finger to his lips and giving us, witnesses to the mystery, a sign of silence.

S. Goncharov's art is thoroughly metaphorical, and this requires from the viewer the skill of non-literal perception, the ability to see, for example, that in the painting "Sasha Weeps" (1972), not the color of the face is conveyed, but the color of a child's cosmically inconsolable grief.

This delicacy and subtlety of plastic perception is amazingly combined in the artist with a powerful coloristic gift. S. Goncharov "heats up" color so much that he allows himself to incorporate sheets of rusty iron, duralumin directly into the pictorial fabric of paintings, apply dull bronze paint, "aluminochka," bitumen varnish, pour enamels directly from cans onto the paintings. And all this is fused into one completely organic whole, possessing the persuasiveness of a new plastic truth that we have just discovered. Collage made of everything that comes to hand, or streams of freely flowing enamel in S. Goncharov's work is by no means trickery. For him, all these are normal means of artistic expression, rigidly subordinated to his image-creating will.

Even in such "hooligan" compositions as "Solemn Garbage Bin" (1968) with cigarette butts and all sorts of junk glued to the surface, after the initial bewilderment, one begins to see the legitimacy of such a solution.

In general, the theme of garbage occupies an important place in S. Goncharov's philosophy. What is worth the polyptych alone with the enigmatic, such a Goncharov-like title — "Four Phases of the Full Moon of Garbagology" (1974)! According to S. Goncharov, earthly civilization has "grown wild in the waste of human material to the point of garbagology." With unbearable pain, he observes the conversion of all traditional values, on which human life rested, into garbage. Man himself, and the artist, become garbage as well.

To my remark about the absence of signatures and dates on many of his early works, the artist gloomily replied that he could not sign them, feeling all this and himself to be garbage unnecessary to the country. Hence the semantic moves characteristic of S. Goncharov, which give his paintings a symbolic character. For example, the Negro faces in self-portraits. In a spiritless society, the artist feels himself to be a pariah, a Negro. This is surprisingly close to Tsvetaeva's self-perception: "In this most Christian of worlds Poets are Jews!"

Stanislav Goncharov is a strong and courageous man, but one of the metaphors repeated in his paintings with obsessive frequency is weeping. We can see how this weeping of an offended girl ascends to the weeping of the artist, the muse, Russia, Rublev's Savior... And finally, the All-Seeing Eye itself weeps, dropping thousands of eyes onto a world buried under garbage. This is already some kind of cosmic lamentation for a perished Universe!

The unexpectedness of the artist's metaphorical moves reveals the incessant work of his thought on the riddles of national and world history, full of tragedy. For example, the two-headed eagle bleeding real blood on Goncharov's canvas makes one shudder. And one begins to understand that behind the throwing down of cast-iron and carved eagles from government institutions, reflected with a reporter's grip by I. Vladimirov in the unsophisticated painting "Down with the Eagle" (one of the first swallows of Soviet painting), something more was hidden than a change of sign, that behind this was precisely the murder of living national history.

S. Goncharov's plastic thinking is paradoxical and often baffles, stunning with literally incongruous things. Who else could have thought of painting a portrait of a smoker, in which the main plastic hero is smoke, molded into the shape of... a teapot?! But the main thing is that the result is not nonsense and gibberish, but a sharply unusual, yet at the same time plastically convincing, memorable image.

And perhaps the most remarkable thing is that, despite all the eccentricity of the artistic means used by S. Goncharov and the unexpectedness of his imagery, something rooted is constantly felt in his paintings. His enamels have a greater connection not with Pollock, but with the enamels of Kievan Rus, and his favorite inclusions of rusty iron or aluminum in the pictorial plane are more reminiscent not of Picasso's and Burliuk's collages, but of the armor of Russian icon frames.

With all the outward, obvious avant-gardism of S. Goncharov's works, they contain the spirit of Russian folk art, the ancient nest of which is Zagorsk (Sergiev Posad), the capital of Russian handicraft toys, with which Stanislav Goncharov has linked his fate.

The artist, however, could set whatever "records" he wanted, achieving convincing victories almost daily in the world of his art (hundreds of canvases bear witness to this!), but in the world surrounding him — the kingdom of down-to-earth truths — he received one everyday defeat after another. And the fact that the artist-poet, sparing himself not, again and again "went into the night to shine and sing" (the title of a self-portrait from 1971), was perceived at best as eccentricity. In these conditions of inaudibility and invisibility, it was difficult to stand firm and even more difficult to maintain the logic of one's own creative development. And even such a great talent did not avoid certain costs. Seeking ever more effective means in an environment of deaf-blind "audience," the artist sometimes violates aesthetic laws, falling into didacticism, overloading the image with signs requiring purely intellectual work to decipher, and allows naturalism.

Summing up on the threshold of his fiftieth anniversary, the artist says: "I am a chronicler of silence... To classify me only as avant-garde is incorrect, narrow, and contrived. Opening new layers of the possible and impossible on the plane, realizing my hermetic solitude in art, combining the incompatible in it, forming image and metaphor, I was devoted to the road that led me... to super-expressiveness, preserving in itself... the origins of our lost memory in the space-time of Russian paganism and Christian Rus." And he bitterly adds: "I... live without hope that the inner blindness of the blinded and mortified souls will end." Well, the means of art alone proved indeed insufficient to awaken a society that had fallen into spiritual lethargy. And yet its role in awakening should not be underestimated. In the process of recovery, the return of hearing and sight, the role of art is generally invaluable.

Art that has maintained fidelity to the humanistic tradition, this backbone of the spiritual biography of humanity, in the suffocating atmosphere of the brown plague of fascism has long since received the name "art of Resistance." By this, the feat of an artist, defending plastic truth with a brush in hand, was equated with the feat of Resistance fighters who took the mortally dangerous path of armed struggle. In our country, however, the tongue still has difficulty turning to call phenomena of our national culture the "art of resistance." Nevertheless, this will have to be done. And the exhibition of paintings by the great contemporary Russian artist Stanislav Goncharov is one of the bright, memorable for life encounters with this courageous art.

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