The Legacy of Vasily Sitnikov's Academy: Forging Alternative Art Education in Soviet Russia

The "Vasily Sitnikov Academy" is well-known as an educational alternative to official Soviet art institutions. While much has been written about the master's teaching methods, the colorful atmosphere of his studio, and his lessons have been documented in films and memoirs, his students have remained somewhat in the shadows. Their creative work deserves examination not only as individual artistic worlds but also from the reverse perspective of artistic development: how did they process their teacher's lessons and methods? How did they find their own voice? Did they become significant figures in Moscow's art scene at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries?

It couldn't have been easy for Sitnikov's students to find themselves alongside a teacher who stood out so dramatically from the surrounding reality. One can imagine studying unusual things in art through unconventional methods. Breaking free from such influence was particularly challenging, especially in youth. Yet here, the talent of the eccentric "Vasya the Lamplighter" – this time pedagogical – revealed itself: he didn't turn his students into mini-Sitnikovs but gave each protégé wings to fly along their own trajectories toward their own stars.

In the initial stages of training, following centuries-old traditions of passing skills and craft from hand to hand, Sitnikov's students followed in his footsteps quite literally. So much so that he would sign many of their works with his own name to help beginning artists earn their living, as Sitnikov's name already carried significant value. Decades later, this "Rubens workshop" effect significantly complicated the process of attributing both Sitnikov's works and those of his students.

No one has ever counted how many artists passed through Sitnikov's academy from 1951 to 1975, but we can say with certainty that there were many, surely dozens. Steps have been and are being taken to identify and study Sitnikov's circle of students, but this process has only begun. At present, we can name the following: Sergei Alyoshin, Vladimir Arkharov-Fredynsky, Yuly Vedernikov, Vladimir Veisberg, Tamara Glytneva, Sergei Zemlyakov, Irina Ivleva, Vladimir Kazmin, Igor Kislitsyn, Boris Myshkov, Vladimir Petrov-Gladky, Nikolai Sitnikov, Marina Sterligova, Vladimir Titov, Ivan Ushakov, Alexander Kharitonov, Alexander Chashkin, and Natalia Shibanova.

During the time when Sitnikov established his school, and later, there was a growing thirst for alternative art education in the Soviet Union. One after another, private and semi-closed studios emerged, led by charismatic teachers who aspired to be gurus of contemporary and authentic art. But what's also noteworthy is the determination of underground or semi-underground artists to teach in ways that would overcome the prescribed boundaries of socialist realism. In terms of student numbers, Sitnikov's academy can only be compared to Eliy Belyutin's Studio, which educated hundreds of followers.

In Moscow's art education, there has always been a close connection between student and teacher in terms of artistic method and style. At the beginning of the 20th century, Alexander Shevchenko wrote remarkably about this after traveling to Paris in 1905 to study under Matisse and learn to paint in his style. In a letter home, he disappointedly noted that he tried to study with Matisse, whom he knew from Moscow, but Matisse "said that one must first learn, and creating comes later. With us," Shevchenko concludes, "Korovin taught in Korovin's way, Serov in Serov's way. Here it was pure training." And so Sitnikov taught in Sitnikov's way.

In 1991, Yuly Vedernikov created a series of works using the dry brush technique, oil on paper. These large-format sheets captured all the most important stages and types of training exercises: drawing spheres, the famous "intestine," standing and moving figures in space. Vedernikov was among the first to write memoirs about Vasily Sitnikov, published in the same year in the "Other Art" catalog accompanying the unofficial art exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery. Perhaps he simultaneously had the idea to preserve the memory of his teacher by recreating his lessons for posterity.

Following the path of preserving pedagogical heritage, another student of Sitnikov – Vladimir Petrov-Gladky – took up the mantle. It was to him that Sitnikov, when emigrating in 1975, entrusted some of his students who remained in Moscow. Much later, in 2015 and 2016, Petrov-Gladky successfully taught the basic techniques of Sitnikov's school at seminars at the Academy of Arts in Geras (Austria).

Sergei Zemlyakov continues to work to this day, relying on Sitnikov's system. His paintings from the 1980s, such as "Memories of Kosh-Agach" (1983) and the landscape "Field" (1980), are painted in a "melting" coloring of thin "stretches" of ochre. Objects of the natural landscape dematerialize in light and airspace, treated as a haze or "veil." The space curving away from the viewer has accentuated "points." In the painting "Field," the light of the sun, glaring toward the viewer, is the most intense light spot in the painting and forms a sense of its depth.

Vladimir Kazmin was a mystic who sought the ultimate visual reflection of spiritual and philosophical truths in painting. Sitnikov's painting system provided the necessary plastic language and visual plot for this. Operating with light and space, on which Sitnikov's system was focused, and through which he taught his followers to open the secret doors of craft, Kazmin found his symbolic language that didn't separate abstraction from the figurative.

Non-objective art, having emerged in Russian art at the beginning of the 20th century, sharply separated itself from the depiction of the world of physical forms. But by the second half of the 20th century, the impassable abyss between figurative and non-objective began to gradually disappear: they increasingly coexisted or were synthesized in a single work.

Kazmin's works of the 1970s, executed in oil using the "dry brush" technique, possessing recognizable symbolism of the cross, bird, and lamp, belong rather to the non-objective world, where a hearth of light appears in primordial chaos, transforming non-being into Being. Building on Sitnikov's system, his studies of sphere and temple in the space of fields, Kazmin finds himself as a non-objective, philosophically and religiously oriented artist. One can hardly say this fully about Sitnikov himself, however, his method proves to be highly universal, teaching plastic language and compositional technique, light-color unity, suitable for a very wide spectrum of artistic individualities. Connoisseurs of Vladimir Kazmin's work note that he was not a non-objectivist: "Abstractions?.. No, on the contrary. Super-concrete expressions of states – concentration, enlightenment, inner liberation, flight, ecstasy – the highest human states for which the soul yearns. Music revealed by brush."

His painting method is similar to that of other Sitnikov's students, and thus comes from the teacher: "Kazmin first applied solid paint (blue, ochre, in recent years – brownish-black), and then lightened it, breaking a path for light. And darkness, fertilized by light, began to give birth to forms. Most often – something like a shell or bowl. Sometimes it seemed like the generative womb of being."

"Kazmin took [Sitnikov's] dry brush technique and transformed it into a deeply meaningful, spiritual method of painting. This became clear from our first conversation," writes a contemporary, "imperceptibly moving from Scriabin's music and Silver Age poetry to Dalcroze's paneurhythmics, to the doctrines of Roerich and Steiner, 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' by Richard Bach, Timothy Leary's treatises on 'consciousness expansion'... Kazmin: 'Everything in my work is built on the effect of resonance. In each painting, I try to reveal myself completely. I allow myself to drown in the infinite. I perceive the canvas as a screen on which my essence and certain energies manifest. The main thing is to connect to the finest vibrations that the hand is capable of transmitting.'"

Marina Dmitrievna Sterligova was one of the students of Vasily Sitnikov's school. "All her life she studied luminescence in some semi-closed 'box,' defended her dissertation in technical sciences, but over the years became fascinated with painting and Steinerianism. Scientific studies of light were complemented by its semi-mystical artistic comprehension. Like Kazmin, Sterligova borrowed Sitnikov's dry brush technique. She didn't like to talk about esoteric and philosophical theories, but undoubtedly knew much. Among 'metaphysicians' of similar artists, indifferent to mysticism and far from any esoteric practices, they were called intuitivists. Ideas of cosmic energy emanation, resonance, the light basis of matter constituted the essence of her artless in manner, but original paintings."

Sergei Zemlyakov, Vladimir Kazmin, Vladimir Petrov-Gladky, Tamara Glytneva, Igor Kislitsyn, Marina Sterligova, Alena Kirtsova, and several other graduates of "Sitnikov's academy" became members of the painting section of the Gorkom of Graphic Artists, established in 1976. They formed a distinct circle at the section's exhibitions, participants of which worked in a very wide genre range, each developing in their own way the knowledge and skills received in Sitnikov's workshop. Some of them completed art schools or colleges, others preferred to remain on the educational foundation of the "academy of Vasya the Lamplighter." Such a departure from official art education was one of the trends not only for unofficial circles of artistic Moscow in the late Soviet period but also for a number of artists striving for creative freedom.

Among those who were trained by Sitnikov, there are abstractionists, genre painters, portraitists, and not only painters but also graphic artists. Alena Kirtsova studied with Sitnikov in 1973-1975 and soon became a member of the painting section of the Gorkom of Graphic Artists. For her, as for Vladimir Kazmin, Sitnikov's system also transformed into abstraction. "At nineteen," she says, "I happened to become a student of Vasily Yakovlevich Sitnikov, who assured that he could teach even a donkey to draw. I completely trusted him as a Teacher. All my fruitless wanderings and sufferings in the world of images and search for self-expression were ordered in mastering the craft of comprehension and practice of painting."

Kirtsova created abstract geometric compositions from the late 1970s onward. And she also worked in the "dry brush" technique: "painted with brushes large and small, as I was taught, dry/rubbing in, sometimes impasto with paint without thinner." Sitnikov's painting system, taught to students, conditioned and enhanced the meditativeness of some of their art. Alena Kirtsova is characterized by meaning-saturated color - deep and capacious, and a certain haziness, softness of form, even in geometric abstraction. Her early, "Sitnikov" landscape of 1975, "The Mill," unexpectedly opens the veil of pictorial sources of inspiration of the master himself. Sitnikov was possibly inspired by early landscapes of Arkhip Kuindzhi: "Forgotten Village" (State Tretyakov Gallery, 1874) and especially "Autumn Muddy Road" (State Russian Museum, 1870). These landscapes are very unusual for Russian landscape painting of that time; they are innovative, like almost all of Kuindzhi's work; they are characterized by curving misty space.

Attention to technology and "craftsmanship" is characteristic of most of Sitnikov's students. He himself, as is known, could make many things with his hands: models of boats, animation characters, paintings, and graphics. Such universality is an echo of the multidimensionality of early 20th-century artists, from Mikhail Vrubel to Vladimir Tatlin, caught and multiplied by Sitnikov. In his "craftsmanship," ideas about painting as a solid craft and the exciting knowledge of painting as materialized magic coexist without contradiction.

For Igor Kislitsyn, lessons at Sitnikov's school became one of the first, though not the first, stages of finding himself. Coming to Sitnikov in the mid-1970s, he already knew the painting of Robert Falk (who had once inspired Sitnikov), the monochrome painting of Belgian painter Constant Permeke. He was generally an apologist of the "brushstroke" Moscow school. Sitnikov's method – asceticism, thin paint layer, and coloristic restraint – gave a completely different experience. Like his teacher, Kislitsyn did not strive for a variety of entertaining plots; much more important for him was the compressed subject matter and emphasis on purely pictorial, plastic, and coloristic solutions.

Icons undoubtedly occupied a special place in Vasily Sitnikov's pedagogical method. He himself was an enthusiastic collector, gatherer of rarities of ancient Russian painting. One can imagine how young artists felt in Sitnikov's tiny workshop, completely hung, as photographs testify, with icons. The icon as an art form aims to exit from the plane into space, to create sacred space, including through reverse perspective. And Sitnikov's main "move" from the depth of space to the front plane of the sheet/canvas, from depth outward, is surely connected with the mastery of reverse perspective. As is the method of "lighting up" dark volume with white lead – the equivalent of light, just remember the icon's "highlights." Light has a completely special, sacred meaning in the art of icons, which became a fundamental element in Sitnikov's artistic system as well. Undoubtedly, young artists' contact with icons as works of art, and not just as cultural monuments and religious objects, played a large role, and the significance of Sitnikov's school in this is great.

Tamara Glytneva – one of Sitnikov's most consistent students – wrote: "the being of light in all its manifestations is my vision." Glytneva worked extensively in portrait and still life genres. Her manner is characterized by the ambivalence of fragile and solid, soft and dense. Paintings such as "Extinguished Lamp" (1983) and "Split" (1986) are evenly filled with light reminiscent of heavenly ether. The artist emphasizes, following Sitnikov, the fundamental system of spatial coordinates – earth and sky. The earth appears as a field, a carpet of grasses. The refined and smooth paint layer enhances the sense of spiritual harmony between human and universe.

Vladimir Petrov-Gladky was among the master's closest students. His early works – both paintings and graphics – were primarily based on Sitnikov's plastic subjects and his teaching setups, such as "Landscape with Temple" (1975-2000). Later, the playful ironic reality of some of Sitnikov's works, including his graphic sketches, was refracted in its own way in Vladimir Petrov-Gladky's "thematic" paintings. Unlike his teacher, he worked extensively in portraiture, seeking to express the enduring, constant in the inner image of his model, discarding all that is fleeting. Such a vision of personality is inherent in artists who have studied icons, this "portrait in eternity."

Graphic sketches are present in every artist's work. Sitnikov's were filled with sharp observations, almost Hogarthian, of people and their morals. He seasoned them with caustic irony and self-irony, but also with sympathy for the humble ones characteristic of national art. This line was developed in his graphic sketches and portraits by Vladimir Petrov-Gladky, and was made dominant in the art of Vladimir Titov – a brilliant draftsman and painter. His canvases are characterized by monochrome coloring, the connection between figure and light-air space, incredible plastic freedom, and "critical" everyday life in the spirit of the Wanderers. The latter is undoubtedly an echo of Sitnikov's "Moscow" canvases depicting monasteries and the lower and everyday life boiling around them: traders, policemen, drunks, stray dogs. The second motif bringing Titov closer to his teacher is female nudes, whose bodily cubature resembles Sitnikov's female figures.

Yuly Vedernikov, who lived and worked in suburban Klyazma, became a chronicler of phantasmagorias of provincial Russian life, combining irony, heartiness, and a sense of horror of what was happening.

Vasily Sitnikov's compositions, which combined longing for eternal, holy Russia, personified in images of temples and monasteries shining like the Heavenly City among the everyday "litter" of life, seemed to split into two streams for his students. For some, the boiling of everyday life, sometimes vulgar, ugly, but specially enlightened, became attractive. Others focused on beautiful elevated visions of the ancient Russian heritage.

Vladimir Arkharov-Fredynsky, unlike Vladimir Titov and Yuly Vedernikov, developed the theme of national myth, beautiful vanished Russia, captured in its ancient art and images of saints. His earlier graphics from the 1960s reveals the same interest in the ancient Russian heritage.

Konstantin Kuznetsov did not directly study with Vasily Sitnikov but communicated much with him thanks to friendship with Vladimir Petrov-Gladky. But apparently, the master's attraction was great, and Kuznetsov in his own way perceived his art and his lessons. One can trace the stages of Sitnikov's influence on his painting and the transformation of this influence. Kuznetsov was fascinated by the post-Cézannist Moscow school's painting manner; through Sitnikov, he joined the fine painting filled with sfumato and light. In "Portrait of Mother" (1979), one can see how Sitnikov's light problematics, when volume is built by light, when light is understood not only in natural but also in metaphysical aspect, is transformed in Kuznetsov into a manner of working with pointillist-dots becoming units of light.

Sitnikov's students gradually progressed from their first studies and educational works, closely connected with the teacher's vision and manner, to finding their own path. They originally developed various themes and plastic plots. What remained common was the foundation of landscape vision and light as the basis of painting. The role of the relaxed graphic sketch was great. Students varied nude themes, adding various thematic repertoires to them. They reimagined genre painting in connection with metaphysics.

Irony as an important component of Sitnikov's worldview, his peculiar holy foolishness rooted in the depth of national culture, intertwined with equally fundamental heartiness and warmth in viewing humans and the world. They preserved Vasily Sitnikov's pedagogical system and strived to pass it on. Sitnikov's students formed a distinct circle within Moscow painting at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries, extending the line of pictorial mastery into the 21st century.

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Literature and Sources:

1. Vasily Sitnikov. Lessons. Comp. Z.N. Plavinskaya. Agey Tomesh Press, 1998

2. Vasily Sitnikov and his school. Exhibition catalog May 24 - July 31, 2009. Gallery "Our Artists". St. Petersburg, Petronius, 2009

3. "Other Art", Moscow 1956-76. Exhibition catalog [in 2 volumes] / [comp. Leonid Talochkin, Irina Alpatova]. Moscow, Art Gallery "Moscow Collection", SP "Interbook", 1991

4. Shevchenko A.V. Collection of materials - M., 1980

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