Vladimir Nemukhin, an abstract artist who personified a post-war wave of Nonconformist art that was in conflict with the Soviet regime but avoided overt political opposition, died in Moscow on 18 April. He was 90. His work can be linked directly to the original Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century. Nemukhin’s first art teacher had been an assistant in the studio of the painter Kazimir Malevich.
In a 2014 documentary, Nemukhin’s Monologues, the artist spoke of having been obsessed with form since childhood: “I was pulled by some kind of invisible force. I started to gather boxes—they were all square—in a corner, pile them one on top of another, painted them white and used them as a model for my Cubism... Abstract art came about right away. If you wanted to break with this parallel culture, abstractionism gave you this chance.”
Later, depictions of playing cards became his artistic calling card. “I started to sense that there is a certain naturalism in abstractionism,” he said in 2013. “I sought an object, a form that would give me the chance to engage in painting and nothing else. And I stumbled upon cards.”
Nemukhin was born on 12 November 1925 in a village on the Oka River, and worked in a factory during the Second World War. In the 1950s, he studied at the Surikov Art Institute, but his allegiance to abstraction put him at odds with the officially sanctioned Socialist Realism style. Seeing works by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 had a profound impact on Nemukhin artistically.
Artists who chafed at state strictures and were deprived of the opportunity to buy supplies and exhibit their works found refuge in each other’s company and creativity. Nemukhin was part of a group dubbed the Lianozovo School, after the village near Moscow where it met, united more by spirit than artistic style. Key members included the artist and poet Yevgeny Kropovnitsky, the artist Oskar Rabin, and the poet Genrikh Sapgir. They were inspired and frustrated by the push and pull of the Khrushchev Thaw—the policies of de-Stalinisation and peaceful co-existence pursued by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.
Bulldozed by authority In 1974, Nemukhin helped organise what became known as the Bulldozer Exhibition, an attempt at an open-air exhibition free of state control. Nemukhin was a “great master” as an artist and a “great organiser”, said Tatiana Kolodzei, a collector who knew the artist from the 1960s and who owns many of his works. “It was difficult to bring artists together but they listened to him.”
The exhibition was broken up within minutes by police equipped with bulldozers and water cannon. “It was a frightening time,” said Kolodzei. By 1978, Rabin, another of the exhibition organisers, had been pressured into emigrating and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
Yet, in 1975, Nemukhin was involved in organising an officially sanctioned show of Nonconformists, tucked away in the depths of Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnogo Khozyaystva (VDNKh—the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy), a permanent trade show and amusement park in Moscow, and later in the 1970s was allowed to organise small shows in the city. Soviet officials allowed his work to be shown at an exhibition of Russian and Soviet art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977.
Nemukhin was among the core artists acquired by Norton Dodge, one of the first American collectors of Soviet Nonconformist art. His collection is now on permanent display at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum.
Kolodzei said that Nemukhin overcame the alcoholism that plagued many artists of his generation and worked until the end of his life. He lived in Germany in the 1990s but returned to Russia in the 2000s.
He was very close to Lydia Masterkova, one of the only female Nonconformist artists, who left for France after the Bulldozer Exhibition and died in 2008. They met at the factory they were both working at during the war. Although their artistic styles diverged and they ultimately parted as a couple,
Igor Tsukanov, a businessman and collector who owns works by Nemukhin, was determined to put on an exhibition in Moscow. He described the artist’s vacillation about having any show and stunned silence at the suggestion it be an exhibition with works by Masterkova: “He was silent for three or four minutes,” said Tsukanov. “After three or four minutes, he said, ‘Alright, with Lydia I will do it.’”
The show ran at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2015. “I think in Russian art history they will be together like Goncharova and Larionov,” said Tsukanov of Masterkova and Nemukhin.