Vladimir Nemukhin

A consistent metaphysician, a student of the fine borders of the physical world, Vladimir Nemukhin started his career splashing paint like Pollock—a lack of space and easel forced him to attach his canvasses right to the wall. The possibilities revealed by action painting, the experience received first-hand at the international exhibitions in the late 1950s, amazed not only artists, who had never seen anything more interesting than Socialist Realism in their lives. But Nemukhin, who had not only heard stories about another art but had met Peter Sokolov, the student and assistant of Malevich, knew about the Russian avant-garde and about the banned Western “formalists,” including Cézanne, and had even painted his first “cubist” painting in 1942, re-creating nature out of colored boxes.

Abstract Expressionism was a brief and very important period in his life, also because “artists saw in it the absolute form of rejection of artistic routine. Abstract Expressionism, which dominated world art then, organically transplanted itself to the new Russian soil and became part of our flesh and blood. It awakened our subconscious, allowed us to emancipate ourselves, and gave an impetus to formal experimentation. It was also a choice of a ‘new faith.’ … Becoming an abstractionist, the artist juxtaposed himself to society, its official ideology, and entered into conflict with the powers-that-be.” [1] And yet Nemukhin distanced himself from the tempting and effective style—he was put off by the brutality, the physical grounding, and the frank sensuality of the energetic gesture.

Most Soviet artists in the unofficial circle did not come to Abstract Expressionism through Surrealism, as did many of their colleagues in the West, and Nemukhin went in reverse: after the priceless experience of the spontaneous nonfigurative creativity that freed the subconscious, he turned to reality on the border between the actual and the dream. After a short period of seeking his subject, which could function as symbol and material at the same time, he found his artifact—playing cards: small pieces of cardboard, not quite a subject and not only an image with a minimal physical component with numerous and therefore undetermined connotations, they were the ideal subject for Nemukhin’s collages and semiabstract paintings, depictions combining spontaneous gestures with meticulously planned ones. The artist’s most important theme came almost by accident—either from the solitaire his wife, the artist Lydia Masterkova, liked to play, or from two cards that formed an interesting composition. Nemukhin appreciated the variety of possibilities revealed: “The playing card is a symbol of a distant world, estranged from human personality, with order, chaos, and capricious changes. In declaring the card an aesthetic phenomenon, I tried to distance myself from its mundane symbolism, even though I knew it could not be ignored completely. In the everyday world of things, the card is simultaneously an object, a game, and a unique form of communication that can combine various sociocultural types.”

From the cards came painterly versions of “counter reliefs” depicting a card table—a real one, found in the dump. The real cuts in the table moved to the painting’s surface. Sometimes these were real holes in the canvas, sometimes the effect, reminiscent of the works of Lucio Fontana, was achieved through painterly methods, using layers of color on both sides of the false slash.  The acute sense of the work’s imperfections, complex textures and a blatant disregard for logic, and a passion for a banal and seemingly unattractive object bring Nemukhin closer to the informal movement, which was opposed to geometric abstraction, a mix of Surrealism and Abstractionism, most vividly represented by the works of Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tàpies.  In his paintings, made with restrained expression, the element of randomness is also important. However, the randomness is now also under the artist’s total control, like the slashes on the canvas and the signs on the boxes. White color helps him handle unpredictable materials—the thick collages gradually dematerialized: tables suspended in airless space appear only with an edge along the diagonal in the painting’s plane, and the cards almost completely dissolve in the white background—so all that is left of the real object is only a trace or a memory.

Faina Balakhovskaya