NT ART GALLERY!
THE TOP PERSON AND OTHERS
By RUBEN BEKNAZAR-YUZBASHEV
Some two hundred metres from the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department in
Petrovka Street a revolution has occurred. However, it was not a bloody
proletarian revolution, but a bloodless, portrait revolution. It took place at
the Museum of Modern Art and it was made by our artist Vladimir Mochalov, who
has been on the road to it for more than thirty years.
We have always regarded him as a master of political cartoons and the grotesque
and a graphic artist. All the more so since he had set a goal for himself
already in his childhood - to become a cartoonist. Any other person would have
been satisfied upon reaching his goal: he has been the art director of the
satirical magazine Krokodil, the political magazine New Times, and the newspaper
hvestia. Besides, Mochalov has been awarded numerous prizes in various contests
and he constantly receives orders and commissions from magazines, publishing
houses, cartoon film studios, and what not. It would seem he could rest on his
laurels, but no...
After a thirty-five-year break he has decided to take up easel, brushes and
paints again, although painting was the subject he hated most of all at the art
school where he studied. Now it has become a breath of fresh air after many
hours of drawing statesmen, businessmen and other members of our establishment.
He paints with the same zeal as that of a veteran angler preparing his
fishing-rods and looking for worms. Now he creates landscapes, still-lifes, etc.
His drawings have always been in demand in newspapers, magazines and publishing
houses. Would his paintings be needed as much as his previous works? It appeared
that they would... During the past two years Mochalov has done almost three
hundred large paintings - not abstract pictures with a couple of strokes of the
brush, but real landscapes and portraits.
At first he didn't have his own style. His still-lifes reminded one of Saryan,
Van Gogh, and others. He worked with passion, Almost without stopping: in the
morniiSsg, say, he would finish a landscape done in the pointillist style,
during the day he woulo do an urbanistic picture in which one could sense- the
influence of Vereshchagin, and in the evening he would
Vladimir Mochalov's 'portrait revolution'
paint a study An Overgrown Pond, which could well have been done by Claude Monet.
Gradually, Mochalov began to paint his old famous portraits done in pencil: the
ones of Yevtushenko, Fellini, Stallone. They were not grotesque oil paintings,
as one might expect. He did "psychological" portraits, emphasizing certain
inherent, even the smallest, traits: a slight grin, a characteristic gesture, a
fleeting glance. "I'm not a psychologist," Mochalov says, "I'm a psychograph-er.
I try to capture the inner state of the person I see before me on the canvas".
Not painting "for money", he does not need to gloss over the truth and conceal
unpleasant features. Sometimes his portraits are too frank, exposing the person,
so to say. In this lies his, "Mochalov", revolution. Previously, it was believed
that the more flattering the portrait, the better it was.
Most portraits painted by Mochalov show not so much the mood of his subjects at
the moment as their character, sometimes hidden from the surrounding world. He
chooses well-known persons as the subjects of his "psychography" and wants
others to see them in a new light. He does not care about the field in which his
subjects achieved success. The main thing for him is that they must have
Personality. He does not look for any money from them - be they David Beckham,
Roman Abramovich, or George Bush. This is why he can afford to show his
subjectve evaluation of them, even if it does not coincide with the generally
accepted one.
True, Mochalov paints not only his contemporaries. He is interested in
historical figures, too. The main thing is that they must be of great stature.
Sometimes he even allows himself to slightly mock them. The famous "Teheran
Three" looks rather strange in his interpretation: Churchill has a pistol,
Roosevelt has a rifle and Stalin has a dagger. Vladimir Vysotsky is sitting
behind prison bars. Mochalov explains that it is he who is free and looking in
at us as we sit behind bars.
To make his "psychogrammes" more expressive, the artist paints them in the
favourite manner of the person: the portrait of Malevich looking at the sun and
painting his black square is done in a suprematist manner, and Dali's portrait
reveals traits of surrealism. Tolstoy is
painted against the background of an oak-tree, and Solzhenitsyn is deep in
thought over what we should do with Russia.
The artist is proud of his "gallery of evil geniuses of the 20th century" -
Rasputin, Trotsky, Hitler, Vyshinsky, Beria. "I am interested in all historical
figures who, in one way or another, influenced the fate of my country," the
artist says. "This concerns the 'demons' of Russia whose portraits have not been
done, as far as I know". In Mochalov's images of butchers there is much of the
grotesque, the blood-red and black colour gamut and the scoffing details like an
Alsatian dog with Hitler, the five-pointed star with Beria and the sceptre and
orb with Rasputin, vividly show the artist's attitude toward the "heroes" of his
portraits.
Opening the exhibition of Mochalov's works organized on the premises of the
Museum of Modern Art, Boris Yefimov, 102, the patriarch of the Soviet school of
political cartoons, and Zurab Tsereteli, the president of the Russian Academy of
Art, said that Mochalov's paintings are a "revolution in portrait art". This was
repeated by other prominent people in culture and the arts. Vladimir Mochalov
was given a medal with the engraved inscription "To the worthy". When
congratulating our colleague in the editorial office of our magazine we said to
him: "Nobody doubts your worth". In this issue we publish some of Mochalov's
works. On the cover is a reproduction of a picture of his which was not shown at
the exhibition. '■
New Times / March -June 2004 61