2016 marked the 155th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom in Russia, and 155th anniversary of the events of the largest peasant uprising in Russia in the Penza province, caused by the difficult conditions of the personal liberation of peasants from serfdom. Today we will tell you about the perpetuation of the theme of the people's struggle for freedom in Soviet monumental art, about the monument of historical and cultural heritage - the mosaic panel "Kandiev Uprising" by the monumental artist Mikhail Alekseevich Trunkov, located in the center of Penza.
“Enough of penny truths.
Wipe the old from your heart.
The streets are our brushes.
Squares are our palettes.
A thousand-leafed book of time
the days of the revolution are not glorified.
To the streets, futurists
drummers and poets!"
V. Mayakovsky "Order for the Army of Art"
At first glance, V. Mayakovsky's lines included in the epigraph have little to do with one of the most ancient and traditional types of pictorial art, but are more suited to avant-garde techniques. But it was precisely the monumental forms of art in post-revolutionary Russia, and then in the USSR, due to the wide possibilities of visibility, panoramic themes, and collective performance that were in wide demand.
Mosaic is called eternal painting, not only because of its more than five thousand years of history. It has special properties that differ from other types of monumental painting: mosaic is utilitarian and decorative, multifaceted and complex, at the same time addressed and understandable to the masses, narrative and symbolic, capable of absorbing the latest achievements of art and maintaining a connection with traditions. In 1920-30. laconic mosaic pictorial means conveyed the very essence of the revolutionary atmosphere.
Here it is - a close-up narrative and symbolic mosaic.
But mosaic decoration became especially widespread in the urban planning of the USSR, starting in the 1960s. If earlier the aesthetic eloctive function was assumed by the architecture of the Stalinist Empire style, then with the entry into force of the Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On the elimination of excesses in design and construction" of November 4, 1955, priority was given to the ascetic simplicity of design solutions. "Unjustified tower superstructures, numerous decorative colonnades and porticoes" were considered redundant, and "simplicity, severity of forms and economy of solutions" were recommended.
Typical development with quick-to-assemble panel houses made it possible to advance to the first place in the decoration of monumental painting buildings. As in antiquity, it linked spatial arts - visual arts and architecture - into a single image, which gave grounds to call it a synthesis of arts.
Deprived of "excesses" geometric surfaces could accept monumental works in a variety of configurations, which, in fact, was their only decoration. Monumental panels played the role of accents in the text of a synthetic artistic work of the massifs of new buildings - these were pauses, caesura, markings; they compensated for the general monotonous rhythm of the buildings. This “neighborhood art”, which looks into courtyards rather than grand avenues, became a completely new practice in the 1960s and 1980s. There was even a specific term denoting this style of design of residential buildings, or rather, their lateral sides (ends) - "torsion".
By 1968, on the 50th anniversary of Lenin's plan for monumental propaganda, that is, put forward by V. I. Lenin in 1918, the strategy for the development of monumental art and its mobilization for visual agitation, monumental art became the hallmark of the all-Union style, and monumental mosaic flourished. Despite the fact that it was mainly about monumental sculpture, the Union of Artists of the USSR announced the "activation of monumental propaganda and the development of the synthesis of monumental and decorative arts in urban planning." “Khrushchev's Renaissance” chose a labor-intensive, durable and expensive mosaic for a reason. The art of mosaics is typical of the "sixties" interpretation of history, typically by its civic spirit, a certain narrative and journalistic nature.
Since the 1960s, the urban planning management system has been changing in the USSR. On October 17, 1969, the Council of Ministers of the USSR approved the Regulation on the Ministry of Construction of the USSR, which was supposed to supervise the construction of industrial enterprises, buildings and structures, residential buildings and cultural facilities. A special role in construction management belonged to the Union-Republican State Committee of the USSR for Construction Affairs (Gosstroy of the USSR), which, in accordance with the decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR of July 12, 1979, was responsible for pursuing a unified technical policy in construction, improving the design and estimate business, improving the quality of design; and also for improving the architectural appearance of cities, industrial centers and settlements.
The architectural appearance of the union, republican, regional centers is gradually changing, more and more attention is paid to their artistic design. When designing a public or industrial structure, two percent of the total budget began to be allocated to it. At the same time, the decoration was created not according to one template, but according to unique sketches.
In the same period, Penza, like most regional centers, began to change. The monumentalists of the 1960s had an undoubtedly difficult task - to change the flat and boring space of the wall, using illusory, perspective cuts. It must be said that they did a lot for that time: they brought painting to the exterior, introduced new materials, began to widely use color, combine painting with reliefs (both genuine and illusory, pictorial).
By 1970 in Penza there were already one and a half to two dozen mosaics, but the most famous one, located in the very center of the city on the street. Mosaic "Kandievskoe uprising" became a Moscow mosaic.
The theme of the mosaic panel is dedicated to the events of the peasant uprising in early April 1961 (April 2-18), caused by the conditions of the reform of the abolition of serfdom and which became a reaction to the content of the "Regulations" on February 19, 1861. This uprising was not the only one, but became the most ambitious event of this kind., along with unrest in the Kazan province in the village of Bezdna.
Despite the fact that the uprising was suppressed in 15 days, it left a symbolic mark. For the first time in the history of the country, during the Kandiev peasant uprising, the Red Banner was raised as a symbol of the struggle. This moment is captured on the mosaic panel "Kandiev Uprising".
The initiator of the perpetuation of the largest peasant uprising against the conditions of the abolition of serfdom in Russia was the second secretary of the regional committee of the CPSU Georg Vasilyevich Myasnikov, who invited Moscow artists to Penza. The head of the work and the author of the sketch of the panel was the Moscow "artist of two-dimensional space", as recorded in the "Register of Professional Artists", that is, the monumental artist Mikhail Alekseevich Trunkov. He studied at the Moscow Higher School of Industrial Art (formerly Stroganov) under S. V. Gerasimov, A. I. Kuprin, G. I. Opryshko, V. E. Egorov. Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR since 1956. Mikhail Alekseevich is known for his paintings in Moscow: in the Slava cinema, stained glass windows and mosaics in the Molodezhnaya hotel, mosaics in the Sokolniki training center. The master worked not only in Moscow, but also in Yaroslavl, Volgograd, Pyatigorsk. At the moment, his works are kept in many museums in the country and abroad.
In Penza, Mikhail Alekseevich Trunkov made not only the mosaic "Kandievskoe uprising", but also decorated the reliefs of the facade of the former Regional Drama Theater. AV Lunacharsky, reliefs and mosaics in the building of the railway station, mosaics in the building of the Aeroflot ticket office.
Along with monumentalism, Mikhail Alekseevich has been engaged in easel painting in recent years. But even in it one can see the artist's skillful mastery of space and plane, inherent in a monumentalist, enriched by the skill of a painter-colorist. The artist does not abandon monumental art, and in 1998-1999 (at 73!) He worked on the restoration of the picturesque decoration of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, where he created figures of evangelists as part of artistic groups.
Monumental art is not only collective in content and addressee, but also in performance; it is the result of collective creativity, and not the art of one person. The teams included the author or authors of the sketch and performers. All of them usually remained unknown. It is no coincidence that mosaics were widely used in medieval art - "nameless art", when "the divine and the common have priority over the individual." But if in rare cases the mosaic was accompanied by a tablet with credits, few people remembered the authors. That is, the monumental paintings were not an exhibition of individual talents, but an exhibition of a generalized talented Soviet reality. The very idea of the primacy of the public over the private, and the mosaic as a form of its expression, is perfectly consistent with the communist ideology.
Work on the creation of the panel "Kandievskoe Uprising" began in 1971. After the approval of the sketch of the future mosaic at the artistic council, Mikhail Alekseevich Trunkov, like many centuries before him a master of the Renaissance, began to work on cardboard in full size. Initially, it was planned to finish the panel for the 110th anniversary of the Kandiev Uprising, but due to the complexity of the work (only the installation lasted about a year), its official opening took place on the eve of the October holidays in 1973.
The work was carried out by the employees of the Moscow Designing Arts Center. The collective nature of the performance of the mosaic (as well as of monumental painting in general) is obviously related to the scale and laboriousness of the work - for example, the panel "Kandievskoe Uprising" occupies 130 square meters of area.
The monumental art of the 1960s revived or created a large number of techniques for performing works: smalt, ceramic, stone mosaics with different types of masonry, sgraffito, reliefs, forged lattices, stained-glass windows and others.
According to the technique of execution, the panel "Kandievskoe uprising" is a reverse mosaic set, which is used in complex mosaics of a large area. This is a smalt mosaic, for the creation of which 6, 5 tons of colored glass - smalt, welded in a special way were used. Smalta, one of the relatives of Murano glass, is a colored opaque glass, interesting in that, although it is opaque, it seems to glow from the inside. Smalt has long been a traditional church material that has kept the reputation of expensive, rare and elite for centuries. Since the 1960s, it has spread throughout the USSR, including small towns and distant villages. Unknown kolkhoz women, miners and scientists began to be portrayed in the same technique, in which Christ, the Mother of God, saints, and royal persons were depicted earlier in the “Bibles for the illiterate”. The routinization of the mosaic has become an egalitarian appropriation of a technique that previously belonged only to the elite.
But not only the technique of performing the Krandievskaya mosaic itself refers us to the past: the composition reveals the traditions of writing hagiographic icons, known since the 9th century. In the center (centerpiece) there was an image of the saint, along the perimeter of the icon - hallmarks, located and "read" from left to right, representing the history of his life and miracles. In the hallmarks, the plot develops in time: on the left - during the life of the saint, on the right - after his death; but the central figure is out of time. The saint is portrayed as a conqueror who overcame earthly trials, and the hallmarks are a wreath of Glory.
Due to the technical problems associated with the placement of the Kandiev Uprising panel, two parts stand out, but we see the same general idea of the hagiographic composition. In the center of the first part of the panel is a stylized image of a giant peasant, which has the illusion of relief, around which a hierarchy of rhythmic relations is built. Leonty Yegortsev, one of the leaders of the uprising, could serve as a prototype for the artist. He holds over himself the Red Banner (and, perhaps, a sword) - a symbol of the struggle, and calls on the peasants from the surrounding villages to fight for freedom. The picturesque form of the panel is factual, rich in theatrical entertainment, external effects, but unusually artistic. Symbolically, this is no longer a victory of one saint, not an image of one person, but a timeless display of the triumph of the driving forces of history in a generalized and understandable way.
As in the hagiographic icon, we read the story from left to right: the upper left group of rebels shot by soldiers along a conditional line through the entire body of the giant, through the sharp corners of the banner and fire is connected with the lower group of people lined up shoulder to shoulder, leaving behind broken chains. Mosaic, due to its peculiarities, does not allow, like easel painting, to convey emotions through facial expressions (except for the most ambitious figures), it operates with lines and silhouettes, angles of figures, masses, which create an emotional plan.
The artist chose the culminating moment of the uprising - a clash with the regular troops of the tsarist army. The moment itself is tragic, and this is conveyed by artistic means: the giant's mouth open in a silent cry, the broken falling figures of the dead, stooped small, in relation to the rebels, the figures of soldiers preparing to shoot, the mass of marching create a dense fabric of the narrative and emotional tension. The anxiety and drama of the moment are emphasized by pictorial means: fractional geometric rhythm, irregular rectangles, truncated pyramids located in the horizontal and vertical planes.
You can also pay attention to the collage principle used in the panel, sudden changes in scale. Not real, but semantic scales are used, as in ancient art. Since the compositional center - the giant - dominates everything, the arrangement of the compositional groups at the points of focus of attention along the S-shaped trajectory of the gaze allows the story of all other participants to also be seen by the viewer.
Behind the greenery of firs and lindens, the mosaic is almost invisible. Unless only the head and a piece of the banner.
The mosaic itself is traditionally static, but the compositional techniques used by the artist impart internal dynamics to it, despite the symmetrical composition. Diagonals and their intersections, graphic geometric shapes supported by two unstable triangles (on the sides of the central figure) give dynamism to a static mosaic, link figures into one compositional whole. The dynamism of the generalized central character is emphasized by his figure - an oblique cross in the geometry of forms. He leans on a conventional circle - this is the earth, falling houses are visible on it, a leaning church; its movement is the rotation of the Earth; he leaves behind him the broken chains and trappings of the old world.
The symbolism of the plot, with all the numerous figures drawn (there are about 60 of them), is expressed extremely clearly and harmoniously. Both external and internal human movements are conveyed powerfully, expressively and naturally.
Mikhail Alekseevich Trunkov skillfully used mosaics to convey volume, light, shadows and space. Color serves as a defining element, the whole composition is built on a combination of catchy local color spots. The basis of coloristic expressiveness are large planes of color and linear contours of figures, the symbolism of color: red is both a red flag raised for the first time and the glow of a fire flaring up on the ground.
In addition to the iconographic stylistics we have noted in the Kandiev Uprising mosaic, one can note the influence of the "severe" style, even avant-garde tendencies, which corresponds to the peculiarities of the 1970s art, marked by polystylistics based on interaction with traditions, on the dialogue of artistic languages, which led to aesthetics emerging postmodernism.
The simplicity of the plot, the generalization with the emotionality and acuteness of the most characteristic in the images, the scale of the idea and the historical significance of the theme, the skill of execution made the mosaic panel "Kandievskoe uprising" an object of the cultural heritage of Penza. The panel is entered in the register under the number 5800000701. However, it is not enough to add the monument to the register, it is subject to protection, but at the moment the state of the panel is alarming. This most famous and most impressive Penza mosaic, 43 years old since its opening in 2016, is rapidly deteriorating: pieces of smalt fall out, the right and upper left corners collapse, and the seams are exposed.
Meanwhile, it is worth recalling the federal law "On cultural heritage sites (historical and cultural monuments) of the peoples of the Russian Federation", according to which such monuments "represent a unique value for the entire multinational people of the Russian Federation and are an integral part of the world cultural heritage." Their safety is guaranteed by the law. Nevertheless, the panel continues to deteriorate rapidly, being squeezed by the restaurant located directly below it.
View of the pedestrian part of Moskovskaya street and the cathedral under construction. Now this building is a symbol of the era …
Well, the mosaic panel, which we talked about here, in general, is also a sign and symbol of an era that is gone and will never return.
