Ilya Kabakov: paintings and their description. Artist Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk. Mom is an accountant, dad is a mechanic. In 1941, with his mother, he evacuated to Uzbek Samarkand, where the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture was temporarily transferred. Repina. In 1943, Ilya was transferred to the art school under Repinsky in Samarkand, and in 1945 - to the Moscow Art School: Moscow Secondary Art School on Krymsky Val, now the art lyceum of the Russian Academy of Arts. In the absence of Moscow registration, Kabakov lives in dormitories, and his mother lives in the most incredible conditions: in the school toilet, in the corners of rooms, in barns. After graduating from the Moscow Art School in 1951, Kabakov entered the Surikov Institute in the book workshop of the chief artist of the publishing house “Detgiz” (since 1963 – “Children’s Literature”), Professor Boris Aleksandrovich Dekhterev. Even before graduating from the institute in 1957, Kabakov began working as an illustrator at Detgiz and for the magazines Funny Pictures and Murzilka. Later, Kabakov talks about the oppressive constant feeling of fear, instilled in him as a child, in dormitories, and acutely felt afterwards. He says that he didn’t even have time to form, to become himself, and the fear was already there, the fear of not meeting the expected, correct, standard. He clearly felt the division between himself - weak, not attractive enough, untalented - and his trained automatic reactions to external demands. I clearly felt my inconsistency with social expectations, but also with professional ones. Having trained as a painter, Kabakov admits that he had absolutely no sense of color and could understand, but not act spontaneously. He replaced the lack of feeling with training and knowledge. Only this fact had to be hidden, always hidden. All his life he considers himself a dropout, saying that he got into art school at a time when it was in its depths, many taught because they had to, were often drunk and did not strive to develop anyone in anything. Thus, insecure and extremely negatively related to the state machine, to Soviet society as a whole, Kabakov entered the professional world. In Ilya Kabakov’s studio on Sretensky Boulevard, Photo: Igor Palmin

Starting from the late 50s and for the next 30 years, Kabakov has been engaged in children's illustration. This was the most undemanding area from the point of view of censorship; the most important thing was to “get trained”, to draw exactly the way the art editor wanted, to learn, as the artist himself says, to see through the eyes of the editor. Kabakov integrated into the system, became a member of the Union of Artists and, in 2-3 months, filling out 3 books, financially provided for himself and his family for a year. Moreover, the weaker the literary material, the less remorse there was. As he himself says, he had no love for illustration and dealt with it as a minimal and sufficient way to exist within a system that he saw no point in opposing - for him it looked eternal. Nevertheless, this principle - outwardly speaking in a generally accepted, banal language, but at the same time making up your own meanings and living in your own personal world - becomes fundamental to Kabakov’s work.

Illustration for the book by S. Marshak “The House That Jack Built”", 1967, collection of the ART4 Museum

In 1957, the World Festival of Youth and Students was held in Moscow, a huge number of bright, cheerful foreigners, including artists, came to Moscow, joint exhibitions and an international art studio were held. In 1959, the American Exhibition took place in Sokolniki. Albums and books on contemporary art are making their way into the country. Underground Soviet artists are agitated.

Unofficial art

During this period, Ilya Kabakov began unofficial artistic activity. He is a member of the “Surrealists Club”, led by Hulot Sooster and Yuri Sobolev (art editor of the Znanie publishing house), Yuri Pivovarov and Vladimir Yankilevsky are also members of this group. In a workshop under the roof of the former Rossiya insurance company on Turgenevskaya Square, Sooster, who through Estonian channels had access to the little-known legacy of surrealism in the USSR, paints juniper bushes, fish, invents parables, and derives complex symbolic systems from his dreams. As Kabakov says - and determining the correspondence of his stories to historical reality is difficult and not at all necessary - in the first years after college he strives to paint an “absolute” picture, a “masterpiece”, a beautiful and perfect work of art - and after a while he completely abandons this idea. During this period, a whole cluster of workshops was formed in the Chistye Prudy area, which became places for communication between artists, poets, theater and film workers and for holding unofficial exhibitions. Directors of museums, foreigners, and employees of diplomatic missions come here quite freely; contacts with left-wing activists from other countries are especially valued - because the USSR cannot offend them for political reasons. All this happens strictly unofficially, is not welcomed by either society or the KGB, but strict control is not felt. In 1962, at an exhibition in the Manege, Khrushchev called non-socialist realist artists “pederasts” and determined the official attitude towards them; the “thaw” was coming to an end. However, in 1965, the works of the main members of the Surrealist Club were included in the large exhibition “Alternative Reality II” in Italy, where both Hockney and Magritte were presented, and were distributed in the catalog into different categories. Sooster ends up in “Symbolic Magic”, Sobolev and Yankilevsky - in “Visionary Perspective”, Kabakov - in “Fiction and Irony”. After this, Kabakov began to be exhibited abroad as an unofficial Soviet artist - in Venice, London, Cologne.

It is believed that in the early 70s, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid came up with a new way of acting in response to the need for external mimicry, obligatory among unofficial artists: they began to work on behalf of invented artists - the 18th century abstractionist Apelles Zyablov, the early 20th century realist Nikolai Buchumov, "Famous artists of the beginning 70s of the twentieth century” or mixing many styles from different periods. Kabakov adopts the character strategy from Komar and Melamid and develops it. He was the first to theoretically comprehend characterization. In the text “Artist-Character”, written in 1985, Kabakov emphasizes the impossibility of immediate, direct creativity, on the one hand, in the dominance of official Soviet art and, on the other, in the situation of the absence of artistic life - exhibitions, spectators, criticism - for unofficial artists. And they themselves are forced to invent an artistic world for themselves, but it turns out to be frozen, lifeless, eternal - after all, there is no current artistic life. In the illusory world, the artist finds himself inside the entire history of art, and his own creativity is distanced from it primarily by this incredible time period. The level of reflection required by the panorama of the history being surveyed does not leave the opportunity to simply take and paint a picture. We need an artist-character, separate, with his own biography and character; it is he who will produce art according to his inner necessity. That is, the imaginary artist is a kind of tool for adapting to the Soviet artistic situation.

Moscow conceptualism

A. Aksinin and I. Kabakov in Kabakov’s workshop on Sretensky Boulevard. Moscow, September 1979

From 1970-76, Kabakov created 55 graphic albums about “10 characters” (“Flying Komarov”, “Looking Arkhipov”, “Mathematical Gorsky”, “Anna Petrovna Dreams”, “Tormenting Surikov” and so on). Each black folder contains from 30 to 100 sheets illustrating the views or directly the views of the main character and comments from other participants in the events. Often these "albums" are called conceptual comics. The practice of viewing these folder albums was that in the home environment the author would recite and show the stories to the assembled initiates. In “10 Characters” Kabakov shows different ways of overcoming reality; this, in fact, is the main theme of his work. Telling Boris Groys much later about the terrible boredom of life and the same boredom of art, Kabakov talks about the magical moment when a boring object, simply thanks to him, Kabakov, suddenly turns into the eternal - it becomes art. You just need to figure out how - and this moment excites him endlessly. Then, in the mid-70s, Kabakov began working on “albums” about communal life and the housing office. Kabakov views the communal apartment, which he knows well from his own biography, as the quintessence of the Soviet: something where one cannot live, but from which one cannot escape.

In 1979, Boris Groys, who had recently moved from Leningrad to Moscow, wrote the programmatic text “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” determining that Russian artists, even being conceptualists and analysts, cannot, unlike European and American ones, free themselves from spirituality and eternity . Groys cites as an example brief analyzes of the activities of 4 artists; Kabakov is not among them, but very soon the designation of the founding father and leader of Moscow romantic conceptualism, which he is still considered to be, is firmly stuck to him.

Ilya Kabakov, “Anna Evgenievna Koroleva: Whose fly is this?", 1987, from the collection of the ART4 Museum

Ilya Kabakov, Kabakov reflects on the interaction between words and pictures as follows: a picture is, in a way, a field of consciousness externalized. To perceive it, the work of consciousness is necessary. On the other hand, the image in the painting interacts with the fact that the wall on which it hangs also has its own visuality. And when different images are combined in a picture, as happens with Kabakov, the entire observed scene is divided into different object components, and the picture falls out of consciousness and becomes an object. But the written words are immediately read and go straight into the consciousness, drawing the whole picture there. On the third hand, the words that Kabakov uses in his paintings are direct speech, everyday, fragmentary. This is the speech that we literally hear in our minds. Those who pronounce these words - and we always know their names and surnames - seem to be standing nearby. So speech becomes material, in some way an object. Moreover, not just physical, but even “spatial”. A sea of ​​voices and words constantly sways around everyone, writes Kabakov, and if you imitate a piece of someone’s speech, the person who hears it will have his inner sea of ​​speech stirred up. Thus, the combination of words and images in the picture confuses the external and internal viewer, immersing him in powerful illusions.

Kabakov thinks about the interaction between words and pictures: a picture is, in some way, an externalized field of consciousness. To perceive it, the work of consciousness is necessary. On the other hand, the image in the painting interacts with the fact that the wall on which it hangs also has its own visuality. And when different images are combined in a picture, as happens with Kabakov, the entire observed scene is divided into different object components, and the picture falls out of consciousness and becomes an object. But the written words are immediately read and go straight into the consciousness, drawing the whole picture there. On the third hand, the words that Kabakov uses in his paintings are direct speech, everyday, fragmentary. This is the speech that we literally hear in our minds. Those who pronounce these words - and we always know their names and surnames - seem to be standing nearby. So speech becomes material, in some way an object. Moreover, not just physical, but even “spatial”. A sea of ​​voices and words constantly sways around everyone, writes Kabakov, and if you imitate a piece of someone’s speech, the person who hears it will have his inner sea of ​​speech stirred up. Thus, the combination of words and images in the picture confuses the external and internal viewer, immersing him in powerful illusions.

Kabakov calls his work with the word “concealment” - when something is said that is not meant, bringing into the field of art the Soviet situation with a word that has lost all meaning, or with a “stripe of prohibition on speech.” In an interesting way, Kabakov turns this gap between word and meaning onto himself too. He writes enthusiastically that looking at his already completed works evoked in him the most active mental activity in interpreting them. Here he suggests that some of what he thinks only after the painting is completed was already in him at the time of its creation, even if unconsciously - and therefore, potentially, the viewer can also embark on these various interpretations. But the main thing is that this intention did not consciously pass into the picture, which means that Kabakov’s consciousness remained outside of it, he is free from it. The picture is “optional” not only for the viewer, but also for Kabakov.

Of course, there are many other interpretations, including from Kabakov himself. For example, in conversations with Groys in 1990, Kabakov explains the words in his paintings by the already mentioned fear, about which he, in principle, talks a lot. To the literary-centric, visually uneducated Soviet subject - out of fear “of not being adequately understood and the panicky fear of another’s inattention” - Kabakov simply says what the artist wanted to say. He anticipates and thereby paralyzes the speech of the beholder and his potential negative assessment.

A new beginning

In the 1980s, a new line in Kabakov’s art began: he began to paint colorful paintings. The text does not disappear from it, but is significantly transformed. Now realistic-impressionist painting fills the entire field of the picture, and the text unobtrusively exists on top, no longer claiming primacy, as it was before, but only integrating into the world of the picture. There is a clear transition here - precisely coinciding with a similar transition throughout the Western world - from critical romantic conceptualism to postmodernism, to preoccupation with images. It should be noted that all Soviet visuality was transformed during this period. Perestroika opens the door to foreign mass culture, television and magazines become colorful, and the basically avant-garde didactic language of wall newspapers becomes outdated and unpopular. Kabakov, reacting to changed conditions, maintains an ironic attitude towards them. Pictures of the limits of Soviet everyday dreams or vivid photographic illustrations are commented on by empty or highly emotional texts, demonstrating the absence of any meaningfulness in relation to the world. The most famous works of this cycle are “Luxury Room” (1981) – an advertisement for a hotel room, “Gastronom” (1981) – a dream of abundance, “Alley” (1982) – a Soviet construction site for new social units, “Beetle” (1982 ) – photo of a beetle with a nursery rhyme.

Ilya Kabakov, “Luxury Room”,1981

In the early 1980s, Kabakov began to create his first installations. His first installation was “Ant” (1993), the cover of the children’s book “Detgiza” and five pages of handwritten reflections from a person about the artistic and intellectual potential of the non-art: this cover. As Kabakov later says, of course, this ant, metaphorically and ontologically, as a type of creature, was himself. The next one – “Seven Exhibitions of One Painting” – offers 4 paintings, each surrounded by many calligraphically written comments from various viewers. Here Kabakov realizes that hum of voices, which he also talks a lot about, that hum of completely different assessments and attitudes, which is more important to him than the assessments and attitudes of close, understanding people - because random voices are culture, where Kabakov strives to become a common name - this is how he defines influence. In all his subsequent installations, there is always the speech of others, the growling of others, irritation at the presence of others, the mood of a communal apartment. From 1982-86 he made the famous “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room.” The spatial solution to Kabakov’s main metaphor of Soviet life allows him to work in a new way with what he describes as the Soviet mandala - a closed space with a powerful energy of its own that directs everything that happens in it. All social institutions familiar to humanity find their embodiment in the space of a communal apartment.

Ilya Kabakov, pinstallation project “Red Car”, 1991

International recognition

In 1988, the first Moscow auction of Sotheby’s took place - works of unofficial artists went on the open market. In 1989, Kabakov married Emilia Lekah, who emigrated from the USSR in 1975. From this moment on, they work in collaboration, and their works are signed with a double name; it is further incorrect to talk about the works of Ilya Kabakov as an individual author. Often, Emilia’s role is seen as reducible to precise management and organization, but, firstly, in accordance with Kabakov’s theory, the artist-manager is no less important type than everyone else, and secondly, they actively insist on strictly duet authorship of works.

Since 1987, Kabakov, who is already 54, has begun active artistic and exhibition activities abroad. At this time, interest in perestroika art in Europe and the USA is at its peak. The first installation under the grant was made for the opera house in Graz, Austria: “Before Dinner.” The following works are in New York, France, Germany. In 1989, the Kabakovs moved to Berlin and never returned to Russia. In 1992, Ilya and Emilia created the set design for the “first post-communist opera” - Schnittke’s “Life with an Idiot” based on the story by Viktor Erofeev - at the Amsterdam Opera House. Throughout the 90s, the Kabakovs constantly exhibited in Europe and the USA: at the Pompidou Center in Paris, at MoMA in New York, at the Kunsthalle in Cologne, at the National Center for Contemporary Art in Oslo, in 1992 at Documenta IX in Kassel, in 1993 at the Venice Biennale, the Kabakovs received the “Golden Lion” for the work “Red Pavilion”; in 1997, the Kabakovs installed the object “Looking Up, Reading Words” for Skulptur.Projecte in Münster. Numerous awards and the French title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts followed.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

Emilia skillfully builds the marketing side of artistic activity. It limits the number of the duo's works on the market, with major contemporary art museums becoming the preferred owners - even if they don't have the budget to pay market value. The Kabakovs respond as accurately as possible to the demands and laws of the market and quickly become not just successful post-Soviet artists, but world-class art figures. They create a myth of Soviet man, understandable to the Western artistic community. Their work is spectacular and great for large venues. The Kabakovs become the personification of the worldview of a Soviet person for a Western European and American viewer intrigued and brought up in a certain aesthetic paradigm.

In the 2000s, the popularity of the Kabakovs in Russia began. In 2003, the exhibition “Ilya Kabakov. Photo and video documentation of life and creativity" at the Moscow House of Photography (MAMM), in 2004 - a large exhibition of "Ten Characters" at the Tretyakov Gallery and, jointly with Emilia, "An Incident in the Museum and Other Installations" - at the General Staff of the Hermitage. The Kabakovs donate 2 installations to the Hermitage, and Mikhail Piotrovsky calls them the beginning of the Hermitage collection of contemporary art. This was followed by an exhibition of 9 installations from 1994-2004 at the Stella Art Foundation. In 2006 and 2008, when Russian art had not caused an international stir for a long time, but there was a second wave of its rise in price thanks to a boom in interest from Russian collectors, the paintings “Lux Room” (1981) and “Beetle” (1982) were sold at Philips de Pury auction (London) for record amounts for Russian works of art.

Today, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov continue to be quite active in exhibition activities; their works are in the collections of 250 museums around the world, more than 50 sculptural compositions are in urban spaces.

It’s good to be an art critic in the era of the Internet and abstract nicknames - no one will know your real name, you don’t have to restrain yourself, because everything is so clear and understandable - they are all grabbers and hacks! For example, conceptualist Ilya Kabakov. Paintings, graphics, installations - some things are unlike anything else in the world, but cost millions - everything is clear!

But some connoisseurs should calm down their breaking voices, and it would be better to go to the exhibition of this master. And if you look with truly open eyes, you can see an amazing, inexhaustible world, sometimes full of humor and irony, sometimes ringing with pain for the people who lived and are living in this incomprehensible country...

14 years of study

But first there was a long study of the profession. Kabakov Ilya Iosifovich was born in Dnepropetrovsk, in the family of a mechanic and accountant. During the war, he and his mother ended up in Samarkand, where the Repin Institute was evacuated from Leningrad. Ilya began studying at the children's art school at this institute. After the war, Kabakov was transferred to the Moscow Secondary Art School, from which he graduated in 1951 and entered the best art university in the country - the Surikov Institute, in the graphic department. He chose to specialize in the art of books with Professor Dekhterev.

In today's memoirs of the master, full of self-irony and mystification, one can find his frivolous attitude towards his studies in the design of children's books, which he took up after graduating from the institute in 1957. He calls them only a way of obtaining food, to which he devoted a small part of his time and effort. Printed materials for children were especially imbued with ideological cliches and dogmas, and supposedly therefore it was impossible to do anything interesting in them.

This seems like a slight disingenuousness: the quality of books from the publishing house “Children’s Literature”, magazines “Murzilka”, “Funny Pictures” is remembered by many with delight, not only because of age-related nostalgia. Ilya Kabakov is an artist who created illustrations for Marshak’s poems, Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, and stories about Peter Pan. Freedom, novelty and imagination are clearly evident in these decidedly non-academic works. The design of scientific and educational children's books is very interesting: "Wonders of Wood" (1960), "Clay and Hands" (1963), "The Ocean Begins with a Drop" (1966) by E. Mara, "The Tale of Gas" (1960), " Tricky Point" (1966).

Workshop under the roof of “Russia”

Since the late 60s, a society of nonconformist artists called “Sretensky Boulevard” was formed in Moscow. It included Ilya Kabakov. The paintings of the artists of this friendly association were very different from the officially approved painting.

The opportunity to get together appeared largely thanks to Kabakov. Work for publishing houses brought good money, and the artist had his own workshop. He calls the mystical story of how he found a room under the roof of the former Rossiya apartment building on Sretensky Boulevard and agreed with the authorities on the equipment of a studio there.

Works by Ilya Kabakov, Hulo Sooster, Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vasiliev and others were exhibited at unofficial exhibitions in Moscow and abroad, personifying the alternative art of the USSR during the Thaw era. But the harsh reaction to abstract art on the part of the main “art critics” of the country led to the triumph of socialist realism alone.

Before the advent of my own studio, “work for myself” consisted of graphic sheets in the style and albums of small format. Later, larger format paintings began to appear: “Head with a Ball” (1965), “Pipe, Cane, Ball and Fly” (1966), “Automatic Machine and Chicken” (1966).

Text as a pictorial medium

Ilya Kabakov, whose paintings began to contain more and more philosophical overtones, became one of the leaders of the conceptualists. A series of “white” paintings of huge size - “Berdyansk is sleeping” (1970), “A Man and Small House” (1970) - evoked thoughts about the conditions of perception of new painting, about the interaction between the viewer and the artist. The artist’s experiments with the introduction of text into the space of the painting serve as a movement in this direction. The first such works are “Where are they?” (1970), “Everything about him” (1970), “Answers from the experimental group” (1970) - represent various objects from the real life of Moscow communal apartments with text comments, often pseudo-significant parodies of official instructions or announcements.

The text was also used later by Ilya Kabakov. “Luxury Room” (1981) is a painting that represents a view of a hotel room with an advertisement for a trip to the Black Sea resorts superimposed on the image.

The albums invented by Kabakov, which became the forerunners of installations, are also conceptual works. Such albums - a fusion of sculpture, illustration, literature, theater - are built around one theme or character's experience, expressed through visual and textual means. Watching significant or meaningless events string together is fascinating. It impresses with either completeness or openness in any direction of time and space.

Ilya Kabakov is a graphic artist, illustrator, and type designer. In such albums the essence of his activity is most accurately traced. The most famous album is “Ten Characters” (1970-74).

War and peace of communal apartments

The social conditions of the Soviet era are the main object of research for Kabakov’s work. The oppressive influence of the dominance of one ideology is expressed in works such as Verified! (1981) and "Supermarket" (1981). Wars between neighbors in communal apartments for air and additional space are the theme of the “housing” compositions “Taking Out the Garbage” (1980), “Sunday Evening” (1980). In the “Kitchen Series” of the same period, familiar kitchen utensils are endowed with a certain high artistic significance, a cultural meaning, often separated from functionality.

Ordinary household garbage is also filled with such meaning in the subsequent installation “The Man Who Never Threw Away Anything” (1985). In it one can also see global discussions about the meaning of human activity, about the habit of reckless storage of what is necessary and unnecessary, or, conversely, the revision of history with the adjustment of the past to the needs of modern politics.

Total installations

In 1987, Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov emigrated to the West. Here he has access to large exhibition spaces. “Total installations” is what Ilya Kabakov calls paintings and objects that occupy large spaces and are united by a common global concept.

The most famous installation was “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment,” which is largely symbolic of the fate of the artist himself. In the center of a small room with walls covered in Soviet posters, there is something that looks like a slingshot. The hole in the ceiling, the comments and the location of the incident - everything proves the reality of an extraordinary event: a certain inventor, using an ingenious catapult, broke through the ceiling with his body, went out into near-earth space - the body was not found...

To see in such an object only banter and mockery of the system is incorrect. Just as in the installation “Toilet” (1992), one can find only a spiteful analogy of the usual living conditions in the whole country. This art object especially amazed the Western viewer, who considers the privacy of a living space to be a natural need of a normal person.

“The Red Car” (1991), “The Bridge” (1991), “The Life of Flies” (1992), “We Live Here” (1995) - total installations that brought Kabakov fame. They are exhibited in museums in the USA and Europe, and combined into exhibitions such as “Palace of Projects” (1998, London) and “50 Installations” (2000, Bern) represent Kabakov’s work as a phenomenon

Wife and co-author

Kabakov loves to color life with hoaxes. Periodically appearing artists Charles Rosenthal, Igor Spivak, and Stepan Koshelev were prone to such inventions. Kabakov entered into creative collaboration with them, he even wrote articles about them in the style of boring art critics.

Since 1989, the artist has found a real co-author - Emilia Lekah. She becomes his wife and takes on many organizational and financial issues, leaving the master more time for creativity. And such questions are becoming more and more frequent, because interest in Kabakov’s work is growing. An example of this is the Phillips de Pury & Company auction. In 2007, the lot “Ilya Kabakov. "Suite". The painting was bought for £2 million, making Kabakov the most expensive contemporary Russian painter.

In 2008, this was confirmed by the next auction at the same auction. The next lot is “Ilya Kabakov, “Beetle” (1982)”, and another record - £2.93 million.

The ability to be surprised

Counting dollars and pounds is necessary - such is the current world. But I want this banal idea to survive in him, that money doesn’t buy happiness. It is in the existence of such artists, in their work and talent. Humanity will consist of people, and not of animals, as long as it is capable of wonder and joy in art.

Until November 17, the Multimedia Art Museum on Ostozhenka will host the exhibition “Utopia and Reality. El Lissitzky, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.” The project was initiated by the Dutch Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and presents an exhibition of works by these two artists, brought from many famous museums around the world and private collections. The exhibition has already been shown in Van Abb in Eindhoven, in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and after Moscow it will go to Austria, to the Museum of Modern Art in Graz.

Utopia and Reality. A dialogue between two Russian artists, two iconic figures of art of their time - the greatest master of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century, the utopian El Lissitzky and the giant of Moscow conceptualism Ilya Kabakov, who has recently been working in collaboration with his wife Emilia.

El Lissitzky. Constructor (self-portrait). 1924 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Both artists are known in Russia, Europe and the USA, both grew up in Russia. They just lived at different times and never crossed paths. The idea to combine them belongs to the Dutch Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, which houses the largest collection of Lissitzky’s works outside Russia. Museum art historians noticed obvious contradictions in the works of Lissitzky and Kabakov. Their works seemed to argue with each other.

One projected a bright future for his descendants, and the other, being this same descendant, diagnosed the resulting reality. The first believed in building an ideal communist future, while the second had already lost such dreams. Moreover, Kabakov did not invent anything specifically for this exhibition; the works were found in his extensive archive. Every avant-garde utopia of Lissitzky is countered by the work of Kabakov. Where Lissitzky proclaims “Everyday life will be defeated” and depicts ideal communal apartments with initially built-in furniture, where residents will move in with only suitcases, because nothing else will be needed, Kabakov exposes the unbearable life of Soviet communal apartments with life according to a schedule, where he stipulates even time to use the toilet. “Life won,” he answers.

El Lissitzky. Interior project. 1927. State Tretyakov Gallery

Ilya Kabakov. Picture stand

Kabakov responds to Lisitsky's plywood chairs with miserable kitchen cabinets, covered with colorful oilcloths and filled with wretched kitchen utensils.

Installation of chairs designed by El Lissitzky for international exhibitions. 1927 State Tretyakov Gallery

Ilya Kabakov. In the communal kitchen. Part of the installation. 1991 Regina Gallery, Moscow

The purity of the forms of the prouns and the horizontal skyscraper is opposed by Ilya Kabakov’s installations made from ordinary garbage.

El Lissitzky. Proun.1922-1923. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

El Lissitzky. Horizontal skyscraper at the Nikitsky Gate. Photomontage, 1925

The project of an ideal theater is a project of a utopian “vertical opera”.

Ilya Kabakov. Model of the "Vertical Opera" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The model of “Victory over the Sun” is a model of the “House of Sleep”, a hellish mixture of a mausoleum and chamber No. 6.

El Lissitzky. Victory over the sun: everything is good that begins well and has no end. Poster. 1913

El Lissitzky. Sketch for the opera “Victory over the Sun”

Kabakov responds to Lissitzky’s tribune for the proletarian leader with the project “Monument to the Tyrant,” where the mustachioed leader who has come down from the pedestal is trying to catch someone else.

Where Lissitzky acted as a designer of a new world, where “monolithic communist cities will be built, where people of the whole planet will live” (Directly a brother with his Radiant City), Kabakov saw prototypes of barracks, trailers, change houses and barracks, from which he wanted to escape to where anything, by any means, even into space using a catapult. Just to be free.

Ilya Kabakov. Toilet. Installation. 1992

Ilya Kabakov. A man who flew into space from his apartment. 1985 National Museum of Modern Art, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris

His angel breaks through the ceiling, breaks through the installation with Lissitzky’s poster “Beat the Whites with a Red Wedge” and... falls from above, breaking.

This is how utopia itself collapses.

Almost all of Lissitzky's architectural projects remained unrealized. Only one single building was built according to his design - this is the printing house of the Ogonyok magazine in 1st Samotechny Lane in Moscow. The building is now included in the city's Cultural Heritage Register.

His famous horizontal skyscrapers never appeared on Moscow streets. But the great idea did not die, and over time, similar buildings appeared in other cities and countries. Followers.

Parkrand Apartments in Amsterdam

And that, of course, is not all. There are other buildings around the world.

El Lissitzky worked for some time with Kazimir Malevich; together they developed the foundations of Suprematism.

The most expensive Russian artist. His paintings “Beetle” (sold in 2008 for $5.8 million) and “Luxury Room” (sold in 2006 for $4.1 million) became the most expensive works of Russian art ever sold. The artist himself, of course, lives in America.

Photos taken from the Internet

Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov was born on September 30, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk. His mother, Berta Solodukhina, was an accountant, and his father, Joseph Kabakov, was a mechanic. In 1941, together with his mother, he was evacuated to Samarkand. In 1943, he was accepted into the Art School at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Repin, whose teachers and students were also evacuated to Samarkand. From there, Kabakov was transferred to the Moscow Secondary Art School (MSHS) in 1945. He graduated from it in 1951 and at the same time entered the graphics department at the Surikov Institute (Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov), where he studied in the book workshop of Professor B.A. Dekhtereva. Graduated from the Kabakov Institute in 1957.

Since 1956, Ilya Kabakov began illustrating books for the publishing house "Detgiz" (since 1963 - "Children's Literature") and for the magazines "Malysh", "Murzilka", "Funny Pictures". From the second half of the 1950s, he began to paint “for himself”: he tried his hand at such directions as abstract art and surrealism.

In the 1960s, Kabakov was an active participant in dissident art exhibitions in the Soviet Union and abroad.

In 1968, Kabakov moved to the studio of Hulo Sooster, which later became famous, in the attic of the former apartment building "Russia" on Sretensky Boulevard. In the same 1968, he, along with Oleg Vasiliev, Erik Bulatov and other nonconformists, participated in an exhibition at the Blue Bird cafe.

Some of the artist’s works were already included in the exhibition “Alternative Reality II” (L’Aquila, Italy) in 1965, and from the early 1970s they were included in exhibitions of Soviet unofficial art organized in the West: in Cologne, London, Venice.

From 1970 to 1976, Kabakov painted 55 albums for the Ten Characters series. The first album was "Flying Komarov". The cycle, which journalists later called a “conceptualist comic,” was created specifically for home viewing: it was a nonconformist, unofficial project.

In the mid-1970s, Kabakov made a conceptual triptych of three white canvases and began a series of “albs” - sheets with inscriptions on “communal” themes, and since 1978 he has been developing the ironic “Zhekovsky series”. In 1980, he began to work less with graphics and focused on installations in which he used ordinary garbage and depicted the life and everyday life of communal apartments.

In 1982, Kabakov came up with one of his most famous installations, “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room,” completed by 1986. Subsequently, he began to call such large-scale projects “total installations.”

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In 1987, Kabakov received his first foreign grant - from the Austrian association Graz Kunstverein - and built the installation "Dinner" in Graz. A year later, he staged the first "total installation" of the Ten Characters project at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and received a fellowship from the French Ministry of Culture. In 1989, Kabakov was given a scholarship by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and moved to Berlin. From that time on, he constantly worked outside the borders of first the USSR and then Russia.

Since the early 1990s, Kabakov has had dozens of exhibitions in Europe and America, including in such major museums as the Paris Pompidou Center, the Norwegian National Center for Contemporary Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Cologne Kunsthalle, as well as at the Venice Biennale and at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel.

The 1990s became a time of recognition for the artist: in this decade he received awards from Danish, German and Swiss museums, and the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture.

In the 2000s, the artist began to actively exhibit in Russia. Thus, in the fall of 2003, the Moscow House of Photography showed the project “Ilya Kabakov. Photo and video documentation of life and creativity.” At the beginning of 2004, the Tretyakov Gallery organized a program exhibition "Ilya Kabakov. Ten Characters."

In June 2004, an exhibition of Ilya Kabakov and his wife Emilia (they have been married since 1992) “An Incident in the Museum and Other Installations” opened in the Hermitage General Staff Building, which “marked their return to their homeland.” At the same time, the artists donated two installations to the museum, which, according to Mikhail Piotrovsky, marked the beginning of the Hermitage collection of contemporary art. In December of the same 2004, the Moscow gallery "Stella-Art" showed nine installations by Kabakov, made in 1994-2004.

When the program exhibition "Russia!" went to New York's Guggenheim Museum in 2006, it included Kabakov's installation "The Man Who Flew into Space." The presence of this work in the same space with icons of Andrei Rublev and Dionysius, paintings by Bryullov, Repin and Malevich finally cemented Kabakov’s status as one of the most important Soviet and Russian artists of the post-war generation.

In the summer of 2007, at a London auction at Phillips de Pury & Company, Kabakov’s painting “Luxury Room” was purchased for 2 million pounds sterling (about $4 million). So he became the most expensive Russian artist of the second half of the twentieth century.

In February 2008, Kabakov's work "Beetle" (1982) was auctioned by Phillips de Pury & Company for £2.93 million ($5.84 million). In April of the same year, the album "Flying Komarov" was sold at Sotheby's New York auction for 445 thousand dollars.

In July 2008, it became known about the largest retrospective of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov being prepared in Moscow, designed for three venues at once: the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art and the new Garage Center for Contemporary Art, which will be opened by Daria Zhukova with the support of Roman Abramovich. It was reported that initially the exhibition was to be financed by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation; the amount intended for the project was named - $2 million. But on June 5, the foundation refused to support Kabakov’s exhibition.

It is known that Ilya Kabakov was a member of the Union of Artists and was a member of the book graphics section. In September 2008, Kabakov became a laureate of the Japanese Imperial Prize Premium Imperiale. Emilia Kabakova stated that the monetary part of the award will be divided into three parts, one of which is intended for the Life Line Foundation for the purchase of equipment and treatment of children suffering from heart disease, the second for the construction of a children's library, and the third part should be donated to a nursing home.

Kabakov has three daughters.

Ilya Iosifovich was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk. During wartime, he and his mother were evacuated to Leningrad, where the Art School at the Leningrad Institute of Painting was moved. Repina. At the age of ten, the boy was accepted into this school, and two years later he was transferred to the Moscow Secondary Art School. Later, the young man graduated from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow.

In his character and worldview, Kabakov differed sharply from classical artists. Back in the 1960s, he actively exhibited his works at dissident exhibitions in his country and abroad, and later worked in the workshop of Hulo Sooster, famous for its art unrecognized by society.

In the 1970s, he began working on several series of paintings dedicated to life in communal apartments and the housing office. And in the 1980s, he became interested in the installations that were emerging in those years and became the leader of Soviet conceptualism. The installations opened new perspectives for Kabakov. He first received a grant from Austria and built the installation “Before Dinner” there, then a scholarship from France and Germany. Since 1988, the artist has been constantly working abroad.

In the 1990s, Kabakov received worldwide recognition. His works have been exhibited at numerous exhibitions in Europe and the USA. In Russia, the last exhibitions were held in 2004 in St. Petersburg, in 2012 and 2017 in Moscow. In the 21st century, the artist received the Oscar Kokoschka Prize from Austria, the Imperial Prize from Japan, the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from France, the Order of Friendship from Russia and other awards.

Currently, Ilya Kabakov is considered the most famous Russian artist in the West. His works are in the largest museums in Russia and the USA, are regularly presented at exhibitions, and during auctions have repeatedly sold for amounts exceeding a million dollars (more on this later). In recent years, he has often worked in collaboration with his wife Emilia.

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Moscow conceptualism

The concept of “Moscow conceptualism” appeared in 1979. Representatives of this trend declared works of art as a means by which the essence of art was studied. To this end, conceptualists created installations (more about them below), held events and studied people’s reactions to them, and also motivated society to discuss the problems of art.

In addition to installations, Kabakov influenced viewers by introducing text into his paintings. This is how the works “Answers from the experimental group”, “Where are they?” appeared. and others. Conceptual works also include the artist's albums - images with text, united by one theme.

Another distinctive feature of Kabakov’s work is his work on behalf of fictional characters: socialist realist hacks, invented artists, etc.

Total installations

Having moved abroad in the late 1980s, Kabakov had the opportunity to bring his grandiose projects to life. Over two decades, the artist managed to create more than five hundred installations, which he called total.

The installations represent worlds constructed by the artist that the viewer can see and feel from the inside. For example, the famous installation “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room” is a room with a broken ceiling, in the center of which a device has been created to break out, and on the walls there are pictures that help to understand the state of the person living in it. This installation symbolized the desire of Soviet people to break out of the shackles of the communal apartment that oppresses them and the country that oppresses them with its demands and ideals.

In 2006, this installation was shown at the Guggenheim Museum (New York) along with works by such famous Russian artists as, which contributed not only to the growth of Kabakov’s popularity, but also to secure his status as an important representative of the artistic community.

Records at auctions, price of Kabakov’s paintings

Ilya Iosifovich is considered the most expensive living Russian artist. Let's find out how much Kabakov's paintings cost on the modern art market.

Let's start with the work "Dog", presented at the auction of the famous auction house Phillips. This is a diptych created using enamel on canvas, demonstrating the game of mockumentary. On the left side, the artist shows carefully transcribed personal data of a fictional Soviet character, and on the right, a dog, symbolizing a small man in the face of a huge bureaucratic apparatus.

The work was exhibited at an exhibition in New York in 1990. It was a success at the auction and, with a preliminary estimate of 300-500 thousand pounds sterling, went for 458 thousand pounds (662 thousand dollars).

The next major sales include the departure of the works “Holidays No. 6” and “Holidays No. 10”. These are works from the “Holidays” series, consisting of 12 paintings. According to the artist’s plan, the paintings in this series should be hung in a littered room with overturned chairs and tables. The work "Holidays No. 6" was sold at Sotheby's in 2013 for 962 thousand pounds ($1.5 million) with an estimate of 0.8-1.2 million pounds.

The painting “Holidays No. 10” was sold at Phillips in 2011 for one and a half million pounds ($2.4 million) at the lower end of the estimate. Since 1987, it has been exhibited at many exhibitions around the world.

The work “Luxury Room” sold for even more money at the Phillips auction in 2007. The artist created a diptych in his characteristic pictorial manner, depicting a luxury room and superimposing on it the text of an advertisement for Black Sea resorts. The work was a huge success at the auction and, with an estimate of 400-600 thousand pounds, went for 2 million pounds ($4 million).

Finally, the sale of the work “Beetle” at the same Phillips auction in 2008 is considered a record. This is an almost photographic image of a beetle on a leaf, accompanied by a nursery rhyme in the style of Kabakov. The beetle symbolizes a person who wants to remain free from any framework, including the framework of painting. This work was repeatedly presented at exhibitions, and was also included in catalogs and books about Moscow conceptualism and the art of Soviet oppositionist artists.

Although a year earlier the work “Luxury Room” sold for 2 million pounds, the departure of “Beetle” became a sensation, because the original estimate of 1.2-1.8 million pounds was doubled. The painting was auctioned for 2.9 million pounds ($5.8 million), becoming the artist’s most expensive work.

If we talk about lower-priced departures, then they also happen regularly at various auctions. For example, at the Phillips auction the following paintings were sold: “Solemn painting” (241 thousand dollars), “We are ready to fly” (29 thousand dollars), at Christie’s “Battle in the apartment (68 thousand euros), “How to meet with an angel" (24 thousand pounds), "Two Friends" (250 pounds), at Sotheby's "Mushroom Pickers" (9 thousand pounds), "Window" (5 thousand pounds) and others.

Returning to the question of how much Kabakov’s paintings cost, we can conclude that they are very popular on the painting market and often go over the estimate. Specific pieces fetch varying prices from a few hundred to several million dollars. In the next section we will look at how and where to sell Kabakov’s painting.

Examination and sale of paintings by Kabakov

How to evaluate Kabakov's painting

Previously, we found out that there is a significant variation in price in the artist’s works. In order not to miscalculate the cost of a particular work, we recommend ordering a professional examination. This procedure involves examining the picture according to a variety of parameters and can be partial or complex. In the case of partial research, one or more of the most significant parameters are assessed, for example, the authenticity of the painting is confirmed. A comprehensive study of many characteristics will help. It is especially in demand if the work claims a high price.

How and where to sell Kabakov’s painting