CHAPTER 2
BECOMING
“TO HIS CIRCUITS”
In the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was entering the period of perestroika like a ship enters its destination port - slowly and deliberately. In Russia, a mood of ugliness was fomenting in the minds of many. Life made people fond of satire. All the old streets, where people were born, lived, studied, and worked, were again named for revolutionaries. Foods like sausage, chicken, and sour cream were in short supply. In the lines for vodka, perfume, or candy people quarreled constantly. In bookstores the unemployed were still caught, arrested, and tried for “shirking.” And the traditional social and spiritual values were literally dissolving.
Artists were cut off from their sources of income: free studios and commissions from the Art Foundation concerned with creating images for ideological venues, as well as portraits of the leaders of the party and leaders of production. Those members of the Tomsk beau monde who did not die from drinking vodka felt despair. Many artists hanged or drowned themselves at the beginning of perestroika.
From 1989 to 1991, Fomin learned the application of the philosophical adage “love and hunger rule the world.” He applied to his art, and to his relationship with me, his absolute idol – a continuous striving for perfection. He began to analyze and distill the ugliness of his childhood experiences and memories into an artistic gristmill for the creation of beauty. The development of this philosophy would enable him to redefine his chosen path.
He remembered himself as a kindergarten pupil watching his teacher draw the face of Lenin. The children were told about Lenin every day and looked at his portraits. But that his teacher ‘created’ for herself the absent leader gave him a real shock. In his mind, he thought, Lenin can be drawn, but he is not there. Soon after, Volodia copied the profile of the “father of the people” for himself.
His desire to construct a mental theater of his past, to look back, to see the landscape of his childhood and to psychologically replay himself in it gave him insights into how to reinterpret it. While continuing to work passionately and almost literally non-stop on the Lubok series, storing the finished pictures one after another under his bed, he conceived the Political series. During this time of deprivation, and his newfound healing love, Fomin, who because of the lack of canvas and out of financial considerations sometimes had to paint on the fabric used to make mattresses, created about four hundred works, mainly graphics. Thirty graphic works were included in his Political series, which explored one of the most important images from his childhood, the Lenin one could draw.
At twenty-six, Fomin made that symbol of his childhood the main hero of his political musings. In one of his works, The Wizard of the Emerald City, the grotesque head of the leader of the proletariat flies away in an air balloon, leaving below the crowd of people, who are watching through the holes in a fence. Their mouths are agape, and they all wear green glasses to make the world appear emerald. Through the holes in the fence another world can be seen. One can take the glasses off and look around. One can die, before the “one who helps everyone” arrives in the balloon. He used the childrens’ fairy tale about the Wizard of the Emerald City as a focal point and put the surrounding reality in it.
In another graphic work, The Entire Seventy Years, he created a Lenin’s Square, present in so many Russian cities. In the middle of the square is the monument of the leader who points with his finger into nowhere. Around the monument stand tiny cars. And everything is surrounded by a wreath of barbed wire. In another work, Beyond the Barbed Wire, Beyond the Fence he presented a geographically true shape of the Soviet Union enclosed within a fence of wooden boards. In Locomotive, a train driven by Stalin, Beria, Kalinin, and Budennyi, speeds forward, thundering and emitting puffs of smoke, taking the seventy years of Soviet power to nowhere.
In the work The Twelve: A Gift to A. Blok, the St. Petersburg of the poet seems to be shaken up by a tornado at the moment of the start of the revolution. The horrific and the beautiful symbols of this graphic work – the Sun, the Moon, the arrows directed at Jesus, the cross falling off a church dome, a cap replacing a crown – all are spinning in the whirlwind of passions.
Vladimir had never gotten over the fact that his parents were a willing part of Khrushchev’s system and spent half of their lives at work in various institutes across the street from home. After painting the Political series, Fomin kept the word he gave his parents in his childhood: I will not walk the same road to the same job all my life. I will not be a slave. His career in Petrozavodsk, where we both moved in 1992, started with the political pieces. In Tomsk, he did not show the works though they were beautiful and deeply emotional.
His devotion to higher meaning of art and his need to find sense in his surroundings allowed Volodia to resolve the problem of the elements of darkness and light in the world. This is the source of the tragic intonations, elements of the intensive inner tension in his numerous “red” tornadoes, smogs, rains, explosions, and bridges. The series was original and embodied ideas and thoughts fundamental for the modern times; it was simple but used challenging fantastic images. In 1992, the diversity of the artistic devices and pictorial means in the Faces, Red Freaks, Inverted Brain, Feast of Clowns, and Gastronomical Masterpiece in 1992 was a way to engage in discussion of a social topic earlier worked out by Peter Bruegel (The Fat Kitchen). But regardless of the complex ideas about the make-up of the world and man’s place in it, Fomin’s early works remained deeply optimistic and included a dose of good-natured irony towards everything symbolizing the flow of life.
OUR MEETING
We met in 1988, when Vladimir came to Tomsk in summer, after his second year at the Krasnoselsky Institute. I was a student of journalism at the University of Tomsk. I had a young daughter, born out of wedlock, and my own two-room apartment, where students, poets, artists, and journalists I knew gathered and brought friends I had not yet met. In one of his later interviews, Fomin revealed: I was brought to Svetlana’s apartment by her acquaintances, who had a key. We were sitting in the kitchen when she came in, all in white and all excited. Afterwards, this apartment evoked strange feelings in me. There, inside, the world winds blew, figuratively and literally – the house stood at the intersection of three roads. Entering this apartment led me to the Milky Way of my fate.
In those years, flashes of negative emotions came over me regularly. Searching for peace of mind in any kind of simple joy was my daily pursuit. Otherwise, everything that happened around me depressed me and caused attacks of hysterics which could leave me in a spiritual paralysis. Once, in the company of several people I didn’t particularly like, I saw a stranger dressed in blue, which created a sudden disruptive response in me. I chased them all away. Offended, they went to Luna Park. I followed them, because though I became very upset suddenly, I was unable to stay upset for long. A few rides on the merry-go-round restored my spiritual balance. When we were spinning around, I had no idea that someone had brought me my soul mate.
Our company set out to the suburbs, to the dacha of this stranger’s parents. I was overwhelmed by a maddening feeling of falling in love when he lifted me up to carry me across a little bridge over a stream. I simply drowned in his good eyes. We exchanged names and walked together, holding hands. We were drinking a sweet, out-of-this-world vodka from the bottle and eating smoked chicken, and had completely forgotten about our friends walking in front of us.
Volodia admitted that before our encounter he had never experienced such “wild” behavior and did not know how to relate to it, so he simply did not draw any conclusions. Much later, after getting to know my parents, he blamed them for the unpredictable “peculiarities” of my character.
After that first meeting we saw each other a few times. Then, Vladimir went to the village Krasnoe on the Volga to study. When he returned a year later, he learned that I had gotten married.
My getting married at that time was like playing Russian roulette. I filed applications in four district Registry Offices, listing in each a different “pretender” to my hand. The day when they, after being informed what happened, came to see me at the apartment, I locked myself up in the bathroom and waited to see who would be the last man standing. That same day I married the winner, my “chosen one,” who I left exactly five months later. He was an artist-designer.
BEFORE THE WEDDING
Sometime after my divorce from this artist-designer, I saw Vladimir on the street. Though he stood with his back to me, feelings from our previous meeting washed over me. I called out to him. From that moment we parted only briefly, always getting back together again.
And yet, I considered him more a friend than a new marriage prospect. But, I had misgivings. My mind was disturbed by several circumstances. First of all, my ex-husband begged me, on his knees, not to marry Fomin! Then, Volodia’s mother, so frightened by our liaison that whenever she was alone with me she tried to persuade me not to destroy her son’s fate, left me with a sense of unrest. This continued until I predicted that she would soon quarrel with her oldest and best friend, and it happened a week later. Also, both Fomin and I are superstitious. Once, in a trolley, some old woman - who resembled a seer - took him for my husband and prophesied about his goodness and his considerate nature.
Protect him, she advised, before stepping out from the trolley at a stop.
So, I was concerned about our relationship. To free myself from my fears, I persuaded Volodia to take a trip with me to Tiumen to visit my grandmother, a well-known fortune-teller with Gypsy roots, who had predicted everything that ever happened to me. After looking at our palms, she informed us, with a degree of regret, that our relationship would not prosper until I reached the age of forty-five.
You are water, she said, and he is earth. You’ll throw mud at him…
It was true. We quarreled often. When he left my home at night, I frequently followed him to his houe, and hid under his window, straining to see the silhouette of some woman. But my jealousy was unfounded. At night, he painted, and I think I married him for those paintings. For several years it seemed to me that I loved the artist in him more than the human being.
His patience in marriage has begun to heal my volcanic character and my unnecessary nervous outbursts, which have been so deadly for me. His patience flowed into me, and he has absorbed some of the good in me. He has changed into a businessman - a dedicated artist, a businessman, and a man in sync with his own responsibilities. Alas, with years he has also absorbed some of my nervousness.
I wish I could compose a romantic song about him, using the following metaphors: in the port there is a storm, the boats strike rocks and other boats, they overturn, and only one magic boat, creaking peacefully, rests on the waves as if it were floating on a mirror-like calm surface… I want to get into this boat and hide at its bottom. In the past I had sunk all my own ships, even though I wanted to live, and now, safe in this boat, my life is contained in his. Ultimately, unexpected circumstances forced us to legitimize our relationship.
One day, one of my admirers, armed with a knife, waited for me in the entrance of my house. He wanted to take revenge on Vladimir, who was renovating my apartment. Afraid for Volodia’s life, I begged him not to open the door, but he, more afraid for my life, opened the door and jumped out holding an axe in his hands. The incident was reported and the case went to court. Now Volodia was in danger of going to prison and he was preparing to commit suicide. To free him from the hell he found himself in because of me, I told my parents that I was getting married, and to another artist! My daughter’s father came from another city to take her away. But for us, he made arrangements with a relative working for the KGB, and Volodia’s case, after lasting through summer, was closed.
LUBOK AND PUSHKIN
Criticisms of Fomin’s art as “children art,”or “pictures for children”, upset me, and ultimately led me to recollections of Pushkin’s fairy tales. Isn’t it strange that the greatest admirers of his talent, Vissarion Belinskii and Nikolai Gogol, did not consider Pushkin’s tales true art or real poetry? During the famous “Boldino autumn,” Pushkin wrote many verses and poems. And one single work, The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, he wrote in less than a month. What prompted him to write fairy tales?
Being called childish is really a compliment, said Volodia, responding to my questions. Children feel life more naturally, without distortions and biases. To speak simply about the world is a complicated endeavor. You cannot explain complex things with complex things. Only a great master has the power to reveal his world-view simply and naturally. Even now, when I am creating, life resembles life in kindergarten, revealed Vladimir. And what happened in school or after school is just a Soviet stagnation, learning for nothing. Man is afraid only because he dies so soon after he is born. My favorite word is “afterwards” but the main feeling is fear. What will happen afterwards? This is always a question with no answer. Why should I depend on politicians? An artist is just fulfilling God’s will.
Fomin’s defense of his world-view was more than artistic. While the “childish lubok” of Fomin found many viewers, only I was witnessed his “childish” behavior. Some of his actions and words possessed childish logic (I don’t want to and I won’t) but they were absurd and worked against him. These flaws kept him from the maturity he needed to present his art seriously, and in a business-like manner.
BY GOD’S WILL
Fomin was never able to clearly explain to anyone where he got money to live. This was particularly interesting to a butcher who lived in an apartment in our house. Volodia’s only commissions were for still-lifes with flowers, and came from one of the first successful businessmen with whom he became acquainted. Several paintings were purchased by visitors from London, Oslo, and Ottawa through the first private gallery in Tomsk. One day we saw on the television news report that an attempt to smuggle cultural monuments out of Russia through diplomatic channels had been prevented. Those were the channels taking Fomin’s works abroad, and the program mentioned a Frenchman who purchased some works from the Lubok series! We were living on the edge.
THE GIFT OF ITALO GRASSI
In the summer of 1991 we had an unforgettable meeting with the Latin American artist, professor of art history, Italo Grassi. As a part of his exhibition tour around the cities of Siberia from April to September, the seventy-year-old leader of the national organization of mural painters (monumentalists) of Argentina came to Tomsk with his forty-year-old wife. This famous founder of one of the current styles in wall-painting was invited to decorate one of the walls of the local university. At the same time, his paintings were shown in an exhibit at the regional Union of Professional Artists, which I covered as a correspondent of one of the Tomsk newspapers.
To my surprise, he immediately agreed to my invitation to visit Fomin’s studio.
I saw many works by Russian artists, he revealed through an interpreter, and all of them paint equally boring and uninteresting landscapes and still-lifes.
Astonished by the lubok, the professor selected five graphic works for an exhibition at the Argentine Academy of Arts and gave us his large canvas depicting a girl with a “third eye,” after telling me it is a portrait of me. Then I asked his beloved: What does it mean to be an artist’s wife? She looked at me sadly and said nothing.
AN EXHIBIT FOR FOMIN
This exhibit was made for me, so that I can draw some conclusions for myself. One needs to make pictures very accurately, carefully. And so it will be from now on, proclaimed Volodia in the kitchen, slicing carrots for a vinaigrette salad after we returned from the Tomsk Art Museum on 15 December 1991, where the works of Pavel Filonov were displayed. After some thought, Fomin said that he already painted exactly like that – very carefully and accurately.
Before the exhibit, I thought that he had already seen with his own eyes all the master’s paintings. He spoke about Filonov non-stop, more than about any of the people he knew or who were close to him. It turned out that he knew all the paintings from reproductions, but personally had seen only two in the Russian Museum – Kings’ Feast and Peasant Family. At the exhibition in Tomsk we looked for a long time at the works of the avant-garde master. This is my lubok! Volodia said as he admired the works. He talked a lot, talked some more, and then became silent, admitting he had no words.
That Sunday, we were overexcited. Having finished the vinaigrette, Volodia was drawing with particular excitement a tiny picture entitled Tornado, using short strokes of his hand to place each dot and coloring the picture with markers. I was sorry that I couldn’t, like he, sit down and create something. And at that moment I admitted to myself: All I can do for him is to protect him. Everything else he can do for himself.
In 1994 the Filonov exhibit returned to us, when we were living in Petrozavodsk. The curator of the exhibit from the State Russian Museum, L. Vostretsova, the author of a monograph about the “great avant-garde artist,” visited Fomin’s home studio. Looking with astonishment at his works, she noted that even though in Moscow alone there were about sixty thousand artists and in St. Petersburg more than forty-five thousand, nobody painted like Fomin. Vostretsova took to St. Petersburg several Xerox copies of his graphic works. Later, we delivered the originals which were included in the Russian Museum’s collection in the section of the Soviet graphics, later renamed the section of drawings and watercolors of the 18-20th century.
WEDDING
Fomin understood Salvador Dali when he ran away from Madrid to Cadaquès in order to hide and create great art. Volodia, too, was scared of the crowded and cliquish Moscow and St. Petersburg. On the other hand, permissions for foreign export could be obtained only there. From Tomsk one could wave his hands for a long time before being noticed. Therefore we chose Karelia which, it seemed, was much closer to Europe.
The deciding factor was a slide show organized by a certain art photographer and devoted to the beauty of the Russian North and to the islands of Kizhi and Valaam, which we wanted to see with our own eyes. At the apartment exchange office we found the only choice, the capital of Karelia, Petrozavodsk. A military family from that city agreed to the exchange of our two apartments for their two-room apartment.
On the day of the wedding, November 29, 1991, Vladimir was half an hour late and I never knew how to wait. After I grabbed the marriage certificate from the hands of the woman making a celebratory speech to the accompaniment of the Mendelssohn’s March and ran out of the Registry Office, I was consumed by anger for a long time.
We celebrated our marriage lying on a sofa, watching a movie and making toasts with two cans of beer bought in the only existing hard-currency store. That was all we had money for. We dreamed about our honeymoon trip, which took place only nine years later, when we visited Egypt and saw the pyramids and the Sphinx.
For some reason, Petrozavodsk seemed to me to be some kind of Timbuktu. It was horrifying to think that Volodia might want to go somewhere even farther north. I felt like a Decembrist wife who had decided to follow her husband anywhere.
The artist M. Romadin, whose exhibit we saw in the Tomsk Museum, compared that city, which in my university years I was taught to call “Northern Athens,” to an Indian Reservation. Why shouldn’t we break out and be free?
THE MOVE TO PETROZAVODSK
Several days after the wedding, we flew to Petrozavodsk to see the place of our future life. The majority of the passengers had a generic ticket with no seat assignments, so Volodia found himself a seat in the cockpit and I in the cargo area. I was sitting on a bucket filled with soap (apparently, at the time, the scarcest thing in Karelia), reluctantly listening to an intimate relationship between a steward and a stewardess taking place behind me in a lavatory.
It seems that life consists of trifles. The main thing is not to let those trifles turn into stormy seas which can drown you. During our second (and last) trip to Petrozavodsk it was a miracle I didn’t destroy our deal concerning the apartment exchange. When its soon-to-be former owner inadvisably decided to entertain his girlfriend in the other room, I became infuriated, and chased them out of our future home. Some sixth sense told me that such behavior was an invasion of what would become our ‘temple of art.’ But, three days later I and the owner, with shifty, embarrassed eyes, signed the agreement for the apartments’ exchange.
It was the first time that, following Volodia, I became unemployed. For a year we were registered in the unemployment office, receiving a meager subsidy for which we bought oatmeal and cheap capelin. In summer, we dug up burdock’s roots and made coffee out of it. We cooked pastries with rowanberries and ate dandelion salads. We starved like St. Seraphim of Sarov, firmly believing that we are saving our bodies and souls. Thanks to this diet I learned how pretty man’s legs can be. Volodia turned into someone very elegant, attractive, and youthful. I fell in love again.
A THOUSAND QUAYS
One day we were strolling in the Petrozavodsk quay. Suddenly, I asked Vladimir: People, like ships, find many quays in their lives. What were the quays in your life?
Before I entered the evening Art School, I felt spiritually empty. But when I got accepted, an inner voice told me immediately that I should be an artist. My second quay I found when I ran away from the Krasnoselskoe School and waited in Tomsk for your call. I felt it because I needed to meet you. You called and I found my third quay. There will be thousands of quays in my life. And every time I will heed my inner voice.
THEY DID NOT EXPECT HIM
Vladimir did not have time to arrange his personal exhibition on which he agreed with the Tomsk Art Museum. Therefore, after unpacking, we immediately went to the Art Museum of the Republic of Karelia.
When Fomin proposed that the museum organizes an exhibit of 400 works, the director looked at him as if he were a madman. Some artists of the people and distinguished artists wait for their turn twenty years to be shown in our museum – he enlightened us about our chances to present Fomin’s lubok to the Karelian viewers. As an example, we were shown a document that proved that a certain well-known female artist received the permission to have her first personal exhibition in the museum shortly before her death. Then, we were advised to make inquiries at the Republic’s Artists’ Union. The Director of the Artists’ Union was not interested at all in looking at the works of the lubok artist who appeared out of the blue. After learning about Fomin’s profession (jeweler) and age (less than 35), he asked Vladimir to work as a jeweler and to join the ranks of the Union of the Young Artists of the Republic of Karelia. The director of that organization, after talking to Fomin who could not see himself a member of an official union of artists, a group which periodically went on trips to paint outside, announced condescendingly that all artists consider themselves geniuses and that one should not dream about exhibitions, particularly abroad.
Geniuses are allowed to have everything, but only after they die, calmly commented Fomin on these meetings. Sooner or later I will be recognized. By art historians too.
Having learned that a private gallery, Taide, will open in town, we became acquainted with its director and its main art expert. The latter showed us his studio, in which he created no more than five or six canvasses a year. Both men visited us at home. Astounded by the number and quality of the works, they invited us to the gallery’s opening. But perhaps for the same reason we weren’t admitted after we showed up to the opening. Volodia understood it right away, but I insisted that the usher should talk to the expert again. We watched them both through the transparent glass doors and we were told, You weren’t invited. Only artists and art specialists are here.
I had never heard anything more offensive. I walked home, crying and thinking about Mikhail Bulgakov’s “they will come and ask themselves.” And it did happen. Initially, only one painting was purchased in Taide, and it turned out to be Fomin’s Dog; later, the unprofitable gallery was closed. When Vladimir became known for his foreign exhibits, the wife of the expert, herself in charge of the city’s Exhibition Hall, asked me to help organize his show in her space. But at the time it was no longer a part of my husband’s plans.
Participation in an art exhibition which took place in the Art Museum of Karelia in 1992 forever killed in Fomin any desire of immersing himself in the life of any artistic community. The organizers of the exhibit placed Fomin’s pictures at the entrance to one of the rooms upside down. He had to straighten them up during the show. Several days later, incredible frictions began among the art historians and the artists. We received a call: Please take your works as soon as possible because they are in our way. Moreover, after selecting twelve of Fomin’s works for the show, the art council recommended “hanging them in a kindergarten.” Vladimir treasured his works too much to offer them to “children” or “adult” institutions. He was afraid someone would destroy his works.
Taking part in an exhibition The Tower of Babel in the National Theatre of Finland during the International Jazz Festival, my husband angered the same former expert from the Taide gallery by selling a picture which a leader of a music group from Bonn liked. The wall of the Theatre suffered – it was now empty and not designed according to the exposition’s concept.
An attempt to sell the works in the second private gallery opened in the city was also unsuccessful; the gallery closed immediately after its opening. People were not interested in buying pictures when there was nothing to eat. We remembered the words of the two plump women in the gallery:
We can draw like this too! they commented, looking at Fomin’s Boar.
They particularly enjoyed the clearly shown reproductive organ of the animal, which they touched shamelessly, paying no attention to their watching children. Standing behind them, we looked at each other. We were recalling a story about E. Munch. The great master asked a worker who was looking at his paintings at the Oslo University. How do you like them?
The worker pointed to the old man on the picture and said: Green beard.
I asked you how do you like these paintings? Munch repeated.
A beard cannot be green! answered the worker.
What the heck are you doing here? Get out!
Thank God, Fomin had a predecessor who knew where such museum visitors belong…
FIRST ONE-MAN SHOWS
Having refused to participate in group exhibitions, Fomin began to organize his own shows, which assured him of complete freedom of experimentation. He wanted to reveal to the public his bare, absolute “I,” demonstrating, as a creative personality, his conviction in his own talent and lack of worries about his position. The selected venues, at which he exhibited his works, places no longer available to the Russian audiences, were a proof of this philosophy. His approach irritated not only the Petrozavodsk intelligentsia and art officials, but also the St. Petersburg and Moscow bohemians. In contrast, it attracted constant interest of the press.
Vladimir’s first one-man shows were staged by foreigners on cruise ships, which from 1992 to 1994 docked in the port of the Karelian capital. The head of the cultural section of the Petrozavodsk’s Mayoral Office created a scandal on one of the ships, sailing under the German flag, when she complained to the organizer of Fomin’s mini-show that he had ignored the other artists of the city. The German wisely replied that since he was on German territory, he could do whatever he wanted.
During Vladimir’s last mini-show – on a South Korean liner – one of the directors of the tourist agency had to intervene and threaten to destroy the contract with the Koreans because they liked the paintings so much they did not want to give them back. Fomin learned his first lesson: that in the art business everything depends upon the word of honor. As a rule, written documents are either not signed or not honored. The organizers of the shows and numerous middlemen receive deserved and undeserved commissions, which are deducted from the artist’s profits. There are absolutely no guarantees of getting the money from the sale of paintings, nor of getting back the unsold paintings.
In 1993, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Karelia organized in its building a presentation of Fomin’s works, granting a request of the General Consul of France in Russia, M. Blattman, who had heard about Fomin’s paintings. The exhibition was organized in conjunction with the “French Days”
in Petrozavodsk. Blattman and the cultural attaché M. Taran, who came for two days with a group of French diplomats, devoted considerable time preparing a lecture about the ideas embodied in lubok and they also purchased several works. Even though they worked in St. Petersburg, they continued to keep in touch with Volodia. Their example was followed by the consuls and envoys of Norway, Finland, and the United States.
My art is exactly as important to me as the revolution was important to Lenin, Fomin said one day, when he learned that the local art specialists and artists had been criticizing his Political series after a show at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Of course, they kept saying, it’s easy to become famous through politics. Fomin will disappear soon.
Fomin defended himself adamantly. These are not political, but philosophical pieces, he insisted. I have my own understanding of propaganda in art. People are not able to distinguish soap from rope before they experience it. But my goal is not to enlighten the people. The Wanderers were doing it. They were not looking for new forms of expression; they misled the Russian art. And after our truly ingenious icon painters, like A. Rublev, no Picassos or Miros, who practiced art for art’s sake, appeared in our artistic communities. Up until now the Russian minds are ruled by propagandists of art. Lenin came out of the barrel carried by the poor children in V. Perov’s Trinity; I. Glazunov and V. Shilov sprang from the Society for Traveling Exhibitions. The contemporary Shishkins, Repins, Kramskois, and other comrades pound into generation after generation of our nation “kindness for the fallen” and determine the place of art in politics… My primitive art, close to the style of such artists as N. Pirosmanashvili, who did not know the canons of classical academic art, or E. Chestniakov and M. Chagall, who rejected it, will not vanish because it carries in itself eternal values both connected to and separated from politics.
Fomin had made himself understood and achieved initial good reviews from the people in the art world who would later help him. The pictures of artists who exhibited after Fomin at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not find any buyers. They had, as the saying goes, “shot themselves in the foot.” Mysteriously, the “French Days” were not celebrated again.
THE FIRST SERIES
I often get upset, feeling that my husband has been humbled far too long as a result of endless rejections from individuals he asked for help and support. Nobody wanted to help organize exhibitions and buy his paintings. At the same time, Volodia made superhuman efforts to accelerate his fame. However, fame appeared to be as impossible as his genius unquestionable.
Those who march, like Fomin, “to reach the people,” should know that life is very jealous of artists. Vladimir shared this thought with me: When I envision other shore, I see a mixture of M. Chagall and P. Filonov… I see not my art, but somebody else’s. And any breakthrough in style has an impact on one’s psyche. I can paint a picture like C. Corot in several hours. But my pictures should be time-consuming. To finish a good small picture in my primitivist style I need about 40 days. And to paint in this style for 40 days is even more complex.
At the beginning of 1993 the recognizable political elements from the series of the same name disappeared from Fomin’s works. He said goodbye to his thoughts about the inevitable presence of vulgarity, baseness, and stupidity in man’s existence on earth, assuming that only this existence, the kernel in the midst of shucks, the beauty at the core of life, is his pursuit as an artist.
As Fomin continued his work on the Lubok series, he also started to develop the idea of creating the Gifts series. The series began with the graphic works The Twelve: A Gift to A. Blok and The Scream: A Gift to E. Munch, first conceived in 1990-1991. He kept repeating his favorite topics from the Lubok series: Country Fair, The Circus Came to Us, Merry-Go-Round, Steamship, and Cat, as well as inventing the new ones: Parade of Aviators, Bears on a Bicycle, Your Thoughts Are Like The Flower Bed, Musicians Came to Us, and Auto Rally. All of them were a celebration of life. He painted Ferris Wheel or Wheel of Life thirteen times.
I wrote in my diary my reactions and hopes concerning his work at that time. The painting! You are unusual. You’ll be seen in the Hermitage and in the Louvre! Of course, Paris… My God, our Paris will appreciate you and fall in love with you. Even though we will never go there… This painting is ‘Ferris Wheel.’ He cannot stop painting it. My husband is an artist. The Wheel is spinning and every man has a place in it. Circling on the Ferris Wheel, man seems to make his life circle absorbing things and events, looking up at the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth below, where his existence, like a single cell in cosmos, connects the spiritual and the mundane. As you can see, Volodia’s work fuels my own dreams, all for him.
Ferris Wheel and Merry-Go-Round were seen for the first time in color by German visitors to the gallery in Tübingen. Fomin planned to continue the Gifts series all his life since he considered the paintings tributes to great works of art and their creators – Picasso, Dali, Filonov, Chagall, Munch, Malevich, Monet, Cezanne, De Chirico, Van Gogh, Saryan, Gumilev, Sibelius, Grieg, and others. These and later works of Fomin are characterized by extreme saturation of space (“madeness”), more expressive forms, and harmonious colors.
THE FIRST ONE-MAN SHOW ABROAD
The well-known aphorism of the actor A. Mironov that everyone can hurt an artist is untrue if guardian angels protect the talent. One of them was Jörg Bohse, director of the company West-East. Having come to Petrozavodsk from Tübingen to establish friendly commercial contacts, he found time one evening to visit Fomin with his assistant-translator. That evening, we were given half an hour to make a difficult decision: without signing any documents, we were supposed to hand over all the pictures to the man whom we saw for the first and perhaps for the last time in our life. And we took the risk, hoping to celebrate before long Fomin’s first show in Germany.
In order to make it possible for his compatriots to see the works of the lubok artist, Bohse did the impossible. He forced the authorities to include Fomin’s name in the list of the members of the official delegation going to Germany and approved by the government. After learning that for some reason Vladimir’s visa had been lost at the last moment among the visas of the other members of the delegation, he was somehow able to set everything straight. And so, in August –September 1993 in the Bremen Gallery in Tübingen an exhibition of the works from the Lubok, Political, and the Gifts series took place. Interestingly, there was no other way to take the paintings out of Russia but in the boxes from some machinery purchased by the Germans in St. Petersburg.
The journey from Frankfurt on the Main to Tübingen and from Tübingen to Stuttgart changed Fomin’s consciousness. He reacted to and memorized the lines of beautiful architecture and the withdrawn looks of the passers-by. A publisher of art books, Mr. Musigmann, printed post cards with reproductions of the then-unknown Fomin’s pictures for sale in the German museums and galleries. The newspaper Schwabishes Tagblatt, which included a long interview with Fomin, compared him to W. Kandinsky, M. Chagall, M. Larionov, and N. Goncharova. Sixteen years after that exhibition Fomin would again be welcomed by the Tübingen art lovers. In 2009 he would have a personal exhibition in another gallery of the city.
EYES
In 1992, Fomin painted a picture on the Holy Trinity icon saved by him in 1985 in Jaroslavl during the burning of icons unfit for restoration. On the half-burned board only the eyes of the angels remained. Vladimir did not paint them over, but added many eyes around. He gave the painting a strange subtitle: We Look and See That We Don’t See Anything. Responding to my arguments that icons are holy and untouchable, Fomin said: Rublev was an artist. And I am an artist too.
