CHAPTER 4
EMBODIMENT OF MAGIC
NOT A PRECISE SCIENCE OR ABOUT “BROTHERS BY TRADE”
The contemporary art environment, which aggressively interfered in our lives, not so much as a result of exhibitions as through the press, resulted in Fomin’s characteristic defensive reaction. He related to other artists from a position of aesthetic primitivism striving for the highest concentration of beauty and refinement in art.
Being a perfectionist, he could not understand why one would repeat Filonov, Chagall or Petrov-Vodkin, and be their follower rather than to be Filonov himself. He called fashionable artists those who successfully followed fads in art and classicists those who discover something new in art. After seeing in Tomsk an exhibit of the fashionable, “approved” portrait painter Shilov (to be allowed to travel with his paintings to Japan, he had to “distinguish” himself in the provinces as the government wanted, trying to take care of official art’s propaganda), Fomin felt discouraged.
Artists like Shilov betray the Goddess of Love, he pronounced; they treat Her in a hypernaturalistic way. They depict Her from Her head to her toe and they fill the entire space in their canvasses with Her as if She were an ordinary naked creature.
Many years later, after watching on TV a film about Shilov, who donated works to Moscow and received in exchange his own gallery not far from the Kremlin, the now-mature lubok master, Fomin, as before considered this type of painting a deviation. In the film, the correspondent asked, why are you painting old women, soldiers, and priests? Shilov answered, To make the leaders look at the people, I have to transmit the people’s pain. Volodia remarked that real journalists don’t ask what the reasons for painting the official, approved portraits are. It is understandable without words – commissions and money, money, money…
A wise man always knows how things shouldn’t be done, while a foolish one knows how they should. Fomin was infuriated by the program. Shilov is convinced that anyone can be an avant-garde artist. The fact that Picasso, Gauguin, and Van Gogh were put “on top,” in his opinion was an unjustified elevation of talentless artists, who did not practice realism, to masters. I understand that his idols are Ivan Kramskoi, Karl Briullov, and Isaac Levitan. But his own overwrought doodling differs from the art of the masters exactly by the same thing that makes the poetry of Nikolai Gumilev and Osip Mandelshtam different from the poetry of Soviet poets who in the Brezhnev period filled journals, newspapers, and booklets with their poems. There are verses but there is no poetry in them. In music, I can compare Shilov to Lebedev-Kumach (the author of “My Native Country Is Wide”), but not with Bach – a human being of universal importance. Looking at Shilov’s works, I am terrified by the thought that I could leave no mark on art. The artist’s hand should be partially led by God and partially by his own intellect. If the intellect doesn’t rise to the level of Bosh, Bruegel, Chagall, and Dali, I am bored. George Gershwin knew what he was talking about when he said that the only kind of music that can claim to be eternal, is that in which there are universal human or folkloric elements. Leonardo used universal human ideas as his point of departure and Chagall used folklore. My lubok includes both.
Fomin was most annoyed by the prolific masters who endlessly reproduced landscapes, changing only the positions of trees, or those who did not care to improvise in still-life. Every well-known, talentless mediocrity understands his or her lack of talent, Fomin said of a sculptor, fashionable in government circles, who churned out his flower canvasses like an assembly line. For that reason, other artists keep creating “Tsereteli-like” paintings, and doing so develop the feeling that everything is allowed. The truth does not bother them. People without aesthetically developed taste, who come to their exhibits, don’t understand that art is more complicated than higher mathematics. In art there is an infinite number of branches, it is always asymmetrical, and many things in it are not apparent. Of course we know that two times two equals four. But what in mathematics is known a priori, in art the majority cannot understand. Art is not an exact science. It cannot be forced out by stretching the canvas. If you cannot say anything in one work, you can paint a hundred, but they will also be silent.
About the shows of the artists belonging to the “traditional” art currents, which did not interest him, and about conceptual installations which became popular in Russia at the end of the 1990s and resembled autopsies of corpses, Fomin spoke without beating around the bushes: This world is a mirror reflection. There is no fire there.
The art of some socialist realists attracted Fomin not only by their formal art preparation, but also by an unexplainable sincerity. But he could not accept the hypocrisy of the artists who adopted the Soviet way of thinking and adapted to the new circumstances. One day we watched on television an interview with one of these’adaptees,’ who painted saccharine views of the motherland. The subject of the program, trying very hard to make a good impression on the viewers, went as far as saying: I am a kind and cheerful person and my pictures reflect that. I love the purity of nature. You know, I am even dreaming about it. I had a dream that I was standing at a precipice and in front of me flowed the Volga. It was so wide... And suddenly I wanted to fly across. I waved my arms and flew across the Volga. Can you imagine, the Volga?! Here the interviewer, with an understanding expression, without any hidden irony, asked in an intimate tone, And why couldn’t you just sit in one place; what took you across the Volga? The dumbfounded artist could not think of anything more effective than to say other than, Well, this is kind of a flight of the soul, you know. Since then, whenever we see how another artist has “gone overboard,” we look at each other and read in each other’s eyes, And why don’t you stay in one place? A flight of the soul, you know!
Russia will for a long time answer for murdering many talented people in the labor camps, Volodia has always emphasized. And also for the fact that even today the artists gain recognition if they know the right people. We continue to bring up a gray generation.
PROVINCIAL EXPENDITURES
From Pushkin, who complained that with such a talent it was a shame that he was born in Russia, to Chagall, who asked why he was born in such a hole, the minds of the Russian geniuses have been affected by one illness. I always searched for it in Fomin, who lived in a provincial town. In 1995, when we had to say no to two exhibits in Copenhagen, I could not hold back: If the talent itself does not break through to the spotlight on the stage, or someone does not kick it up under the spotlights, it is doomed to life behind the curtains. In Russia there is only one stage – Moscow. From Petrozavodsk no one can become famous either in Russia or in the world.
Directors of the two out of five galleries in the capital of Denmark (Nikolaj and Galleri 68) who organized one-man shows for artists, became interested in my husband’s work and sent invitations, without even mentioning exhibition fees. Had we lived in Moscow, obtaining the documents for visas and for the export of the paintings, securing the shipping, and going abroad would have been much simpler.
Vladimir’s positive stance shook my conviction that I was right: Business first, fame later. Famous artists have many commissions, but people basically order kitch. He had never wanted to create art as a potential source of income, even though he succeeded in making a living selling his pictures. Feeling the pressure of commercialism, Vladimir only took orders which did not limit the abilities of his artistic mind, those into which he put his entire soul. He knew that with time the prices for his paintings would increase.
Time proved him right. By adhering to this determination of his life’s priorities, his point of view mirrored that of the academician Likhachev, who maintained that Culture justifies the life of one person and the entire nation. Everything else was just icing on the cake.
AN ARTIST OF THE FUTURE
In 1995, an international archeological symposium took place in Karelia, during which Fomin delivered a lecture about the use of the ancient ornament in his art. The meeting with the artist influenced one of the participants in the symposium to write a scholarly book.
The same year, Fomin unexpectedly attracted the attention of the State Tretiakov Gallery. On the designated day, he arrived in Moscow to present his works to the expert advisory committee. The art historians asked the artist to leave all of his works, but not to place them in the collection of the major gallery of the country, but to distribute them around the district museums. They told me that for his sake all the experts of the Tretiakov Gallery specializing in modern art were gathered together and that this in itself was an extraordinary event. Disappointed, we brought the pictures back to Petrozavodsk. Fomin was afraid that they would be buried in the storage rooms of the provincial museums.
However, after receiving in 1996 and 1997 consecutive invitations from the Tomsk Regional Museum, the Khanty-Mansi State Ethnographic Museum, and the Tiumen Art Museum, Fomin changed his mind. We visited all three museums which later acquired graphic works from the Lubok series (it was too difficult to transport the oil paintings). The directors of the museums took us on tours of their exposition halls. In the Khanty-Mansi Museum, later renamed Museum of Nature and Man, which included many pieces related to Fomin’s art, the artist photographed himself on the skin of the bear in a makeshift dwelling of the Khanty. In the Tiumen Museum we laughed so hard that we cried looking at the wonderful romantic picture by Silvestr Shchedrin and listening to a story of the former director of the museum, a professional army man, who every day lined up the art historians like soldiers and gave them orders.
In November and December 1996, Fomin was again invited by the German city Cochem-Brauheck, this time to an exhibit at the City Hall. The sponsors were the well-known companies Vereinigte Volksbank, Autohaus Meurer, Reisebüro German, Lufthansa, and Center Kreuter.
Even though the titles of the national or distinguished worker of culture and art will for a long time remain in Russia the criteria of importance, I said then to my husband, you are able to prove the opposite. Following the painter Nesterov, you have the right to say that it is most difficult to earn the title of Artist. You will continue to earn this title even after you are not around anymore. In response, Fomin said, I know that my paintings will participate in auctions on other planets as much as the paintings of other artists. After a short pause, I continued my thought, If Russia is reborn, artists like you will be in demand. When it gets reborn, I will be the first, either jokingly or seriously answered Volodia. He has always possessed a rare gift of talking seriously about the unbelievable and joking about the serious. Sometimes it was absolutely impossible for me to determine the difference.
THE LUCKY PIKE
Since the artist was in his soul a dedicated mystic, the “primitive” beauty of his canvasses also had a mystical meaning. Everywhere he found strange signs of his being chosen: he was born on the day of Christ’s baptism, while his facial features in profile resembled the features of Leonardo, Paul Gauguin, and Eduard Munch. He considered it a gift from above that he was born one hundred years after Munch, the artist he imitated when he was young. The Norwegian expressionist was one of the three geniuses (the others were A. Blok and A. Einstein) with whom Vladimir spiritually communicated and whose presence he truly felt. And the number thirteen followed our every step: dates of events, seats in planes and trains… The coincidence of his fiftieth birthday and the year 2013 seemed to him also not accidental. When he met one of his best friends, Matti Vehvilainen, his benefactor and supporter, the fact that the firm of the Finnish businessman was located in a former church (later removated and turned again into a functioning church) was enormously important to Fomin.
When not long before our departure from the island of Kizhi, he caught an enormous pike, he decided that it was also a sign. The way in which the fish was caught was quite unusual. Fomin made a fishing rod from a short stick, a piece of thin string, and a home-made hook with the only worm he had found. The pike swam close to his feet and froze in expectation of a small roach, and was instantly hooked. Everything happened in an instant. The island was shaken by the victorious yell of the happy owner of the pike. From the head of the fish we made a house-protecting amulet. Since then, according to Khanty custom, the dried-up jaw of the pike has protected our home from attacks.
In 1996, Fomin reminded me about the sign, tying it to the conversation in the Café of Pani Amanda in Riihimaki with the director of the art museum of the city, T. Simonainen, who received his art education in Italy. At that time Simonainen proposed that Fomin exhibit in the museum at least 35 paintings devoted to the Karelian-Finnish epic Kalevala, with the condition that the paintings will be done in his unique style, not used by anyone else in Russia or abroad.
This series appeared exactly according to the folk wisdom, Man proposes, God disposes. Impressed by the first Kalevala canvasses in the style of avant-garde lubok, brought to Finland in 1997, the directors of the museum procured for the painter the majority of the funds from the state budget for his unprecedented tour through Scandinavia, entitled 150 Years of Kalevala. To bring the project to fruition, the museum hired a specialist, who worked for more than a year on organizing the tour. The exhibit in Riihimaki was moved to 1999, the anniversary of the publication of the full version of the national mythological poem, with expectations of sensational success. Nevertheless, the journey of Fomin’s Kalevala series through exhibition halls began already in 1998.
GALLERY VILLA NURMINATA OR THE APPEARANCE OF THE COLLECTOR
As Paul Cezanne before, Fomin was obsessed with the idea of excellence. But unlike the French artist, who dreamed about creating one day a masterpiece, Vladimir wanted to paint a series which would be better than anything created earlier on the basis of the epic Kalevala. And he succeeded thanks to strenuous work, sometimes to complete exhaustion. He turned into a working machine. He saw the entire process of creating the painting in his dreams: he sharpened his pencils, placed the lines on the paper to make a sketch, and painted the work in colors. When awake, he could not abandon his easel fourteen hours a day with a break for meals, usually also at the easel. I was afraid to send him shopping for necessities because, when we went shopping together, he would stop in front of a store window deeply immersed in his thoughts. The topics of Kalevala, as well as of the following series, forced him to think about the eternal. He was afraid to die before he could paint what he had imagined. When I begged him to take a break, he would answer that when man creates, he is happy, and that this special condition is from God.
To create 88 paintings and 33 graphic works the artist needed almost three years. Perhaps another artist after painting so many works in laborious, time-consuming, and exhausting style in such a phenomenally short time would go insane.
The Finnish viewers saw some Kalevala paintings in summer of 1998 in the gallery Villa Nurminata. The Art Museum of Riihimaki allowed the gallery owner, well-known businessman Matti Vehviläinen, to be the first to exhibit the paintings. Meeting of this owner of a chain of stores with Finnish furniture, who appeared in our apartment for the first time in 1995 to help transport the frames and stretchers to Finland, played one of the most decisive roles in the fate of the artist. Most of the subsequent exhibitions were organized with his sponsorial support. History knows many artists, like Claude Monet, who were supported by one patron only. I remember the words of our Finnish friend at the exhibition of Kandinskii which we attended together. He said that he is bored with looking at the works of the famous abstract painter (who also began with the lubok) and that he only likes Fomin. Vehviläinen, who became a collector of my husband’s paintings, made him a gift by providing an exhibition space in his gallery in the city of Parikkala.
Shortly before the opening of the exhibition in the gallery Villa Nurminata, located on the lake shore, Vehviläinen and Fomin, like the heroes of the epic Kalevala, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen, caught an enormously large pike. It was another sign for Vladimir, pointing toward a new stage in his artistic career. While Väinämöinen made out of the pike’s jaw a kantele to accompany his song, Fomin announced himself to the whole world by his Kalevala series.
The symbol of the exhibition became a boater departing into the future as a scarlet spot on deep blue background, prophesying fame for the author of the new Kalevala, as the Finnish press wrote. Three-meter tall sign boards with this image adorned the Western Finnish highway from Lappeenranta to Joensuu. In the gallery, the visitors could find postcards and t-shirts with the same image. The exhibition also included works from the Lubok, Kizhi, and Gifts series, but the largest newspaper of the country, Helsingin Sanomat, which published an article about the show, put emphasis on the series, which became the national pride of the Finns.
THE PROPERTY OF FINLAD
Half a year before opening of Fomin’s show in the Art Museum of Riihimaki, Karelian officials in charge of culture asked the director of the museum to combine the exhibit of Fomin’s avant-garde Kalevala with the Kalevala collection of the Karelian Art Museum. The request was rejected and for the exhibition of the alternative standard collection a small space in the city library was allocated. The rejection led to a scandal which accompanied the beginning of Fomin’s tour.
The delegation of the Karelian museum which arrived in Riihimaki was led by its director, the woman who in the year of our arrival in Petrozavodsk was the assistant of the Republic’s minister of culture. Fomin asked for her help when he was looking for a place for his exhibit, but the woman, in his words, kicked him out, like a homeless dog. After she became the director of the museum, she remained not well disposed to the “outsider,” who never again crossed her threshold.
Just before the official opening of the exhibit, Fomin’s countrymen made a walking inspection of the two-story building containing almost 100 of his works devoted to the epic. From their comments it was clear that they did not like anything. Nevertheless, they took the best seats in the room, and the director of the Karelian museum even gave a long speech not included in the program. In the speech she mentioned many centuries of friendship between the people of Karelia and Finland, but not even a word about Fomin, which caused consternation among about hundred seventy people present at the opening. The object of the celebrations restricted himself to a speech expressing gratitude to the organizers of the exhibit.
Olli Alho, the redactor of the National Finnish Radio, professor, and the author of the book about the epic, who opened the presentation of the series, indicated that without the Kalevala, the Finns would not be known the outside world. The epic is the firm foundation of Finnish history and culture, the spiritual beginning of the nation and state. And she praised the Russian artist who glorified the epic in his style land in magnificent colors.
The epic motifs were subjects of hundreds of works in many countries – the Finnish art historians agreed with his speech, -- but a hundred years after Akseli Gallen-Kallela only Fomin fully revealed the ancient world of the Finns, having embodied the immortal work in the primitive avant-garde style, distinguished by its epic poetic nature and mythological language of imagery.
For the first time the Kalevala resounded under the roof of a museum simultaneously in the language of the contemporary lubok and the eternal language of music, when at the opening the Male Choir of Helsinki gave a short performance.
After the opening, the hero of the celebrations had a press conference, despite the fact that the representatives of the Karelian museum tried to spoil the impressions.
If the Kalevala is literary folklore, lubok is folklore in art, -- said Fomin. In my work on the series I used the cultural heritage of Finno-Ugric and Slavic people. The series is literally saturated with cosmism, which kept filling me as I became acquainted with the literary sources and folk poetry. I was always interested in the appearance of the world creation. That’s the reason that God Himself wanted me to create Kalevala. It is the most harmonious compilation of the spiritual and the material that I know. A good book is always the knowledge of the past, present, and future. As a reader, I felt this in the poem. As an artist, I visualized the connection between the past and the present. In the future, Kalevala will be painted in a different way.
To everyone’s surprise, the meeting with the painter was attended by the richest man in the city, who in the past had donated to the museum works by Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, whom he personally knew. For the first time in several years he appeared in public to raise in his hand a glass of champagne to honor Fomin. His other hand was in a cast, and yet he arrived on his bicycle. We were astounded seeing all the cars leaving the city after the series’ introduction and following the bicyclist. For a long time nobody in the procession of cars dared to pass him.
That day, giving in to stoic feelings, we gave our respects to our compatriots, whose show was taking place in the library. Fomin, I, and the workers of the Art Museum and the library were the only visitors to the “exhibition of the Karelian artists.” In a restaurant, where the opening of both exhibits was celebrated, T. Simonainen asked everyone to hold hands as a sign of making peace, after which he had to satisfy the curiosity of one of the representatives of the Karelian Museum, who anxiously asked why exactly Fomin embodies the 150th anniversary of Kalevala. The director of the museum boosted our egos when he answered that Fomin’s works represent the highest level in world art.
After Fomin’s exhibition in Riihimaki, he became, according to the museum’s curator S. Koskela, the most famous Russian modern artist in Finland, perhaps sharing recognition only with Ilia Glazunov. In three months, more viewers visited the museum than in the previous three years. When, a week after the opening of the show, we went on a bus tour of Finland, every half hour we heard on the radio an ad about Fomin’s Kalevala, as if he were some show-business star.
After our return home we received the news about the press-conference at the Karelian Art Museum organized to give an account of the exhibition in Riihimaki. During the conference, the director talked about the successful exposition of the Karelian artists not in the library, but in the Art Museum, which was confirmed by the press release distributed to the journalists. Not a word was said about the success of Vladimir’s show, as if such an artist never existed in Karelia. At the same time, in Scandinavia, thanks to the tour 150 Years of the Kalevala, Karelia became famous as a place where Fomin lived and where the new painted version of the Kalevala was born.
After keeping the graphic works in its collection, the Art Museum in Riihimaki sent the exhibition to Sweden, where in 1999 the paintings were shown in June in the Finnish Cultural Centre in Torsby, then in July and August in the Värmlands Museum of Karlstad. In August 1999, the series was presented in the third Swedish city, Göteborg, and was associated with the opening of the International Book Fair. In September, the exhibit transferred to Norway, to the Finnish-Norwegian Institute of Culture in Oslo. After the showing of the series in Juminkeko -- the Museum of Kalevala in Kuhmo in April, May and June of 2002, some pictures from the series, belonging to Vehviläinen, continued to be shown around Finland. The concept of the exhibition in Kuhmo included Fomin’s leading a master-class for the beginning artists. Unfortunately, because the Peer Gynt exhibit in Oslo was taking place at the same time, the organizers had to explain in the press that the artist is on “art assignment.” The famous Jan Sibelius Quartet performed during the opening of the show in Kuhmo. When several years earlier we had our photographs taken in front of the famous monument of the great composer in Helsinki, we could have only dreamed that one day the quartet would perform in Fomin’s honor.
Interestingly, a hare became the symbol of Fomin’s Kuhmo exhibit, as can be seen on the canvas entitled Carrying the Bad News, devoted to the most tragic heroine of Kalevala, Aino. The Finnish newspapers wrote that after the artist created this universal and powerful image of a minor character from the epic, in the conscience of the Finns this character grew to enormous proportions. Moreover, in the life of many famous men the hare appeared as a forecaster of something important. For instance, it is known that the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin turned his sled back because of the hare that crossed his path, and for that reason he did not take part in the Decembrist uprising. Fomin, who was born in the year of the Hare, related to this image with particular passion. He painted himself many times as a hare held in the hands of the Mother Madonna or simply as a hare sleeping in the snow .
Even though the representatives of Hungarian museums visited Riihimaki to discuss the possibility of organizing the anniversary exhibition in their country, the journey of the series to Hungary was interrupted by a natural disaster, as a result of which all the expenditures from the state budget for cultural events were cut.
During the Scandinavian tour more than fifty five thousand visitors became acquainted with Fomin’s Kalevala. Finland, a country in which the epic became the symbol of national renaissance, named his unique series a cultural property of the nation.
