CHAPTER 8
HALF WAY AROUND
A VIOLET FOR NAPOLEON
On the 10th of March 2008, a day before the official opening of Fomin’s second exhibition at the Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens, Alexander Boguslawski received from me an e-mail for Fomin, which astounded him:
How can she give you advice what you should paint, particularly for France, while the Florida show is on? he inquired, handing Vladimir my letter.
Here is the content of the entire message: Volodia, do you remember you’ve wanted to paint Napoleon? He should be holding in his hand not a saber but a large violet. Think about that sketch. I will tell you a story. Napoleon saw Josephine at a ball. She stood out among all the ladies adorned with jewels because she was wearing on her head a wreath made of violets and on her bosom small bouquets of violets. Josephine became Napoleon’s wife. He promised he would give her violets every year for the anniversary of their marriage. In the twelfth year of their life together, the gardener who grew these flowers for the Empress died. Napoleon sent messengers in search of violets all over Paris, but they returned with nothing. Then Napoleon himself rushed to look for the flowers. Not far from the Louvre, he saw an old woman with a basket of violets and bought from her the nicest bouquet. When Josephine brought the bouquet close to her face, she suddenly turned pale and threw it away, saying that the flowers smelled like death. The old woman who sold the bouquet admitted that she picked the flowers at the grave of the Dauphin Louis XVII. A former prisoner herself, Josephine once sent the violets to the Dauphin wasting away in prison and when he died, she planted them on his grave. Josephine sensed the tragedy in the bouquet. Soon, Napoleon abandoned Josephine for a marriage by proxy to Marie Louise. When Josephine died, unable to stand Napoleon’s imprisonment on the island of Elba, he covered her grave with violets. After the death of Napoleon on the island of St. Helena, a golden locket was found on the Emperor’s neck. Inside were two dried violets from Josephine’s grave – two symbols of one love. Many years later, Napoleon III met at a ball Maria Eugenia Ignacia of Spain, also adorned with violets, like Josephine. Eugenia became the queen of France and the violet her favorite flower. If I were able to paint, I would paint an ‘Ode to Violets’ (about passions). But speaking about your painting, about Napoleon on a horse, let him hold in his hand a violet. Such a painting will not go unnoticed in Paris. S.G.
My husband thanked me for the idea, which he used later, in Petrozavodsk, to paint in his lubok style the funny Napoleon in the Snow. Later, after our return home from the Paris exhibition in October 2008, Fomin gave an interview to the major publication of our country, the Russian Gazette. Interestingly, the interview was entitled Napoleon was gone away, and subtitled An exhibition of a famous Russian artist Vladimir Fomin ended in Paris. The paper wrote: His painting, ‘Napoleon in the Snow’, amazed the French lovers of art so much that it was purchased in the first days of the exhibition. Now, it can be only seen on postcards and in the journal ‘Napoleon.’
A journalist from Napoleon, N. Griffon, came personally to Petrozavodsk from Paris shortly before the opening of the exhibition to conduct an interview with the artist. The fate of Fomin’s Napoleon in the Snow is unusual also because the canvas was purchased by a French artist. He was very upset that without a translator he could not explain what masterpiece it was. But we understood.
CONTRACT, WHICH FOMIN DID NOT WANT
As early as 2006, we received the proposal from three Parisian galleries to have my husband’s show in the “city that never sleeps.” After we signed a contract with one of them, the gallery ART Présent, for 2008, we simply could not sleep. Fomin was worried that he would not have enough time to paint anything worthwhile for Paris. There was one exhibition after another. He was not ready for Paris creatively and thought that by signing the contract I pushed him too hard, making him agree with very harsh conditions of the contract for our side. In my opinion, I was just consistent. One day, in a conversation with the poet Aleksei Tsvetkov, who lived in Prague and in a book he gave to us was called one of the greatest contemporary Russian poets, I said that if I ever went to Paris, I would not go there to buy tights, but to attend my husband’s exhibition. Several times we were close to breaking the contract. There were two middlemen working on commission and negotiating between us and the gallery. One of them, as we discovered only in the summer of 2008, was bluffing from the very beginning, and the other, like us, was wrong about the intentions of the first. Because of them, we lost a lot of money for nothing. When we were signing the contract, the middlemen guaranteed by a signed affidavit the purchase in advance of cheap airplane tickets, meeting us at the airport, and providing reasonably-priced lodging for the seventeen days of the exhibition; they also promised to be our translators and guides in France. When the deception was discovered, in an emergency mode we had to buy the most expensive tickets with an inconvenient plane change, look on the Internet for all the necessary information, and book a hotel not far from the gallery. We found ourselves completely on our own in Paris.
IN THE CITY OF LIGHT AND FIRES
From the very beginning of our trip, Providence was leading us. We flew to Paris from St. Petersburg with a 25-minute plane change in the capital of Denmark. Even though I thought I knew that airport (I was a student in Copenhagen in 1995), I still got confused. The time was wasted. We did not register at the registration desk, as we should have, we did not get boarding passes, we rushed through the passport control without getting our passports stamped, and we passed the customs and even the boarding station, where boarding passes and passports are checked, because nobody was there. We ran into the plane just before the door was locked, when the turbines were already humming. This way we illegally departed for Paris, from where by law we should have been deported within three days…
As we were approaching Paris, Fomin noticed in the hands of a young man who sat next to us on the plane Sasha Sokolov’s book A School for Fools with the cover designed by Alexander Boguslawski. Relieved, I concluded that our neighbor was Russian. I asked him right away to help us get out of the airport and board the necessary train or metro. He agreed, but after landing he disappeared in an unknown direction. We wandered for half an hour around terminals and, descending on an escalator, we saw the young man ascending on the opposite side. We caught him. Our short description of Fomin’s friendship with Sasha Boguslawski and Sasha Sokolov, whom my husband just visited in Wellington, made an impression on the student of mathematics at the University of Paris. He bought us tickets for the necessary metro line, got with us into the train, and brought us to the needed station. While we were traveling, the admirer of Sokolov admitted that his mother gave him the book in St. Petersburg for his general development, but it would have been better if she gave him something less complicated. To keep our conversation about the great writer going, I told him a story about the presentation of the new edition of Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf on the program Variant Readings, aired on the Culture channel on January 27, 2006. The presenter, apparently not appreciating “literature for the brainiacs,” could not come up with anything better than to say at the end: At least this book will be interesting to all those who have a dog.
We exited around the East Train Station at dusk – exactly at the moment called the time “between dog and wolf.” I had a premonition that our stay in Paris and the show would not go exactly as planned. The feeling of panic which seized me at that moment did not leave until our return home. Each of the seventeen days of our stay in Paris I kept putting my hand to my cheek saying O horror! and I kept drowning that feeling (a combination of fear, surprise, and bewilderment about everything we encountered) in Napoleon cognac. Fomin was my faithful companion in this, but he was experiencing the feeling of an endless flight over Paris.
After we asked some passersby in which of the four directions we should go, my husband made a remark which he later repeated every day: Stop pestering the French! We guessed the correct way, but in the darkness we went far beyond our hotel. And then, again, good fortune smiled on us. We were following the “tracks” of God, which by chance turned into an unexpected rescue. The first people whom I asked for help after we lost hope to find our hotel turned out to be Russians. Two women told us that we must wait for the third one who was talking on the phone in a telephone booth. She would know where our hotel was. And yes, the third woman and her girlfriends took us to the hotel even though it was not very close. And the next morning, when we were going downstairs to have our breakfast, one of the women appeared in the hotel door. She gave us two tickets to a tour of Montmartre with a Russian-speaking guide and two 75-euro tickets to Moulin Rouge. We invited the unknown fellow countrywomen to the opening, but we never saw them again.
The gallery ART Présent was located in the center of Paris, about 100 meters from the Georges Pompidou Center of Arts and Culture. In comparison to several thousand galleries of the “city which never ends” it looked quite presentable. The two-story building held several exhibitions at the same time. We noticed with pleasure that the passersby took pictures of Fomin’s painting King’s Hares displayed in the gallery’s front window. After checking how the paintings were hanged and how the postcards with Fomin’s biography in French were displayed, we set out to the Pompidou Center. The rest of the day we spent on an excursion to Montmartre and at the variety show in Moulin Rouge.
This alone would have been a sufficient reason to come to Paris. But since the exhibition was going to last from September 27 until October 10, and the gala opening, to which 400 people received special invitations with a reproduction of Napoleon in the Snow, was to take place on the 1st of October, before the opening we were able to visit the most famous sights of Paris.
There was no question of primacy of choice between the Louvre and the Notre Dame Cathedral. We had read Victor Hugo who called Notre Dame “a majestic symphony in stone.” This famous edifice made an impression described by the great writer as “a sort of human creation…, powerful and fecund as the divine creation of which it seems to have stolen the double character – variety and eternity…” We admired the city from the roof top of the cathedral. We returned to Notre Dame twice and Volodia held the ear of a chimera allegedly protecting one from the devil. We could personally feel the presence of the key thoughts of the cathedral’s builders: to straighten and elevate people’s souls.
In contrast, we came to the wind-blown slanted square in front of Georges Pompidou Center every time we went out. At the very beginning of our stay in Paris, on this square, in the presence of more than a hundred people, Fomin made a wish and raised his eyes to the sky. There, a white feather was whirling in the air. It landed on his palm and the next day his wish came true... My husband just had to make any wish in Paris and immediately it came true. One day, he fantasized he would find money and the moment he thought about it he found 5 euro under his feet. He played with his thoughts the way a child plays with toys.
Wherever we went in Paris (and we remembered our every step), there were traces of history and culture, and the signs of Napoleon and Picasso, whom Fomin called “grandfather.” The gray-haired Picasso looked at us from posters pasted all over the city. He did not let us in two times and only the third time we succeeded in seeing the works of the genius. The Picasso Museum turned out closed until November. The next day we could not enter his exhibition at Orsay, advertised by a banner “Matisse and Picasso,” because this was a day when the show was opened only to journalists. Therefore we only saw the permanent exhibition of the museum and its collection of impressionists, which we had seen earlier in Moscow at the 150th anniversary of the Tretiakov Gallery. And only on the third day, after looking again at the photo of the gray-haired “grandfather” hanging above the entrance to the Louvre (we were there a day before, on the day of free admissions), I suddenly noticed on the poster, besides the mad look expressing the insanity of the world, an inscription: Grand Palais. The line to the National Galleries of Grand Palais was twice as long as the one to the Louvre. In front of us stood a strange couple: an astonishingly beautiful woman dressed all in white and a man dressed all in black. Fomin whispered to me that they resemble God and Devil. That’s why I made their acquaintance. They were French. Later, we saw them on Place de la Bastille driving in a yellow classic convertible with a number 666 on it. We could not believe that such a coincidence was possible in a multi-million megalopolis.
In Grand Palais Fomin, like one bewitched, walked from room to room and told me stories about Picasso’s paintings, exquisitely done in the artist’s style and “imitating” Goya, Velásquez, Ingres, Manet, and Rousseau, whose pictures were displayed next to them.
I understand now why grandfather was not letting us in – my husband said to me. I was supposed to see this particular exhibition. I did not know that before I started painting my ‘Gifts’ series Picasso has already embodied in his works the same idea. Now I will be more liberated when I paint.
When we were leaving the Grand Palais, Fomin dropped to all fours and appeared not to walk but to crawl out of the building. The endless line applauded.
I know that besides me nobody will risk to leave the gallery like that – Fomin explained his actions. I showed that I bow to Picasso’s genius and the public understood me.
After standing for a while on top of the Eiffel tower, we went to buy some tapes with Charles Aznavour’s songs, thanking God that the singer did not fulfill his wish to jump from the spot we’ve just left.
For some reason, Napoleon’s Tomb, made of raspberry red quartz quarried in Karelia, horrified Vladimir.
Napoleon, like the pharaohs, had no doubt that he was the embodiment of God on Earth. Not everyone can lie in a sarcophagus… with the saints all around and with lights flickering in the darkness, he said.
For me, the most horrifying impression was made by a picture in Carnavalet Museum of the History of Paris. The picture showed an enormous devil dragging people who were holding on to his tail. The rich and the poor, planting their feet, falling and crawling on the ground without releasing the tail – all of them were powerless before the devil. Fomin was surprised by my reaction:
Haven’t you understood yet that everywhere we went we saw signs of equality? In Paris one can feel not only the presence of God. The Devil dwells here too, and is quite comfortable.
I immediately recalled a strange encounter on one of the Paris bridges. Fomin begged me not to approach three men, dressed in long black coats, but I did not listen and asked them to take our picture. I looked them straight in their eyes, but could not see their faces as if they weren’t there. Not even one picture came out and the camera stopped working for two days. Then, it fixed itself.
In the church of Ste. Geneviève behind the Pantheon I experienced lofty and unfamiliar feelings. Even though we visited many churches, nothing like this, so unexplainable, happened to my soul in any of them.
THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION
On the 1st of October in the evening, we went to the opening at the gallery ART Présent. Suddenly, I lost consciousness. Just a moment earlier, I felt that not enough paintings would be purchased and not enough would be written about the show in the newspapers. I had a feeling that we had not conquered Paris, but it had conquered us.
About 500 guests were packed into the gallery. Nobody could see the graphic works because, violating the contract, the gallery did not display them prominently. The number of sold works did not make us happy, even though, according to the gallery’s owner, many collectors expressed interest. The owner was not supposed to gather for us the press releases about the show and we ended up just with the articles from the paper Russian Thought and the journal Napoleon given to us by their journalists at the opening. I could not hide my disappointment and, to cheer me up, the owner generously kept offering me shots of Russian vodka.
When we set out from the gallery to the hotel, it became apparent that I would not be able to walk by myself. Fortunately, Boris Kozlov, the same student who helped us in the airport, was there. He and Fomin tried to catch a cab, but unsuccessfully, since according to Parisian laws (I read about it on the Internet before we left) the taxis on the streets, even the empty ones, work only on call. And Boris did not have the telephone number of the taxi company. Suddenly, two bicyclists stopped next to us. Having learned from Boris what happened, they helped us without hesitation. They put their bicycles down and the two twins, resembling two D’ Artagnans, in about an hour made the entire trek to the hotel, with one of them carrying me in his arms. When we approached the hotel, I asked Fomin to thank my guardian angel and the others and invite everybody for a beer. Five of us had a great time in the bar, like the poor artists who once lived on Montmartre but nowadays are often seen in museums and galleries.
FAREWELL, PARIS!
During our visit we were able to see most of the districts of Paris. Like in a dream, we explored more than thirty basilicas, cathedrals, churches, and chapels, starting with Sacré Coeur, all five Arcs, seventeen palaces and castles of the capital, including the Conciergerie, five famous Hotels, including the Invalides, which Peter the Great admired so much, the canal Saint-Martin, the cemeteries on Montmartre and Montparnasse, twenty six bridges, thirteen museums, including, of course, the museum of S. Dali, one third of monuments (Fomin was even convinced that the famous white knight knighted him too), twenty squares, and twenty gardens and parks.
To dream about Paris is one thing, but to see this wonderful city with your own eyes is completely different. For me, Paris will remain the only city on earth where museums are built by presidents. Creating his museum or Museum d’Orsay, Georges Pompidou couldn’t have known that the first would have six million visitors a year and the second more than three and a half million. But perhaps he did know?
Fomin told me that Paris has given us a universal celebration and revealed to him certain secrets oflife. The eternal Paris is ruled by its own laws of harmony, formed over the centuries. In Paris my husband realized that if in the beginning God said a word, that word must have been in Russian.
HELLO, SPAIN AND GERMANY!
On the first day of 2009 we were walking, holding hands, down one of Petrozavodsk’s streets. Suddenly we heard squealing of brakes and a black car, after running over the pavement in front of us, stopped with its bumper almost touching our stomachs. We froze for a moment, but then took a few steps back and crossed to the other side of the street.
God spared our life – pensively said Fomin. We have not completed our journey, even though Paris would have been a wonderful ending.
That year was remarkable by one spontaneous, unplanned show in Germany.
After the three exhibitions in 2008, Fomin was planning to turn into a hermit for about two years to devote himself fully to the artistic process. But in August 2009, unexpectedly, the telephone in our apartment rang:
Mr. Jörg Bohse, president of the West-East company, wishes to meet with you.
A half an hour before Bohse got back on a train, he asked Vladimir: Do you want to have a show in Tübingen in November? Yes or no?
My husband couldn’t say no to the man who 16 years earlier, in 1993, organized his exhibition at the Brenner Gallery in the city.
Before going to Germany, in August and September, we went for two weeks to Spain. We participated in various fiestas, festivals, and carnivals. We visited nine museums in Barcelona (we got to the Picasso Museum and to the National Museum of Art for free; once a month the major museums of the Catalonia’s capital open their doors to all visitors), saw the works of Gaudi and theatres-museums of Salvador Dali in Fifueres and Cadaqués.
Fomin, who had conversations with Napoleon, Picasso, and Dali in Paris, wanted to find out some truths from his favorite artists in their motherland. After a visit to Dali’s grave in Figueres, Vladimir asked the master to give him some sort of a sign. Exiting the theatre-museum of the great surrealist, my husband was almost ran over by a casket carried in a funeral procession to the church in which Dali was laid to rest. This occurrence led to our discussion of the topic first expressed by Socrates in Plato’s famous phrase “to study philosophy is to learn to die.”
Having tasted the cultural life of Catalonia, we were ready for Germany. But in connection with this exhibition we had to go to Finland to select the paintings for subsequent shipment from Matti Vehviläinen to Tübingen. In Finland, we traveled to the city of Savonlinna with its museums and the medieval fortress Olavinlinna, famous for its annual festivals of opera and ballet and the home of the writer Tove Jansson, where Fomin conceived an idea of painting the Moomins in his style. There were no problems with the transport of the paintings from Finland to Germany.
In contrast, the paintings previously shown at the Albin Polasek Museum, which Alexander Boguslawski kindly agreed to ship to Tübingen, caused us serious worries. Several days before the show we learned that the transatlantic shipment was held over and that it was necessary to pay some unbelievable customs fee. The sender argued that the paintings transported from one exhibition to another should not be taxed (as the customs declaration clearly stated), but it was too late to argue with the officials in Düsseldorf who held the paintings.
The Maiakovskii Club, which had not hosted any Russian painters before, was already refurbished into an exhibition hall with professionally arranged lights and specially ordered picture frames. Invitations were mailed and ads were placed in newspapers.
Fomin considered it an honor to show his works to the German viewers in a place where the voices of many famous Russian writers and poets resounded. B. Akhmadulina, Ch. Aitmatov, E. Evtushenko, A. Bitov, V. Pelevin, V. Sorokin, and L. Ulitskaia gave presentations in the Club.
Despite the fact that every year Tübingen celebrated a number of important cultural events, there was a great excitement about the exhibition. Visitors came from as far as Stuttgart and there were even some tourists from Spain. They were interested not only in paintings, but in the printed postcards, calendars, and brochures. The painter’s friend, Konstantin Nikolaevskii, published 16 postcards and a booklet in German. He also published a large wall calendar for 2010 with reproductions of paintings from the Gifts series.
Our trips to Spain and Germany, where Fomin made a large number of sketches for future works, generated new ideas, which were realized during preparations for the next exhibition.
THE ETERNAL RETURN
The thirty-first personal exhibition in the life of the 47-year-old practitioner of the synthetic art took place in the country which gave him international recognition as the creator of the Kalevala series painted in the style of “avant-garde lubok.” On the 6th of August, 2010, the show opened in the library of the city of Jyväskylä, named in 2009 “The City of Light,” and awarded with the International prize of the organization City.People.Light for the best presentation of the value of light for cultural and architectural heritage. The show was linked to the International Congress of Architects and was made possible thanks to the Congress organizers’ initiative. Earlier, the publisher Konstantin Nikolaevskii published a large wall calendar with pictures from the Kalevala series.
One more acknowledgment of the painter’s name was a proposal from a well-known liqueur and vodka factory in Moscow, which asked Fomin to design an original container for Russian vodka – from the shape of the cork and the bottle to the label. As the proposal indicated, the product was intended to become almost a national symbol of Russia, competitive with such a brand name as Swedish Absolut, designed in collaboration with A. Warhol. Fomin agreed on the condition that his priorities would be given to painting new canvasses and preparing for new exhibitons.
Nothing could make him abandon the occupation in which he saw the meaning of his life. Like E. Degas, H. Matisse, and P. Filonov, he wanted to remain true to himself until the end; he did not want to drop the brush even for a moment. I am grateful to fate, impossible to understand without understanding God, that the first publication about Fomin and the first exhibition in his life took place after I became his wife.
Life on earth, he used to tell me, is the sound of God’s music, in which no note can ever be changed. Everything has its purpose. Man’s life resembles a ray of the sun. It shoots forward, dims, and dies, but it is taken and given to someone else. A constant flow of one essence into another is occurring.
And he never abandoned his childhood dream: to be a Magician, to be an Artist. He continues his experiments in art, awakening in others aspirations to be creative and leaving at every step of his own creative journey the artistic and spiritual testament for the Man of the Future.
