Andrey Vladimirovich Vasnetsov

Biography

In 1943, at the front, Andrey Vasnetsov was told to make posters, and there was no paint. He straightened sheets of roofing iron and stretched them over stretchers, dissolved in kerosene a white substance found among the drivers, sifted stove soot and mixed it with oil, and made brushes from horsehair and tin tubes. White, ochre, red lead and soot, he recalled later, were “the set of my present-day palette”.

He was born on 24 February 1924 in Moscow, into the family of the ichthyologist Vladimir Viktorovich Vasnetsov, the youngest son of the painter Viktor Vasnetsov. He did not remember his grandfather, who died when the boy was two. But he called his grandfather’s house in Troitsky Lane, where guests gathered on Sundays, “Noah’s Ark”. From 1936 he attended the art studio of the Moscow City Pioneer Palace, a youth centre, under a teacher named Mikhailov, and in 1937 his school piece “Still Life with a Coffee Grinder” was shown at the Tretyakov Gallery.

In November 1942, before finishing the tenth grade, he was called up. He served in the 48th Army on the Bryansk Front, first as a private, then as a sergeant and Komsomol organiser of his battalion, the Communist youth league. He fought his way from Oryol to Königsberg and was awarded an order and medals. In August 1945, in Gumbinnen, in former East Prussia, he was enrolled in a unit of front-line artists preparing the exhibition “The Combat Path of the 3rd Belorussian Front”. It was led by Andrey Dmitrievich Goncharov, a pupil of Vladimir Favorsky. Vasnetsov considered Goncharov his chief teacher.

In 1946 he entered the department of monumental painting at the Moscow Institute of Applied and Decorative Art, where Alexander Deyneka and Pavel Sokolov-Skalya also taught. From Goncharov he took over the system of Vkhutemas, the state art and technical school of the 1920s, and of Favorsky: rhythm, form, the laws of composition. His diploma work was a variation on Gustave Courbet’s “A Burial at Ornans”, in the black-and-brown colouring that would later become his recognisable manner. It was not passed for defence, and he defended his diploma in 1953 in Leningrad, at the Mukhina school of art and industry.

He exhibited from 1954 and from 1956 belonged to the Union of Artists of the USSR, the official professional body. His first commissions were in architecture: murals for pavilions at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, then panels for international exhibitions with Goncharov and Viktor Elkonin, among them “Golden Moscow” for Brussels in 1958. In parallel, from the mid-1950s, he began to paint pictures almost without colour. “Still Life with a Black Hen” (1955) was read by many as a veiled reproach to Soviet life. The artist answered that it was simply a black hen, black on black: a market woman had brought it to the house, and he laid the bird on a newspaper, hung an oilcloth behind it and painted it in two hours.

In 1962, at the exhibition “30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists” in the Manege, Vasnetsov showed “Breakfast”, “Conversation” and “Hanging Laundry”. According to the artist, Khrushchev was outraged by the empty plate in “Breakfast”: he saw in it a hint about the state of agriculture. The author had needed the plate to construct the space. On 14 January 1963 Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, printed his article “Young Artists Serve the People”, in which he defended the right to new searches and, at the same time, the right to choose as one’s “spiritual father” whoever is closer to one. He was not expelled from the Union, but he stopped being exhibited. Commissions for easel painting closed to him, and for a long time he concentrated on monumental art, that is, murals and mosaics for public buildings. According to Elkonin’s recollections, for years he let no one into his studio and could destroy a picture he had worked on for several years. His first solo exhibition took place only in 1987.

The pictures of this circle, “Breakfast” (1960), “Ironing Woman. Nadine” (1961) and “Peeling Potatoes” (1963), are built on black, brown, cold blue and grey, with a touch of ochre or brick red. Rounded forms stand beside flat silhouettes, and every object has its own spatial axis. The model for “Breakfast” was a neighbour in his building, Andrey Ivanushkin. The wall behind him the artist long could not resolve, and in the end he made a niche with a contrasting shadow. He is linked with the Severe Style, but Alexander Morozov noted a difference: in the “severe” painters one still hears a belief in the hero as worker, whereas in Vasnetsov, he said, this is wholly absent; he is “a pessimist and a fatalist, but in essence a realist”. From the 1970s his painting included hunting scenes, group portraits, portraits of his wife, the sculptor Irina Vasnetsova, and several versions of “Self-Portrait with Family”. His chief landscape motif became Abramtsevo, where in the late 1980s he built a studio.

In his monumental work he often had collaborators. He considered the mosaic “Conquerors of Space” (1966) for Kaluga a milestone: a wall seven metres high split the interior in two, and he stressed its weight with figures of different scales. In 1967, with Nikolai Andronov and Elkonin, he laid out in marble, granite, quartzite and jasper the mosaic on the facade of the October cinema in Moscow, about 2,000 square metres. For the mosaic “Man and Press” for the newspaper Izvestia, he and Andronov received the USSR State Prize of 1979. There were also the high relief “Trumpeting Glories” in Velikiye Luki, the “Lanterns” on the facade of the new Moscow Art Theatre building, and the decoration of the theatre in Kyzyl and of the Russian Restaurant at the International Trade Centre. He called easel painting his personal diary, without which he could not have done the rest.

His elder brother Yuri was killed near Kalinin in 1941, but the family learned the circumstances only in 1990, from a letter by a comrade of his regiment. “Funeral of a Soldier” (1985), on which the artist worked for almost ten years, is dedicated to him. “Eclipse” (2003) he dedicated to his son Fyodor, who died in 1996. Morozov compared that picture with Levitan’s “Over Eternal Peace”, and to my mind the comparison is right.

From 1975 Vasnetsov taught at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute; in 1980–2003 he headed its department of drawing, painting and composition, and from 1986 he was a professor. From 1983 he was a secretary of the board of the Union of Artists of the USSR, in 1988–1992 its last chairman, and in 1989–1991 a People’s Deputy of the USSR. He became a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts (1988), a full member of the Russian Academy of Arts (1991) and People’s Artist of the USSR (1991).

He died on 6 December 2009 in Moscow. He is buried at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery, in the family plot where his grandfather also lies.