Mikhail Koulakov

Biography

In 1959 Koulakov was expelled from the first year of the Moscow City Pedagogical Institute. The reason was an exhibition of his abstract paintings that he had arranged in the flat of the art historian Ilya Tsirlin. Showing in a private flat was then one of the few ways to exhibit such painting.

He was born on 8 January 1933 in Moscow. He studied for two years at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, then moved to the pedagogical institute, from which he was expelled.

From 1959 to 1963 he studied stage design at the Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema (the graduation is sometimes dated 1962). His teacher was Nikolai Akimov, an artist and theatre director; Koulakov is counted as part of the “Akimov school”. It proved possible to get a theatrical education after the expulsion, and work for the stage stayed with him for a long time. In Leningrad he worked as an illustrator for Lenizdat, a Leningrad publishing house, designing books by Alexander Grin and the poems of his poet friends Viktor Sosnora and Gleb Gorbovsky. At the same time he did theatre work. Among his principal productions is Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “The Bathhouse” at the Moscow Theatre of Satire (1967); he also worked with theatres in Volkhov, Leningrad and Moscow. His abstract works were shown not in official galleries but in scientific and club premises: the House of Culture in Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk (1964), the Institute of Physics in Moscow (1967) and in Yerevan (1968), and the House of Scientists in Dubna (1969). Art historians place him in the Soviet avant-garde of the 1960s and among the founders of the “Second Abstraction” in Russia.

In 1976 he emigrated to Italy and settled in Umbria, in San Vito, near Narni, where he set up a studio. In 1977 alone his solo exhibitions opened at the Galleria Trifalco in Rome, in Minneapolis and at the Banach Gallery in New York. That same year his work was shown at the Venice Biennale in the section “La nuova arte sovietica. Una prospettiva non ufficiale” (“The New Soviet Art: An Unofficial Perspective”), at the Rome Quadriennale and at the “Salon d’Art Sacre” in Paris. Later came Bremen, Perugia, Naples, Vienna, Milan, Munich, Hamburg and Berlin.

Italian honours came later. In 1984 (by other accounts, in 1993) he was elected a senior academician of the Pietro Vannucci Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia. As part of the “Arte Metro Roma” project he made a mosaic panel for the Anagnina station of the Rome metro. In 2003 he was awarded the gold medal of the international “Emigration” prize in Pratola Peligna.

From the late 1980s his work was again shown in his homeland. In 1989 there was an exhibition at the gallery of the Soviet Culture Foundation in Moscow, in 1990 at the Manege in Leningrad and the Arsenal in Riga, and in 1991 at the Dostoevsky Museum in Leningrad and the Yuriev Monastery near Novgorod. In 1993 his solo shows were held at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St Petersburg and the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome. In 1989 the scholar Dmitry Likhachov wrote of his painting that it “creates freedom”: he noted the plaster, metal and wood in the paint layer, the effort to go beyond the flat surface and the inclusion of the movement of the artist’s hand in the picture.

Koulakov was a tai chi master and published a book on the art, “Tai Chi Chuan, il Grande Limite” (by different accounts, in 1990 or 1999). In 2008 the State Tretyakov Gallery opened the exhibition “Potop mlechnykh putei” (“The Flood of the Milky Ways”; paintings and drawings, 1960–2007). His works are in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, the Pushkin Museum, Rutgers University in the United States, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome and the Bank of Italy.

He died on 15 February 2015 in Terni. That same year the exhibition “Umbria seconda patria” (“Umbria, a Second Homeland”) opened in Sangemini, and in 2019 the Moscow Museum of Modern Art showed the exhibition “The Style of the Thaw Period”.