Sergey Kalmykov

Biography

Sergey Kalmykov’s diary contains an entry addressed “for the information of the future compilers” of his monograph: the youth on Petrov-Vodkin’s red horse, he insisted, was painted from him, except that in real life his legs were longer. He also claimed that a painting of his own from 1911, with red horses in water, had given his teacher the subject of “Bathing of a Red Horse” (1912). Petrov-Vodkin himself named his cousin, Shura Trofimov, as the model. The pupil’s version can hardly be checked now, but to my mind it shows well how he saw his own place in art.

He was born on 6 (18) October 1891 in Samarkand, which had not long before become part of the Russian Empire. Soon afterwards the family moved to Orenburg, where he finished gymnasium. In 1909–1910 Kalmykov lived in Moscow and attended Konstantin Yuon’s studio, then moved to St Petersburg and studied under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.

After the revolution he was back in Orenburg. From 1920 he took part in exhibitions: the first state exhibition of Orenburg artists, and the first and fourth state exhibitions of paintings (1921, 1932). In the early 1920s he was taken with Malevich’s Suprematism and joined the creative committee of UNOVIS, to which Ivan Kudryashov also belonged. The painting “Isolated Visible Infinite Straight Lines and Their Combination” (1920) is built on Hermann Minkowski’s four-dimensional model from the theory of relativity, yet it has more movement and depth than strict Suprematism allowed. He earned his living as a decorator, designing parades and demonstrations, and as a lecturer. In 1925 he exhibited in Moscow with the Zhar-tsvet society, and in 1926–1928 he was a member of the Orenburg branch of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. In the early 1930s he painted sets for Fyodor Vazersky’s Travelling Opera and designed costumes and posters for the Orenburg theatre and circus. From these years come “In the Circus” (1924), “The Abduction of Europa” (1928) and “Railway Station” (1930).

In 1935 he moved to Alma-Ata, then the capital of the Kazakh SSR, at the invitation of the recently opened Musical Theatre, which later became the Abai Kazakh Opera and Ballet Theatre. He worked there until he retired in 1962 and made a great many stage sets. In 1937 the journal Literaturny Kazakhstan, reviewing an exhibition, called one of his paintings “bare, soulless formalist schematism”. Even so, solo exhibitions were held in Alma-Ata in 1941 and 1943, and in 1941 his works were shown in Moscow and Leningrad at an exhibition of artists from the Uzbek, Kirghiz and Kazakh SSRs.

He did not sell his paintings. Sometimes he gave them to acquaintances, or even to chance passers-by.

He painted on whatever came to hand: scraps, maps, wrapping paper; he made etchings and monotypes, tried triangular and round canvases, wrote text into his pictures and almost always put the full date directly on the image. Some works are abstract and expressive, others closer to Surrealism, and many fit no style at all; this manner is sometimes called “fantastic expressionism”. In Alma-Ata he painted “Fantastic Landscape with Red Rocks” (1938), “Lanterns by the Theatre” (1945), “The Racecourse” (1948), “Gorge on the Road to Medeo” (1952), “Serenade” (1959) and “Allegory” (1964), and made the graphic series of the 1940s “Majestic Portraits”, “Lunar Jazz” and “A Walk in the Desert”. Some ten thousand pages of manuscripts he stitched and bound into illustrated books in which every letter is drawn by hand: “The Album of Van Gogh and Degas”, “The Green Book”, “The Dove Book”, “The Factory of Booms”, “A Thousand Compositions with Atomic Reflectors”. They contain novels, essays and philosophical reflections.

The city knew him from the streets and parks where he drew, and from the costumes he devised for himself: a bright red beret, blue trousers with gold stripes, a cloak with tin cans sewn on that clattered as he walked. There was no furniture in his flat; bundled stacks of old newspapers took its place. Yury Dombrovsky, who also lived in Alma-Ata, put him into his novel “The Faculty of Useless Knowledge” (Paris, 1978). There Kalmykov explains his outfits like this: from the depths of the universe a million eyes look down at the grey, single-coloured mass crawling over the earth and suddenly see a bright spot, and that is him, out in the street. David Markish made him the hero of his novel “The White Circle” (2004).

After retiring he lived in great poverty but never stopped working. Sergey Kalmykov died in Alma-Ata on 27 April 1967. Most of his works went to the Central State Archive and from there to the Abylkhan Kasteev State Museum of Arts, which now holds more than eleven hundred of them; several dozen are in the Russian Museum and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

The first posthumous exhibition was organised in 1968 by the Taras Shevchenko Gallery in Alma-Ata, from which the Kasteev Museum later grew. In 1989 Igor Gonopolsky made a documentary trilogy about him, “That’s Me Coming Out into the Street”; in 1991 the first album appeared, in 2001 the largest exhibition so far was held, and in 1997 and 2008 Kazakhstan issued a stamp and a coin with his works. In 2014 a memorial plaque was put up on the house in Orenburg where he had lived. The first official Kazakhstan pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2022, was conceived around his life and work.

He was buried in the Central Cemetery of Alma-Ata. His grave was found and put in order only in 2022.